The Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Collective
The Twin Cities LGBT Oral History Project (OHP) is a collective organization devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer people in the Twin Cities. These stories are often absent from the archive and are marginalized both in and outside the academy. Since 2003, the OHP has collected approximately 90 oral histories, which have become valuable resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and professors conducting research, as well as an innovative teaching tool for instruction at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The OHP has been a catalyst for interdisciplinary and intercommunity conversations on history, life narratives, nonheteronormative sexual formations, subjectivity, the Twin Cities, and Minnesota, and has also spawned a collaborative book project, Frozen Fruit, under review with the University of Minnesota Press.
The oral histories produced by the OHP have been used in classrooms, sparked conversations on the use of oral history in and between multiple disciplines, and sprouted projects that engage communities outside the academy, including an exhibition, “Protest and Parade: GLBT Activism and ‘Pride’ in the Twin Cities.”
The OHP at the University of Minnesota is run as a collective and is always welcoming new members. We meet about once a month and if you are someone who is interested in attending a meeting email the OHP, attention Alex Urquhart, and he will provide details.
If you are interested in volunteering for the OHP there are a number of opportunities and we would love to have you.
The currently proposed version of Frozen Fruit includes sixteen essays that explore the heterogeneity of queerness in and around the Twin Cities. While many queer community histories attempt to present a unified narrative of queer subjects, we stress the often conflicting and contradictory experiences of our respondents. Furthermore, we see these contradictions partially deriving from the unique social geography of the Twin Cities. Our methodology was designed to seek diversity in our subject population, and to capture this relationship between variegated queer social spaces and multiple queer subject formations. By diversity we refer not only to race, gender, and particular queer identities, but also to modes of queer public life. We have interviewed many individuals who are NOT business owners, political leaders, or social activists. Several of our subjects live in Minneapolis’s most radical neighborhoods, but have lived queerness in a largely domestic, private manner. We have also interviewed a longtime Saint Paul resident who spent twenty years in direct action struggle and even ran for congress. We have interviewed individuals who have “come out” in their late sixties. We have interviewed those who have never left the Twin Cities, and those who have lived outside the U.S. for a significant portion of their life. In addition the contributors to the book have conducted additional interviews with drag performers, AIDS activists, bar owners, queer real-estate agents and developers, queer rappers, and radical bisexuals. The diversity of our interview population has led us to new understandings of how categories of Saint Paul, Minneapolis, the suburbs and “outstate” Minnesota fit into queerness in the region, and have allowed us to redefine academic articulations of queerness and the uses of queer theory. This manuscript brings together these multiple voices, movements, identities, and spaces in order to present the often unknown history of queer sexuality in the Twin Cities. At the same time the book makes multiple interventions in larger debates on sexuality, public history, and posits that the Twin Cities are not just a “flyover” version of the queer histories of coastal cities like New York and San Francisco.
The authors in Frozen Fruit examine the closing of the bathhouses in the Twin Cities in the 1980s, the history of “pride”, and the continual battle over access to queer public space. It examines the Anita Bryant boycott of the late 1970’s which was one of the organizing forces of the first pride festivals in the Twin Cities. It also interrogates the queer influences and origins within Minnesota populism, AIDS activism, the election of queer officials, and other social movements that have arisen out of the Twin Cities and have shaped queer life in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It looks at historical sites of “cruising,” their destruction, and those who have fought against the policing of public sex. It looks at the University of Minnesota and the student movements that have sprung from its student body and faculty. It traces the history of lesbian separatism and makes connections between feminist movements and the politics of race. It also examines the Twin Cities in relation to Minnesota, the Midwest and the rest of the United States.
The editors for this project are Larry Knopp, Jennifer Pierce, Kevin Murphy, Ryan Murphy, and Alex Urquhart.
If you are interested in the subject matter included in these bios, or have materials/stories you would like to share please contact the OHP and we will put you in contact with one of these scholars.
Emily Corrigan is a fourth year graduate student in Musicology at the University of Minnesota. She currently teaches an English Composition course with a focus on Multiculturalism. Though her course work has been mainly in the standard Western European classical tradition, she took a course on Ethnomusicology and completed a project on Hmong rappers in Minneapolis. Her thesis uses these techniques and focuses on the sounds of otherness in hip-hop, specifically working with Minneapolis’ Tori Fixx. She has given several papers at conferences on the topic of hip-hop in Minneapolis, and more specifically queer hip-hop, occurring in the Twin Cities.
Susan Craddock is an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MA and PhD in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. Her work explores implications of medical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological relationships for global patterns of disease and geopolitics. Drawing from feminist science studies, postcolonial theories, and bioethics, Craddock explores the role of clinical trials, patent regulations, and the medical neglect of major global diseases in generating debates over resource equity, valuations of human life, and definitions of gender and race. She is the author of City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (2000), and is one of the editors of HIV and AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology (2003). She has also published a number of articles on HIV/AIDS and the politics of disease.
Ryan Li Dahlstrom is an individualized study undergraduate major at the University of Minnesota as well as a transgender activist in the Twin Cities.
Michael David Franklin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work examines genealogies of transsexuality and transnational travel to explore questions of gender/sexuality, race, imperialism, and capital.
Caley Horan graduated from Stanford University in 2002 with a B.A. in History and Feminist Studies. She is now a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Minnesota where she studies modern American cultural history. Her interests include comic books, men’s fashion and the role of feminist theory in movements for social justice.
Kathleen Hull is an assistant professor of sociology with interests in culture, law and social movements. Kathy’s book Same-Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law will be published by Cambridge University Press in March 2006.
