QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Queer Choirs, Archives of the Self, and Finding Voice in the Refuge of the 1990s

Thomas Hilder — 2024-12-04

This text offers a reassessment of the queer 1990s through retrospections of a queer scholar, pedagogue, and activist. I focus on three pop song performances as part of my own current ethnomusicological research on queer choirs in London, Rome, and Warsaw, each song evoking memories, posing questions, revealing secrets of my past selves, as well as becoming imbued with new meanings in the politically volatile present. Drawing on queer autoethnography, I parse through the pieces of a contradictory personal archive, and posit the 1990s as an intimate refuge that has enabled my current attempts to foreground queer voices, my own and those of fellow queer choristers.

“It Ain’t Easy Being Green:”

Karen Jaime — 2024-12-04

In this essay, I focus on the cultural, racial, sexual, and gendered politics that inform the staged and quotidian performances of masculinity by the late Stormé DeLarverie. A mixed-race, butch lesbian drag king who, in the 1950s and 1960s, performed with the famed Jewel Box Revue—a racially integrated drag show at the Apollo Theater—DeLarvarie was also a central figure in the 1969 Stonewall Riots. I analyze DeLarverie’s personal history, life-long activism, and staged performances, beginning with a close reading of Michelle Parkerson’s documentary Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box as a way to frame the relationship between DeLarverie’s gender presentation, both on stage and off, and her cabaret style singing within a 1990s butch aesthetic. Alongside Parkerson’s film, I also interrogate DeLarverie’s employment as a bouncer/door person at various lesbian bars in the West Village neighborhood of downtown New York City, including Henrietta Hudson and Cubby Hole. I focus on how DeLarverie’s deployment of a racialized gender presentation informs how she both greets LGBT/queer people seeking entry, and labors to ensure their safety. Throughout, I argue that DeLarverie’s butch aesthetic highlights a female masculinity readily legible in the 1990s, one that troubles contemporary queer discourses surrounding “butch” as a marker for those assigned female at birth and that now operates as out of place and time, under the threat of constant erasure, and framed within the vocabulary of extinction. I challenge the narratives forecasting the inevitable butch disappearance and, instead, propose an alternate framing by focusing on DeLarverie’s embodiment and performance of a racialized female masculinity in order to imagine future possibilities for butch survival.

Laura Aguilar and Gil Cuadros: Legacies of 1990s Chicanx Resistance through Illness and Los Angeles Queer Friendship

Pablo Alvarez — 2024-12-04

Laura Aguilar and Gil Cuadros: Legacies of 1990s Chicanx Resistance through Illness and Los Angeles Queer Friendship centers a time of great loss and uncertainty for Chicana photographer Laura Aguilar and Chicano writer Gil Cuadros. Coming of Chicanx queer age in the late 1980s and 1990s of Los Angeles, graduating from the same high school, taking their first Chicano Studies class together at East Los Angeles College and exhibiting and publishing their work during the early AIDS epidemic grounds their friendship and resistance as they emerged as Chicanx queer artists. There is no denying the deep ties that rooted their friendship and art through illness, resistance and death. Their friendship reveals Chicanx queer community as a complicated, sometimes contradictory, methodology rooted in political resistance that disrupts historical mainstream representations of AIDS. From my first conversation when Aguilar had me laughing deeply from her childhood stories to the day I arrived at her home to help pull the weeds in her backyard as we recorded our first oral history project of her and Cuadros’s friendship, to our companionship and caretaking through illness and death, this writing argues for a broader definition of archive that not only considers Aguilar’s already-recognized groundbreaking work but also her physical home, her life story, her personal relationships and her unpublished/unexhibited work that allows me to identify the importance of AIDS and Chicanx queer friendship of the 1990s as refusing to settle in her photography and to unearthed for a larger tradition of AIDS activism and consciousness.

Gaga for MAGA:

Francesca Petronio — 2024-12-04

This article explores nostalgia for the not-so-queer nineties, or rather, the post-gay nineties. This unique contribution is the first critical study of Walk Away, a coming- out-as conservative social movement. Sparked by a video testimonial and the hashtag #WalkAway, the movement documents the exodus of erstwhile democrats who now ride the Trump train, with the goal of attracting liberals, and especially minorities, to the GOP. I examine how queer conservative figures of the present echo cultural critiques of the past, specifically the post-gay politics of the nineties, all the while reverberating old fears of erasure and loss of authentic identity amidst assimilation. Assembling a bricolage of methodologies, I blend participant observation of the panelists and audience members, and Foucauldian critical discourse analysis, as I situate the movement, the rhetoric, and the ideas within a larger framework of reactionary conservatism, and the post-gay politics of the nineties. I focus on several key themes of nineties nostalgia: the triumphant coming-out ritual, battles over biology versus social constructivism, and a wistful edginess and defiance which Jack Halberstam has equated with masculinity and especially whiteness.

