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This article, entitled "History, Nationalism, and Lesbian Cabaret: Agnieszka Weseli 'Furja' and Maria Konopnicka," traces the role that nineteenth-century Polish Positivist author Maria Konopnicka has played in the twenty-first century Polish LGBT rights movement, as well as the backlash against her newfound status as an LGBT icon from nationalist factions. More specifically, I examine how activist-historian and performance artist Agnieszka Weseli-Furja has reimagined nineteenth-century queer and feminist history through her performances as Konopnicka as part of the lesbian cabaret troupe Barbie Girls. Through my analysis of her sketches collectively titled "From the Album of Maria Konopnicka," I argue that Furja utilizes a form of feminist revisionist historiography to navigate the historical Konopnicka's ambiguous sexuality and her association with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish nationalism (often hostile to the LGBT community). Through these performances, Furja attempts to decouple patriarchy and heteronormativity from Polish national belonging, producing an alternative vision of Polish patriotism based in feminist community and same-sex desire.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piotr Domalewski's Operation Hyacinth (2021) centres on the young police officer Robert's (Tomasz Ziętek) investigations into a case of serial murder and his developing romance with the student Arek (Hubert Miłkowski). The connective tissue is that all of the victims are gay men and Arek plays a role in it. As the film unfolds, we learn, alongside Robert, that the case is a massive cover-up operation and that his discoveries marry together his private and his professional lives. In this interview, I discuss, with writer Marcin Ciastoń, his extensive research for the film, which was inspired by historical events; and Robert's and Arek's romance. We explore how, if on the one hand, Arek represents rebellion to Robert, then, on the other, Robert is the embodiment of reticence, and we attend to a key scene wherein Robert is pressured by his father (Marek Kalita), also a police officer, into questioning Arek about his sexual history. All of the characters appear to be on trial, and as Ciastoń declares, '[e]veryone involved had a secret'. This interview advances scholarship by recovering the critical project that directly informs this imaginative one, by suggesting its importance in LGBTQ history and by attending to Ciastoń's approach to personal and public histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes gender non-conformity in late imperial Russia through a selection of newspaper articles on the lives of gender non-conforming individuals. It examines the potential motives for gender non-conformity and argues for including gender dysphoria as a reason why Russians chose to perform a gender that did not correspond to their assigned sex. The article explores these individuals' lives as well as their interaction with authority figures, the justice system, and Russian journalists and newspaper readers, to assess how late imperial Russians experienced and reacted to instances of public gender non-conformity. Finally, the article argues that gender non-conformity was a matter of great interest for the late imperial public but was treated leniently by figures in positions of power, from journalists who chose not to expose gender non-conforming Russian to judges who chose not to punish them for their defiance of gendered norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists' caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the author's oral history work with lesbians born before 1950. Older lesbians have been consistently under-represented in research, so that less is known about them than about any other part of the LGBTQ community. Their voices need to be heard, but when anonymity and confidentiality are the speakers' chief concerns, the implications of such 'hearing' are complex. The article discusses the practical and ethical challenges of presenting and interpreting older lesbian lives in four different contexts and formats: an academic thesis using excerpts from the transcripts; a radio programme using extracts from the oral recordings; a documentary film; and a book comprising a curated collection of life stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 Kansas City installed a marker that celebrated its role as host to the first meeting of the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations in 1966. The marker was the first to commemorate this historic gathering of gay rights activists as well as the first to recognize Missouri's LGBTQ history. This article charts the effort to install Kansas City's marker as a case study of the issues involved in documenting LGBTQ history. What began as a community collecting initiative quickly evolved into an effort that included students, city officials, and a federal heritage area. The authors--a founder of the community collection initiative, a public history educator, and a public history student--demonstrate how those involved attempted to navigate questions of ownership and shared authority. Ultimately, the authors ask public historians to see themselves as potential allies to, rather than authorities of, the communities with which they work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, presented at the Museum of the City of New York from May to October 2017, aimed to complement and complicate popular narratives about the history of HIV/AIDS by examining how HIV/AIDS played out in the everyday lives of diverse communities in New York. The exhibition placed works of art alongside documentary photography, film, and archival materials in unique ways to ask visitors to rethink what counts as activism and to reconsider home as a crucial political space. This paper reflects on the ways the curator sought to activate the domestic archive--the everyday ephemera and affects of illness, care-taking, and family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report from the field examines the interpretation of two notable queer women