​Empathy through story sharing: TQH bringing queer history to Red Raven

By Sabrina Hornung

sabrina@hpr1.com

Telling Queer History is an LGBTQIA+ organization that utilizes oral storytelling and community building to educate, honor and collect oral histories. To honor its final year in operation, the organization is on a five stop Minnesota tour featuring new work and retrospective work.

We had a moment to chat with founder and Executive Director Rebecca Lawrence prior to the upcoming exhibition titled “We Live On: Stories of Radical Connection” at Red Raven Espresso Parlor in Moorhead. The community kickoff event will be March 22 from 2-3:30 pm and the exhibition will be on view through April 3.

HPR: Can you tell us a bit about the Telling Queer History project? How did it come to be?

Rebecca Lawrence: 12 years ago, I started this. I was working as a campaign volunteer for the Minnesotans United for Marriage Equality. The homophobes have been going state by state to get voters to put a definition of marriage into their state constitutions, that was one man, one woman, and they had been successful for 12 states before us.

They came to Minnesota. We used a different campaign tactic. Instead of trying to argue that we deserve rights to people who don't think we deserve rights, they used a storytelling tool. So they had people call other Minnesotans and say, “What does love and marriage mean to you? Here's what it means to me,” and build that empathy one person at a time. And that changed the history of our state and our country.

That inspired me. I had already felt this call to want to find my queer history and ancestors in Minnesota, having grown up here. The history was so focused on the coasts and I knew that wasn't the whole truth. There wasn't much at the time 12 years ago.

I also saw in that campaign that people of color weren't really well represented. Trans folks weren't represented. And in fact, a lot of those people were like, “We don't care about marriage, we're trying to find safe housing and a job and food. And yet billions of dollars are being put in this campaign.”

I wanted to make a space where those groups of people (across race and class, in particular) in Minnesota could have a conversation and understand that we're in the fight together. So that is how it started.

HPR: Do you think that we've come a long way? What do you think about the current climate? I guess maybe that's kind of a trick question…

RL: Yes, and no. So I have, you know, like urban privilege. I live in a bigger city, so there's more liberal general acceptance, though my neighborhood's pretty conservative. And I can only speak from that experience. I know it's pretty different in smaller towns, and that's part of what I'm learning through this.

We have rights that we haven't had. There's no criminalization on the books anymore. They've removed the sodomy laws, there's marriage equality, we have adoption rights in the state of Minnesota, the Human Rights Act included gender expression, which was the first in the country. We still have a lot of those (rights), at least in Minnesota. A couple generations before me never had those (rights) and there were still queer people living their best lives that they could at the time without those protections.

We're seeing some of that attack. I mean, it's pretty pointed at trans people, because they know that that's a way to divide, a wedge to divide our community. I think it's not working as well as the people trying to hurt us think. But yeah, gay bashing and trans murder never slowed down, even with those protections. And I think we're seeing more of that. So I don't know… it's like, both. We also have the internet, so we're connected across identities and space, in ways that we've never had before.

Bayard Rustin organized the first march on Washington. A million people showed up, and he had just a rotary phone and buses. So I think there's just so much possible. I hope that we keep remembering that we have each other and look at the history of what was possible then and what is possible now. So much more is possible now.

HPR: I read that your work will be archived locally. How can people gain access, and where will that be?

RL: So we're building this exhibit virtually so that people will be able to visit it in perpetuity through the internet through a program called Bloomberg Connect, they are a specialized virtual exhibit host. There's these digital timelines, and we might just hand those off, so right now, you can watch videos on our website and YouTube. The digital timelines you can interact with. We hand wrote those timelines and had people add their stories over the years, the paper one will be on display in the exhibit, and the digital one lives on our website. We're still kind of sorting out what pieces go where. 

There's the Tretter collection, which is at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. There's a special room in the University Archives library, some will be there, and that should be a public resource. The Minnesota Historical Society is also interested, but they don't take anything that's duplicated in another archive. So I have to figure out where stuff will go there, but that's another public resource, and they have some pretty cool queer history stuff that they've curated over the last couple years.

We're still planning to create these two walking tours, the Minnesota Humanities Center hired us to do that and is funding this project through the legacy grant. So our walking tour will be around Powder Horn and in South Minneapolis, and then somewhere in St Paul, I don't know the history yet, so somewhere in St Pau.

HPR: The exhibition at the Red Raven, what does it look like? What can visitors anticipate?

RL: So there'll be banners, these tall, vinyl pop-up banners with pieces of history. There's one that's on intersex folks, HIV and AIDS, telling queer history is history, sex work, the Iron Range.

Then there's a section on Two Spirit folks, incarcerated people, incarcerated queer people. We have art. We have the ancestor altar, which is literally what it sounds like. There's photos of Minnesotans that have passed on. People can bring their personal photos or offerings to the table. There's a letter writing station so you can write to your ancestors.

There's this thing called “Cranky.” I don't know if that'll make the cut. We'll see. It's a puppetry tool, and you crank it and wind up the scroll on one end and it reveals a story across the scroll and that's where our timeline will be on display. Books, video, audio, transcripts, photo albums, t-shirts, and paperwork from the years of doing this work…

HPR: This traveling exhibition serves as a bit of a farewell tour for this project, what’s next?

RL: There's going to be a final event in Minneapolis on June 8 at Queermunity Center. We're kind of having an end of life, sunset kind of celebration. There's folks making a documentary film about telling queer history that'll be premiered at that event. On June 23 we take it down, and then there'll be paperwork to close stuff out, handing off all these things to archives or donating them to other nonprofits.

Then I'm fundraising to have a sabbatical. I would really like all of us to have some paid time to rest. And everyone is an independent contractor, so they'll have to be applying for new gigs or jobs. If folks want to support that, they can donate to us and me personally.

IF YOU GO:

We live on: Stories of radical connection kickoff event

March 22, 2-3:30 pm

Red Raven Espresso Parlor, 106 7th Street S, Moorhead, Minnesota

https://www.tellingqueerhistory.com