Queer Activism in the Queen City

Mary Catherine Foltz — 2024-12-04

“Queer Activism in the Queen City” explores how LGBTQ+ organizations in the Lehigh Valley (Pennsylvania) operated during the 1990s to address HIV/AIDS, to develop anti-discrimination legislation in Allentown and the state of Pennsylvania, and to promote coalitional organizing to address intersectional forms of oppression. Drawing on materials from the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive, the article addresses the impact of small city activism, including discussion of organizing by F.A.C.T (Fighting AIDS Continuously Together) and their Summer Games fundraisers for direct services for HIV+ people, the creation of the Pride Festival in 1993-1994, the development of regional LGBTQ+ publications, and the fight for trans-inclusive anti-discrimination legislation by Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance for Political Action. Written as a series of snapshots that provide a kaleidoscopic view of intersecting and diverging activist efforts, the article will showcase how regional activists grappled with unique challenges in our region due to the prevalence of the conservative religious right in the Lehigh Valley and surrounding areas. Ultimately, the article offers a strong account of how activists in a battleground state contributed powerfully to fights for equity that continue to have ramifications for contemporary regional activism. With a focus on a small region of PA and attention to the import of local LGBTQ+ community archives, the article showcases the value of hyperlocal LGBTQ+ history for granting researchers better understanding of the decade of the 90s outside of coastal metropolises, thereby contributing to new research in our field that calls for attention to understudied communities.

‘To Mystify, Terrify, and Enchant’

Christina Hanhardt — 2024-12-04

This article weaves together a close look at the short-lived organization Queer Nation and a review of the historiography of queer political history.

Caring Across Generations

James Huỳnh — 2024-12-04

Access to a history of organizing can be a powerful tool to shape any activist’s worldview and approach. Especially for queer activists, this history can instill a sense of rootedness that makes activism sustainable and impactful. But, for different reasons, that history is not always accessible for queer people of color. One, the notion of queerness evolved as soon as it emerged and gained popularity among activists in the 1990s, and our ideas for gender identities have become more expansive in the last decade. Two, most accounts of queer organizing history, such as AIDS activism in the 1990s, overlook the contributions of people of color. Three, for LGBTQ Asian Americans, organizing has always been beautifully intersectional. This means that activists are able to draw from different organizing histories to shape and bolster their work. Lineages for us are never singular.

In this roundtable discussion, four community organizers from the LGBTQ Asian American community in California will trace our organizing lineages and discuss the divergent ways the Queer 1990s have (and have not) informed our activism. While the past has been elusive to some of us, our community is at an inflection point where intergenerational organizing can happen in both directions. Some LGBTQ Asian American organizations are collecting oral histories and opening up conversations about healing and care for the elders in the community. On the other end of the spectrum, gender and sexuality has become de rigueur in youth organizing work, whether the organizing is focused on queer youth or not. This opening was not available to many of us when we were growing up. We can now talk about how to harness the past in more intentionally and collectively ways.

Yet, there is no denying that our contexts have shifted, and we cannot use yesterday’s strategies uncritically. In working across generations, how do we handle cisgender privilege and transphobia? How do we have conversations about generational trauma caused by war displacements, as it shows up in our organizing in covert ways? How do we build multiracial coalitions and share resources at a time when more people are finally acknowledging anti-Blackness in U.S. history and our complicities in it (while others still resist it)?

