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This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White's numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White's individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White's non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator's sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White's autobiographical fictions), White's non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on oral history interviews with twenty-six lesbian and bisexual women who came out within the context of heterosexual marriages between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Despite the extent to which the LGBTQ community emphasizes narratives of progress and triumph, feelings of shame, guilt, regret, and ambivalence figured significantly in these women's life stories, particularly with regard to their experiences of coming out. This article thus considers how oral history can provide queer narrators with an opportunity to share negative feelings that often remain unspoken within mainstream LGBTQ culture and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the development of a public history walk based on the life of Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sheffield-based writer, campaigner and sex reformer. It argues that understanding the world in which Carpenter and his comrades, friends and lovers lived, dreamed and loved, requires attention to both the alterity of sexual experiences in the past and historical continuity in terms of sexual identities and practices that are marginalised within different mainstream cultures. Public History brings a new perspective to this debate, drawing attention to the resonance of history in terms of present day identities. The article also addresses the heteronormativity of public history, the role of history in place-making and the ways in which public history, creative history and the practice of walking can challenge dominant versions of urban history and urge us to think critically about different ways of knowing the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining autobiographical and theoretical reflections, this essay looks back impressionistically on the last 100 years of British/US LGBTQ history. The discussion draws on exemplary texts from a range of media; these texts include Brokeback Mountain, Auden's poetry, Rattigan's drama, queer oral history, and gay journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay asks whether queer oral history is different in light of recent interventions in queer theory, LGBTQ history, and oral history. It explores the intellectual genealogy of queer oral history in the research projects of some of its early practitioners. It also provides a close reading of Alessandro Portelli's classic essay and considers its implications for a queer methodology, drawing from the work of recent scholarship in queer studies as well as our collaborative research in the Twin Cities Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Oral History Project. Finally, it gestures towards some of the unique dimensions of a queer methodology and its rich potential for research in LGBTQ oral history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, while representations of tragic lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) histories are disseminated widely, positive aspects of the past must be largely pushed out of the cultural imaginary to support a vision of the present in which sexual rights and freedoms have been achieved. It proposes that this view relies on a linear progress narrative wherein the experiences of LGBTQ people are held as consistently improving over time. In considering the construction of cultural memory through popular media and art, it claims a nostalgic turn to the past as a useful political tool for dismantling the pacifying aspects of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ephemeral evidence, or ephemera (including posters, flyers, and other materials created for short-term purposes), poses numerous challenges to archivists and researchers seeking to understand their provenance, veracity, and significance. In particular, scholars of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people and communities frequently encounter such materials since ephemera has become a central element of much queer archiving practice. Drawing on an ongoing research project examining the history of gay and lesbian college student organizing as an example, this article suggests how oral history can help “animate” ephemera, providing researchers a way to enhance the interpretive value of such fleeting evidence. Oral histories can transform “queer campus ephemera,” traces of 1970s queer student histories in the form of flyers, posters, and short-lived newsletters produced by gay and lesbian students, into more substantive evidence of the social and political climate in which such students lived, went to school, and organized. Through these examples, the article explores the benefits (and limitations) of using oral history to interpret ephemeral archival evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]