Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Comparing The Social Responses Of Aids And Covid-19 Through Oral History, Elise Lee

Women's and Gender Studies Theses

In the past 40 years, the United States has faced 2 major public health crises: the AIDS epidemic, and the global COVID-19 pandemic. In this project I consider the various aspects of these public health emergencies such as sharing the burden of survival, the role of fear, the bastardization of identity politics, and queerness as a political project. I do this by analyzing oral histories and I argue that we can look at the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic in parallel. During both AIDS and COVID, despite severely lackluster governmental responses, we saw overwhelming amounts of community organizing and …

Not Sanitized For Your Protection: Aids And The Politics Of Trash, Emma Banks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metaphors of waste are particularly potent when enlisted to describe and justify the segregation and subjugation of marginalized communities. For, as discard studies scholars have shown, waste is not merely about trash; it is about power (Liboiron and Lepawsky). Maintaining power necessitates hierarchical categorization, whereby the needs and desires of some people are prioritized over those of others, to frequently catastrophic effect.

At the turn of the 21st century, AIDS patients and allies needed no such explanation of what it meant to be relegated to the fringes and designated as waste. Thrown to the proverbial curb of society, PWAs (people …

It's Disco, Baby: Queer Possibilities And Conservative Outrage, Lottie Bromham

University Honors Theses

From 1974 to 1979, disco music was a cultural phenomenon, gracing radio airways and dance clubs across the United States. Just as disco music reached peak popularity, growing disapproval from rock fans and other Americans who saw the genre and scene as overly lavish, too effeminate, and too racially inclusive, forced disco out of American mainstream favor. This paper proposes a viewpoint that contextualizes disco culture as integral to the lives of queer people in New York City, analyzes the prejudices that accompanied the anti-disco movement, and situates the mainstream death of disco as an early cultural consequence of America's …

Hiv/Aids Research Symposium, College Of The Holy Cross

LGBTQIA Archive: Posters

Poster detailing planned events of the HIV/AIDS Research Symposium, held November 29-December 2, 2023 at the College of the Holy Cross. In observance of the 35th World AIDS Day, the Holy Cross LGBTQ+ Alumni Network and a multidisciplinary faculty team invited a broad ranging conversation about the historical and current impact and intersection of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on both the Holy Cross community and the wider world.

Burdin, Johannah, Samantha Rouillard

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Johannah Burdin shares her story as a lesbian/queer woman experiencing southern Maine in the 1990s. Her story touches on topics involving coming out, relationships, a traumatic incident that left her disabled, activism, and much more. She was active in her youth in spreading awareness on the AIDS/HIV crisis, education on safe sex, and spent her evenings at popular Portland gay bars, like Sister’s Bar and Limelight/The Underground. Although she is not much into drinking, she recognized these were some of the few spots queer people could go to make community and relationships. Johannah also shares her story of becoming a …

Marcous, Dana, Robben Harris

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Dana Marcous is a spiritual, successful and fascinating man who at times lives in the extremes, but always seems to maintain his balance. His life story and his spiritual path are so closely intertwined, it might appear as if he has eclipsed the spiritual and physical world. From being a world-class hairdresser and opening one of the most successful hair salons in Maine, to pursuing a career as an actor in L.A., Dana is a person who always follows his dreams and looks for the signs. This interview contains stories of Dana’s early life, including his process of coming out …

Fairyland, Christopher R. Deacy

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Fairyland (2023), directed by Andrew Durham.

Blanchard, Mike, Micaiah Wert

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Mike Blanchard is a 60 year old gay man from Westbrook Maine. He has struggled as an alcoholic due to repressing his queer identity, but has been sober for 33 years (since 1989). Through addiction recovery he was able to come out as gay in 1992. After years of struggling with alcohol and rough relationships, Mike met his husband at Blackstones in Portland, and describes their relationship as, “nothing I ever chased and everything I could have hoped for.” Mike worked for a long time in the field of recreation, but left after feeling as though he could not be …

Queer Bodies: Homoeroticism, Sensuality, And Erotica In Postmodern Fine Art Photography, Rosa Michel Pace