When Eurovision Came Out: LGBTQ+ Visibility and the Eurovision Song Contest in the “Queer 1990s”

Catherine Baker — 2024-12-04

Queer and Asian in the American South

Svati Shah — 2024-12-04

In this forum contribution we recall our experiences of doing Asian queer community-based organizing in Atlanta in the mid-1990s. We draw on the friendship and community that we formed at that time, friendships that persist between us and many other people whom we met and worked with then. These networks are part of the politically progressive community space we helped to build, which grew, changed, and eventually gave way to other projects and spaces. Here we focus on our efforts to organize APLBN, the Asian Pacific Lesbian Bisexual Network, a precursor to later Asian queer and trans organizational formations that accounted for gender diversity more explicitly in their monikers, including APLBTN (Asian Pacific Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Network) and API-QXX. The history of queer Asian and Pacific Islander organizing in the US is still to be written. It would begin not with the 1990s, but much earlier, with the history of the Americas itself and the waves of migration and settler colonialism in which API history in the US is woven. The 1990s are a significant chapter in this history for reasons that we have tried to describe through a recollection that is ultimately quite brief. While ‘API’ has taken on very different meanings over time, this piece recalls a moment when the ground of its formation was being actively negotiated via spaces like APLBN / APLBTN / API-QXX.

Organizing against AIDS and across Prison Walls

Emily Hobson — 2024-12-04

Across the late 1980s and 1990s, activists came together to challenge the convergence of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the carceral state. The three activists interviewed here, Linda Evans, Judy Greenspan, and Crystal Mason, were leaders in HIV/AIDS prison activism inside, outside, and across prison walls. They held differing experiences of incarceration, race, and politics, but all became central figures in AIDS prison activism as well as in lesbian feminist and queer networks, approaching incarceration as inseparable from the course of the epidemic, particularly in Black and Latinx communities and among women. Interviewed together, their recollections help to surface the importance of AIDS prison activism to revisiting the queer 1990s.

Queer Pasts and Queerer Presents: the Queer 1990s and their Legacies in Eastern Europe

Hadley Renkin — 2024-12-04

The 1990s wield a powerful force in the memories and meanings of queer lives and politics. Nowhere is this more true than in the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe. Here, the collapse of Socialism along with other changes made the 1990s a complex site of ruptures and continuities, fundamental social and political transformations, shifting local and global entanglements, new hopes, and emerging disillusionments - as well as efflorescing queer lifestyles, communities, and movements, and resurgent heteronationalisms. These developments and their remembrance continue to shape the nature and scope of gender and sexual politics, both left and right-wing, throughout the region today: national-reproductive politics, “gender ideology” panics, homophobic legislation and violence; left and liberal resistance, queer and feminist prides and politics, establishing new and globally visible queer and anti-queer configurations and critiques. Yet scholarly efforts to consider the significance of this historical moment for queerness and its study have remained almost entirely focused on its Western/North American manifestations, whether empirical or theoretical. This conversation between queer scholars and activists from and working on queer lives, socialities, and politics past and present in postsocialist Eastern Europe explores these critical questions of the proximate impacts and persistent effects of the 1990s, in an effort to broaden the terrain of thinking about what, when, where, and who constituted “the queer 1990s” and their crucial effects. We ask: What was queer about the postsocialist 1990s? Why, when, and for whom? How has the memory of the 1990s and its queer moments shaped Eastern Europe’s sexual politics - queer and anti-queer - since? What affects/emotions, and what materialities, have lingered, which have faded, and which have taken new forms? What visions of past and future - what origin stories and utopias, queer and anti-queer - emerged in this time, and which of these linger to trouble or inspire present-day forms of politics, culture, and scholarship? What, and who, has remained present, been remembered, or been forgotten? With what effects? And finally: what can the postsocialist queer 1990s and their complexly permeating legacies tell us about the limits and possibilities of Queer Theory and Sexualities Studies?

Red as Red, or Conditions of Self-Fashioning

Serubiri Moses — 2024-12-04

Information Activism

Ashley Carter — 2024-12-04

In their book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies, Cait McKinney tells the herstory of lesbian media activism, highlighting the generations of feminist, lesbian volunteers who made community possible using media and technology. McKinney dives deep into this movement's history, allowing the communication networks, databases, and digital archives to tell the intimate story of justice and connection. Through telephone hotlines, notebooks, index cards, and digitizing technologies, these women successfully established a counterpubic that would forever impact how we generate and share knowledge today. Information Activism paves the way for current and future decision making, technological design, and infrastructure in media driven spaces with antiracism and trans-inclusion at the core of our efforts.

Review of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

Galen Bunting — 2024-12-04

Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut. By Ghassan Moussawi

Godfried Asante — 2024-12-04

"A Third University Is Possible" - Book Review

Laura Torre — 2024-12-04

Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. By Patricia Hill Collins.

Lyounghee Kim — 2024-12-04

Bitches Unleashed Book Review

Emily Pollard — 2024-12-04

The Queer 1990s: Introduction

Eve Oishi — 2024-12-04