What's Left of Our Communities?

So ... there used to be a couple of offices in LA where the Mattachine Society and Foundation operated. Gone - now a parking lot and a modern office building. There used to be a whole neighborhood of clubs and entertainment spots in DC, including the city's longest running and best drag show. Gone - obliterated when the city fathers wanted to build a baseball stadium for a team so bad that Montreal sold it.

Can we start saving our historic places instead of kissing them goodbye?! Queer America is still getting into the history business - writing up its past and collecting its documents and artifacts. We have hardly even begun preserving our historic sites. Ten years ago the Stonewall got listed as a historic national landmark. Nothing else has made the list. No one has pushed anything else on to the list. Between California and New York, virtually nothing has been saved or preserved, with the exception of Henry Gerber's house in Chicago. [see earlier posts]

Forty years after Stonewall, it's time for local queer communities to tally up the spots that celebrate their history, document them and get them onto the historic preservation/landmark lists before they're gone. And where there is already local preservation as with Milk's home and camera shop and Gerber's home, local communities need to press their state historic preservation officer (that's what they call the guy who recommends sites to the national register) to submit those local sites to the National Register of Historic Places run by the National Park Service, and maybe even to the National Historic Landmarks list.

With a new administration coming in, there is more of a chance that queer history won't be shoved into a closet the way it was during the Bush years.

We're a people with a past and we're a people with historic places. We need to keep those places safe, organize walking tours, and invite straight society to learn about our civil rights struggle.

The ONLY One that Made It to the Landmark List: Stonewall

In June 1999, just in time for the 30th anniversary, the Stonewall Inn in New York City was designated a National Historic Landmark, the first queer site to be recognized as a NATIONAL landmark. In January 1999, Bernadette Castro the New York State Historic Preservation Officer, had raised the Stonewall Inn nomination for a National Historic Landmark, noting that there was not one letter in opposition. That June, there were many hopeful statements. The New York Times noted that Assistant Secretary of the Interior M John Berry remarked

''Let it forever be remembered that here -- on this spot -- men and women stood proud, they stood fast, so that we may be who we are, we may work where we will, live where we choose and love whom our hearts desire.''

Nine and a half years later, not one more queer site has been seen fit for the National Historic Landmarks list. And, not a single queer site has made it on the National Register, the next level down from 'landmark' status. The work that Carter, Dolkart, Harris and Shockly put into getting the Stonewall nomination accepted has turned into a once-and-only event.

The Stonewall Inn certainly deserves its place as a queer national historic site but how could it be the only one. Two years after landmark status was achieved the Keeper of the National Register Carol Shull and Beth Savage, architectural historian at the National Register, congratulated themselves and the National Park Service in a paper at the annual NCSHPO meeting in DC:

"Historic places associated with other groups in American society forced to fight for civil rights are beginning to be documented, and more will be identified as part of the NPS’s civil rights study. Stonewall in Greenwich Village, the site of the 1969 raid and demonstrations regarded by many as the single-most important event that led to the modern gay and lesbian liberation movement, was documented by several local organizations and nominated to the National Register by the New York State Historic Preservation Officer. After its listing, Stonewall was designated a NHL for the exceptional role it has played in the Nation’s history."

Yet that same year, the National Park Service dropped entirely the discussion of queer historic sites from its year long study Civil Rights in America: A Framework for Identifying Significant Sites.

So now nearly forty years after the Stonewall riots, at the thirtieth anniversary of the Milk assassination, and four weeks after Proposition 8 triumphed in California, queer historic sites linger in preservation limbo. We certainly have historic sites -- and not just bars and clubs -- to remind us of our historic struggles. We need to get them out of the preservation closet and into the main streets of preservation.


The nomination to the National Park Service: by David Carter, Andrew Dolkart, Gale Harris, Jay Shockly - http://www.nps.gov/nhl/designations/samples/ny/stone.pdf
New York Times' coverage of the National Historic Landmark listing:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A03E7D7123AF935A15755C0A96F958260

Visible Past

Visibility builds awareness, which can lead to understanding.

Buildings and sites connected to historical movements and events create a physical connection with the historical narrative. The sites of queer history, where gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people have campaigned for civil rights and built communities, are often invisible to the larger community.

Recognizing these sites, achieving historic preservation status for them, and making them visible marks the queer community as a people with a history that cannot be ignored. It also preserves that history as part of the national story of achieving minority rights and acceptance. For current and future generations, preservation ensures that the physical locations remind ourselves and others of the struggles and creates a visceral connection to that story.

Queer physical history is largely urban. As such it often disappears beneath developers bulldozers. In Washington, DC an entire community of entertainment sites, dating from 1970, fell to bulldozers building a new baseball stadium in 2006. In Los Angeles, the two offices of the Mattachine have been replaced by parking and a newer office building. To date only one site, the Stonewall Inn, has been recognized by the National Park Service as worthy of inclusion on the National Historic Landmarks list. A handful of other sites have been recognized locally.

This blog will profile historic sites not yet preserved, examine the process and hurdles of achieving historic site recognition and preservation, and advocate for heightened preservation campaigning by queer historical and archival organizations, professional archivists and historians, and the public.

The photo on the right is the home and office of Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, the father of militant gay activism from 1961, which has been nominated by Rainbow History for historic site recognition in Washington, DC (more on that later).