Danielle M. Kasprzak is an undergraduate student in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. Her focus is on gender relations and sexuality in 20th century American literature, and how modern texts contextualize and utilize oral histories. She plans to attend graduate school and pursue a dual-degree in American literature and gender studies.
Larry Knopp is Professor of Geography at University of Minnesota-Duluth. His recent work has focused on critiquing, reconceptualizing and creatively representing queer spatialities, through a combination of narratives and non-traditional mapping techniques.
Tiffany Muller is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Feminist Studies at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her dissertation is an analysis of the arenas of women’s professional basketball. She examines how lesbian fans accept and challenge heteronormative practices that help shape these spaces.
Kevin P. Murphy is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. His scholarship focuses on gender, sexuality, and political culture in the United States and transnationally. His book Red-Bloods and Mollycoddles: Political Manhood in the Progressive-era United States is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a manuscript on transatlantic sexual and political cultures and is co-editing an issue of the Radical History Review on “U.S. Homonormativities and Contested Queer Futures.”
Ryan Murphy is a PhD student in the department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Prior to beginning his graduate studies, he was an elected leader of the Association of Flight Attendants, AFL-CIO, and an activist in Pride at Work, the organization of GLBT trade unionists. In light of his previous activism, Murphy's academic work is grounded in conversations in political economy, labor history, and queer studies, specifically focused on the experiences of transportation workers in a globalizing economy.
Polly Reed Myers is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at the University of Minnesota. She has an M.A. in history from Western Washington University. Her research and teaching area is twentieth-century U.S. history, and she specializes in gender, work, and business history. Her dissertation examines Boeing Aircraft Company in the postwar period and the ways in which company executives regulated the workforce through gender and sexual norms. She has taught early and modern American history, Western civilization, history of the Holocaust, and American women’s history.
Timothy Ortyl is a second-year graduate student in sociology at the University of Minnesota, with interests in sexuality, family, and social movements. Tim graduated from Ohio State University in 2004 with a BA in sociology and political science.
N'Jai-An Patters is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and political activism in twentieth century United States. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Deviants and Dissidents: Ideologies of Children's Sexuality, Boston 1972-1986.”
Jennifer Pierce is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms (U of California Press, 1995) and co-editor of Is Academic Feminism Dead: Theory in Practice (NYU Press, 2000). She recently completed an anthology with Hokulani Aikau and Karla Erickson titled Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories in the Academy, 1964-2000 (under review with U of MN Press). In addition, she is working on book manuscript tentatively titled Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, American Culture, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action and a project with historian MJ Maynes called Telling Stories: Personal Narrative Analysis in the Social Sciences.
Andrea D. Robertson holds an M.A. in American history from Butler University and is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation examines the intersection of religion and politics in seventeenth-century New England and specifically questions the relationship between government and the construction early American constructions of gender and sex roles. Robertson is currently collaborating with Dr. Kevin Murphy on an article that explores the way in which sexuality studies have shaped the field of political history. She has taught early and modern American history and American women’s history.
Jason Ruiz, a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, is currently a fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC, where he is researching his dissertation. His work interprets U.S. popular culture and the Mexican Revolution, analyzing racialized and sexualized constructions of “Mexico” in the American imagination. He is especially interested in how these constructions intersect with cultures of U.S. imperialism and nation building in the twentieth century. Jason has taught courses in Chicano Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Metropolitan State University and is the co-founder of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project.
Mark Soderstrom is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Empire State College in Syracuse, NY. His scholarship focuses on cultural discourses and political practices of race, class, gender, and sexuality. He has also published on race and memory in the Midwest. His article “Testing Democracy: World War One I. Q. Testing from Measuring the Military to Selecting the Student Body” is forthcoming in the Smithsonian collection Science in Uniform: Science, Technology, and American Military Institutions, from the Revolutionary War to the Present, from Scarecrow Press.
Mari Trine After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2000 with a dissertation titled, “The Politics of Pleasure,” Mari became Assistant Professor of History at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. Using the research from her dissertation, she has been regaling audiences at widely varied conferences with stories concerning the fantasies—both social and otherwise—of women’s liberationists and lesbians during the late 1960s and much of the 1970s. She has recently embarked on an oral history project studying the experiences of lesbians and feminists who have lived in rural Minnesota for significant periods of time.
Donna Jean Troka is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts (ILA) at Emory University in Atlanta. Her dissertation focuses on drag kings in the Midwest. She performed with H.I.S. Kings for just over two years in Columbus, Ohio and was one of the founders of the First International Drag King Extravaganza (IDKE) that just celebrated its seventh year (IDKE 7) as it traveled to Winnipeg, Canada. She is also a co-editor of The Drag King Anthology, which was nominated as a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards in the Transgender/ GenderQueer category. She also acts as the chair of the IDKE Steering Committee. Presently she resides in Brooklyn, New York with her partner Jes and their three cats.
Dorthe Troeften has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota; in 2003, she co-founded the Twin Cities LGBT Oral History Project. Through a historical reading of trans oral histories and autobiographies, medical literature and gender theory, in her work she studies the ways in which the phenomenon of transgender has been narrated into being through competing and overlapping discourses.
Amy M. Tyson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. When she is not writing her dissertation, “Living History: Performing Historical Narratives in the Service Economy,” she can be found impersonating females from the early 19th century as a costumed interpreter at Historic Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Alex Thomas Urquhart is a PhD Student in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is interested in discourses of race, gender, class, community, sexuality, and subjectivity grounded in institutions and applications of biomedical models of disease prevention. His research centers on transnational HIV prevention and its relation to modernity and neoliberal global capitalism. He is also managing editor of the Queer Twin Cities Oral History Book Project.