LSU Master's Theses

The queer body– describes the sum of assumptions and biases attributed to queer people, whereby a person’s own queer identity or expression is overshadowed by the generalizations, (mis)perceptions, and stereotypes that society imposes on that individual. Central to the scope of this thesis is the reality whereby the ostracization of queer people involves the association between the very body of the queer person with sexual acts deemed both deviant and immoral by a cis-heteronormative society. Society renders the queer body as pejoratively deviant simply on the basis of its existence alone, where any form of varied gender or sexual expression …

"Death Can't Touch Them Now": Aids Response And Memorialization In Louisville, Kentucky, 1982-1992., Olivia A. Beutel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to address the role of the queer community in Louisville, Kentucky during the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with the first reported AIDS death in the city in 1983 throughout the 1980s, dialogue focused on those living with AIDS, specifically on education for prevention and aid to those afflicted by the disease. Individuals in the queer community—gay men, lesbians, bisexual men and women, transgender men and women, and others—created resources that were not being provided by the larger city government. Then, in the 1990s, national attention to the AIDS Memorial Quilt encouraged people to participate in rituals of commemoration, …

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

Art And Aids: Viral Strategies For Visibility, Stephen Baylor Pillow

Honors Theses

“Art & AIDS: Viral Strategies for Visibility” examines the complex relationships between social stigma, healthcare, homophobia, and mortality, and how these impacted the lives of Western artists and manifested in their works. Most of the art discussed in this thesis was produced during the height of the AIDS crisis (late-1980s to mid-1990s). During this period, gay artists and their allies employed new strategies in their work to inspire activism, and convey intense emotions –– predominantly frustration, grief, and anxiety –– associated with HIV/AIDS. In the U.S., the inaction of the Reagan administration was largely due to widespread homophobia kindled by …

When Are You Going To Catch Up With Me? Shu Lea Cheang With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

“Digital nomad” Shu Lea Cheang and friend and critic Alexandra Juhasz consider the reasons for and implications of the censorship of Cheang’s 2017 film FLUIDØ, particularly as it connects to their shared concerns in AIDS activism, feminism, pornography, and queer media. They consider changing norms, politics, and film practices in relation to technology and the body. They debate how we might know, and what we might need, from feminist-queer pornography given feminist-queer engagements with our bodies and ever more common cyborgian existences. Their informal chat opens a window onto the interconnections and adaptations that live between friends, sex, technology, …

Positive Women: Emotion, Memory, And The Power Of Narrative In Women Organized To Respond To Life-Threatening Diseases, 1991-2020, Eleanor Naiman

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

Note: In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's first paragraph.

"By 1992, the AIDS epidemic in the United States had reached seemingly catastrophic proportions. Over ten years after the first published report of AIDS-related lung infection, the number of AIDS cases in the United States far exceeded 100,000. It would be four years until the FDA approval of the first protease inhibitor. Over ten thousand women had been diagnosed with the disease, and experts expected over ninety thousand more were already infected. The disease, lacking effective treatment, increasingly struck women and people of color in the early 1990s; …

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Twelve Dispatches From The Futures Of Aids, Alexandra Juhasz, Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler

Publications and Research

A Dialogue between Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, and Jessica Whitbread, with Images by Quito Ziegler and an Introduction by Alexandra Juhasz

Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced.

Robedee, Matthew, Hannah Gorham, Jason White

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Matthew (Mat) Robedee is a 35-year-old gay man who lives in Portland, Maine. For seven years, he was a health and outreach worker and former prevention programs manager for the Frannie Peabody Center, in Portland. He has also worked with organizations such as Portland Pride and Equality Maine and is currently a real estate agent.

Mat grew up in Buxton, Maine. In elementary school, he revealed to a friend that he thought he was gay. His friend reprimanded him, telling him never to tell anyone about his secret. That event set the tone for years to come, and Mat hid …

Kawamoto, Eric, Cosette Holmes, Tiana Cope-Ferland

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

This interview with Eric Kawamoto reveals a journey of self-discovery in Chicago, L.A., Boston, and Portland; an intersection between being Asian American and being queer; and survival of AIDS as a result of reserve. Kawamoto places these personal themes among his account of the LGBTQ+ and Asian American communities’ overarching struggles, like the fight for domestic partnership benefits, representation of Asian American gay men, and spreading awareness about Japanese American internment in California.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in …