from Columbus, Georgia: blues musician Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (1886-1939) and Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers (1917-1967). Although these women maintained complicated relationships with their hometown, the Columbus Museum is utilizing new ways to examine their sexuality in the context of their cultural contributions. Nuanced interpretation of Rainey's and McCullers's bisexuality offers opportunities to discuss connections between sexuality, gender, race, and economic realities. In presenting the museum's efforts to interpret these fascinating personalities through exhibitions and permanent collection artifacts, this article offers ideas, strategies, and questions for public historians to consider in their own practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great challenges for public historians in LGBTQ history is finding and developing interpretation of the history of sexuality for public audiences at current historic sites. This article answers this challenge by repositioning historic house museums as sites of some of the most important LGBTQ public history we have, by using the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a case study. At this house museum, we can re-see historical interpretation through a queer lens and take on histories that have been until recently "slandered, ignored, and erased" from our public narratives of the past.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) historical interpretation is an increasingly common feature of museums and historic sites, while at the same time one that often pushes beyond the physical boundaries of historical organizations. This article considers various interpretive methods as tools for delivering LGBTQ history and offers multiple examples of each type of interpretation. Methods discussed include exhibits (both temporary and permanent); special events; arts programming; youth programming; monuments and memorials; historical engagement with the built environment; and digital history projects. The author acknowledges that, in 2019, these efforts still tend to favor the experiences of white cisgender men and to focus on the realm of political activism and offers some suggestions for how LGBTQ interpretation might develop in coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on letters and essays written by teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s, and building on my historical research on same-sex desiring girls and girlhoods in the postwar United States, I ask how teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s pursued answers to questions about their feelings, practices, and identities and expressed their subjectivities as young lesbian feminists. These young writers, I argue, recognized that they benefitted from more resources and role models than did earlier generations, but they objected to what they saw as adult lesbians' ageism, caution, and neglect. In reaching out to sympathetic straight and lesbian public figures and publications, girls found new ways to combat the persistent isolation and oppression faced by youth whose autonomy remained severely restricted by familial, educational, and legal structures. [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 early collaborations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, in which music and dance were united structurally and in expressive intent. Drawing on unexamined archival materials, I begin by highlighting the thematic content of the earliest Cage-Cunningham collaborations, Credo in Us (1942) and Four Walls (1944), of Cunningham's (rather than Martha Graham's) choreography for the Revivalist's solo in Appalachian Spring (1944), and of Cage's The Perilous Night (1943-44), premiered at the couple's debut concert. These works all portray a conflict between sexual desire and social conformity through marriage, a theme of pressing import as Cage left his wife to become Cunningham's partner. I then elucidate the programmatic nature of the first and last works that Cunningham choreographed to the music of Satie, Idyllic Song (1944) and Second Hand (1970), both of which use Cage's arrangements for piano of Satie's Socrate. Placing Cunningham's personal choreographic notes in dialogue with my own observation of rehearsals and performances, I suggest that Second Hand dramatizes not only the Socratic texts set in Satie's score but also the couple's relationship and their earlier dependence on and subsequent rejection of personal expression, a rejection that heightened their status within the postwar avant-garde. Instead of dismissing the collaborations of the 1940s as "early" or "anomalous," I suggest that they are fundamental to understanding how Cage and Cunningham's relationship prior to their de facto marriage led to one of the most productive divorces in the history of artistic collaboration. [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]

This article describes OutHistory.org, the public Web site on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) history hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. OutHistory.org uses MediaWiki software to compile community-created histories of LGBTQ life in the U.S. and make the insights of LGBTQ history broadly accessible. Project Coordinator Lauren Gutterman explains how the public history project employs digital history to collect, advance, and project LGBTQ history, and how it serves as a model for other interactive history Web sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868-1935), an early campaigner for 'gay rights' avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. When researching Hirschfeld's biography (published in English in 1986) Wolff met a librarian and gay activist, Manfred Herzer, who would eventually be a cofounder of the Gay Museum in Berlin and publish (in German, in 1992) the other major Hirschfeld biography currently available. Using, inter alia, the correspondence between Wolff and Herzer, the article aims to explore and interrogate the boundaries and possibilities of 'biography' as a form of 'doing history'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]