The Queerest Places: The Challenges of Finding & Documenting Historic LGBT Sites
By Paula Martinac
he summer of 2009 marks a historic event in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history: the 40th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, a popular gay bar in the 1960s that was often the target of police raids. On June 28, 1969, drag queens, queer youths, gay men and others took to the streets, fed up with police harassment. Following three days of intense rioting, LGBT people launched an all-out liberation struggle that has grown over the decades into a powerful movement for equality.
Thirty years after the riots, the historic bar finally got national recognition. In 1999, the U.S. Department of the Interior added the Stonewall Inn to its National Register of Historic Places. It was the first LGBT site to make that prestigious list, and ten years later, it's still the only one on it.
A few other LGBT sites have garnered official recognition. In 2005, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected a marker in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia to commemorate an LGBT rights protest that took place there every year from 1965 to 1969. Architect Philip Johnson bequeathed his Glass House in New Canaan, CT, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and it opened to the public in 2007. And this year, the District of Columbia granted landmark status to the home of gay rights pioneer Dr. Frank Kameny – remarkably, while he is still alive and in residence. But there's still much work to be done to document sites of significance to the LGBT past.
So, why exactly are LGBT sites still so officially unrecognized? Well, it's not for lack of trying. LGBT activists have lobbied for national landmark status for several significant queer sites, like activist and politician Harvey Milk's camera shop in the Castro district of San Francisco, and the row house in Chicago where Henry Gerber founded the country's very first LGBT rights organization, the Society for Human Rights, in 1924.
There's also no want of significant events or figures to document. But while a lot of the LGBT names are immediately recognizable to average Americans – names like James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Rock Hudson, Bessie Smith – their experiences as queer people remain relatively unknown because of discrimination and stigma. Many famous figures who had same-sex relationships went to great lengths to cover their tracks. Celebrated novelist Willa Cather, for example – who cross-dressed and identified as "William" as a teenager, and eventually shared her life with a female partner for 40 years – destroyed most of her correspondence and, in her will, forbade scholars to quote from any surviving letters.
Furthermore, same-sex relationships were criminalized for many years. Lives could be ruined if homosexual behavior became public. People might lose their jobs, be shunned by families, even commit suicide. Not until 2003 did the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalize sodomy in all 50 states in its Lawrence v. Texas decision. But, as we've seen with the African-American civil rights movement, court cases and legislation alone don't eradicate prejudice. Given the shame heaped on same-sex desire over the centuries, it's not surprising that there is still stigma attached to being queer.
As a result, historians, biographers, museum curators, and historic site custodians and docents continue to ignore or downplay the same-sex attachments of American historical figures. For some, "accusing" a historical person of homosexuality is akin to slander, so the topic is ignored. Others simply maintain that "private" matters play no role in our understanding of people and events. A guide at the Lizzie Borden museum in Fall River, MA, dismissed a question posed by a friend of mine about Borden's rumored lesbianism (she had a long relationship with actress Nance O'Neill) this way: "I don't really care about that. I always say, as long as you don't do it in the road and frighten the horses."
Both of these attitudes – denial and trivializing – reduce homosexuality to sexual practice alone. Stigma has created a double standard for LGBT historic figures, who, just like their heterosexual counterparts, certainly didn't have sex nonstop; they had full lives that are worthy of discussion and exploration, and their affectional and sexual orientation influenced the ways they viewed, experienced, and lived in the world.
Not surprisingly, many LGBT people also remain in the dark about their history and physical heritage. When I was compiling a book called The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites (Holt, 1997), some LGBT people I spoke to were unaware that they had any significant collective history, let alone sites they could visit. "That'll be a short book!" one lesbian snorted when I told her about the project.
On the contrary, my research revealed an abundance of historic sites related to LGBT heritage – houses, markers, statues, offices, gravesites, bars, bookstores, community centers. I knew where to start looking because I had training as a historian and had been reading queer history for years, thanks to the pioneering work of LGBT scholars such as Allan Berube, George Chauncey, Martin Duberman, Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, Susan Stryker and Blanche Wiesen Cook. I was also familiar with the efforts of community organizations like the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, the Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago, and others.
In my research, I defined a "queer historic site" as any house, structure or geographic location with an association to a historic LGBT person or event. A site didn't need to have official landmark status, nor did a structure need to be standing; many, I discovered, were victims of time and changing landscapes. And a site most definitely did not have to be just in New York, San Francisco or other urban areas; I found "the queerest places" in 45 states.
Then there's the question of "proof." In trying to uncover a past that was criminalized, we don't always have the kind of evidence that some scholars would accept. But then, why is "proof" of gay or lesbian sexual relations required to reclaim a historical figure as gay, when "proof" of heterosexual intercourse is not required to name a person as straight?
Sometimes investigating the LGBT past requires an alternate detective system. Because gay people had to hide in the closet for such a long time, many of the rules of evidence simply don't apply. Something as seemingly cut-and-dried as heterosexual marriage and children, for example, can't rule out that someone was gay. After all, how many of the gay people you know were once in heterosexual marriages that produced children? Instead, it's vital to look at how our LGBT ancestors actually went about their lives – their friends and community, their work, their relationships, their creative output. And yes, sometimes rumor and gossip, the "oral history" of LGBT people, figures in, too.
A number of the sites I found were popular tourist attractions that had never been written about from an LGBT perspective. These public exhibits sidestepped their subjects' sexuality. At Walt Whitman's birthplace, for example, the poet's lover, Peter Doyle, is referred to in the permanent exhibit as "his Confederate veteran pal" – interesting since Whitman was about as out as you could be in the mid-19th century. But to the museum's credit, the curators do display the well-known photo of Walt and Pete sitting close together, looking every inch the gay couple.
In the 12 years since I published my book, LGBT historians – both professional and community-based – have created a history boom, publishing important chronicles of LGBT life in cities like Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and adding immeasurably to our understanding of not just one group of Americans, but of American history in general. Archives have mounted exhibits on the LGBT past, and a permanent collection of documents and artifacts related to our heritage is now on display at the Castro Street gallery of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
Fortunately, the phenomenal growth of the Internet in recent years makes it much easier to do research on LGBT sites. Unlike in the mid-1990s, many LGBT archives now have extensive websites detailing their findings and work. Today, a search on Google Maps can often turn up whether buildings associated with the early LGBT rights movement are still extant. Photos of sites I researched for my book are now often available online, bringing history even closer. My own blog, The Queerest Places, based on my book, makes use of this technology and research that simply wasn't available when I first conceived of a national guide to LGBT sites.
With the increasing acceptance of LGBT people in society, we may very well see the further expansion of research and documentation of our physical past by the time the 50th anniversary of Stonewall rolls around.
Paula Martinac is the author of six books and numerous articles on LGBT topics. Her blog, The Queerest Places, chronicles LGBT historic sites. She holds an M.A. in history and works for a community development organization in Pittsburgh, PA.
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Submitted by John D. at: June 15, 2009
Imagine my surprise (ok, not THAT surprising when you think about it) at coming across the National Trust's booth at the Gay Pride festival in Washington, DC, this weekend and to hear about this new web page! Thanks for all your work supporting preservation of EVERYONE's history. I look forward to seeing more LGBT content!