Hopkins, Susan, Ysanne Bethel

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Susan Hopkins is a 53-year-old member of the LGBTQIA community, living in Westbrook, Maine. Susan grew up with her family on the small island of Vinalhaven in Penobscot Bay, hearing tales of her anti-racist bisexual aunt. A self-identified feminist in her adolescence, Susan recognized that she was not straight early on, but did not feel safe to come out in her small community. Going to the University of Maine, Orono, Susan experienced her first lesbian relationship and taste of chosen family. Eventually, Susan found herself at the Howard University School of Law, where she interned at Whitman Walter Clinic in …

Elias, Richard, Benjamin Cornwall

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Richard Elias grew up in Northern Maine and moved to Portland at a young age. In this interview, we discuss: coming out as a gay man, his family life, his experience with Portland gay bars (The Phoenix, Roland’s and Blackstones), some of his travel stories, his love for dancing, and the effect of the AIDS epidemic on his life.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, University of Southern Maine Libraries.

For more information about the Querying the Past: …

Lg Ms 023 Roland Blais Papers Finding Aid, Julie Cismoski

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Roland Blais was born in Rumford, Maine in 1939, and knew by the time he was in high school that he was "different". He saved money and moved to Los Angeles in 1958, where he got a job with Broadway Department Store, and went to gay bars for the first time. He joined the Navy and served from 1959 to 1963, leaving with an honorable discharge. He then enlisted in the Army, serving 1963-1966, stationed at Walsrode, Germany, working with missiles. He returned to the United States, retrieving the car he bought in Germany from Newark Port, New Jersey, …

Quiet Heroes, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Quiet Heroes (2018), directed by Jenny Mackenzie, Jared Ruga, and Amanda Stoddard.

On Lgbt Studies At Vcu: An Interview With Richard Godbeer, Amita Rao, Emily Furlich

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Grindle, Charles, Gwendolyn Wolf, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Charles Grindle is a 66-year-old man from Ellsworth, ME. He is a piano player, as well as a minister. He has been heavily involved in church, music and theater since childhood. He has also done a lot of traveling- he’s lived in Portland, Boston, San Diego and England. He has years of experience working for churches- doing sermons and weddings, etc. In his earlier years, he played piano at many hopping places- such as The Front Porch and the Inn By the Sea. He worked at Blackstones when it first opened. Other bars that he frequented were Styxx and Rollins. …

Brooks, Frank, Rachel Spigel, Elizabeth Wise Horan

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Frank Brooks is a 64 year old Social Worker and Social Work educator born and raised in Maine. He when came out as gay in 1976, he was in a heterosexual marriage and he has a son from that marriage. He was involved in an LGBT parent's group, LGBT social worker's group, volunteered for the AIDS project, worked on referenda and political campaigns, and was a board member of both the MLGPA (now Equality Maine) and the MCLU (now ACLU of Maine). His life's work has been serving the LGBTQ community through both activism and social work. …

Lg Ms 043 Aids Lodging House Archives, Anthony Marvullo

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Provenance: The AIDS Lodging House Archives were donated by Shawn LeGrega on September 3, 2014.

Restrictions on Access: Some materials are restricted until 2081 to protect privacy rights.

Governmentality/Animacy/Mythology: A Biopolitical And Rhetorical Mosaic Of Hiv Stigma In A Time Of Prep-Aration, Brendan Geoffrey Aaron Hughes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since 1981, roughly 35 million people have died from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the end stages of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and an estimated 39 million are living with HIV today. While various factors such as poverty, lack of education, and poor access to treatment and healthcare compound the epidemic across the world, the endemic in the industrialized west faces specific communication-based challenges to slowing the spread of HIV. Now classified as a "chronic manageable condition", an HIV diagnosis is no longer the death sentence of the early outbreak in the 1980's. A major factor in the …

Solomon, Howard, Richard Morin, Michelle Johnston

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Howard Solomon is a 76 year-old man who grew up in New Castle, Pennsylvania. During his early years, and still today, Judaism played a significant role in his life. His dad was a Kosher butcher, and Solomon attended a Hebrew school while growing up. Solomon’s profession was teaching history as a college professor at New York University, Tufts University, and the University of Southern Maine. Towards the end of his full-time teaching career, he taught a class about Lesbian and Gay History. During the same period, he openly discussed his homosexuality in the university context. He witnessed the AIDS epidemic …

Lg Ms 040 Harbor Masters Archives Finding Aid, Natalie Hill

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Harbor Masters of Portland, