Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project

A collection of essays drawing from the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project. I'll say upfront this is not your typical local queer history--it's more interested in interrogating questions of process and parts of Twin Cities history that resist dominant narratives in queer history. For that alone, I think it is really incredibly valuable, especially if you are interested in the ways that non-coastal cities posit themselves (or those living in those cities, really,) in the larger narrative of queer history that we tell in the US. Hearing again and again how unimportant Stonewall was to the residents of the Twin Cities at the time, for example, really challenges the dominant narratives about that event's centrality to histories of queer resistance.

There are some pieces that really raised a lot of questions for me--specifically, the roundtable of queers of color made me really reflect on where Two-Spirit queers fit into narratives of queers of color (claiming there are very few people of color in the Twin Cities when, for me, it has the most visible Native population of any place I have ever lived in, which is complicated! And I wished had been addressed by the roundtable, but wasn't) really challenged me to think hard about what my role as a white settler in supporting BIPOC members of my community, especially as someone who is living here.

All of the pieces in this are interesting in their own ways, though it is interesting to see the intellectual well from which each of the authors is collectively drawing (Miranda Joseph's Against the Romance of Community is cited about 800,000 times, which makes sense but is also funny to see.) I'd really recommend this book to anyone interested in a more critical local queer history that isn't afraid to challenge dominant narratives, specifically of progress, in queer history.

[Also, full disclosure, I work with one of the authors, so that may have impacted how I read the book.]… (mais)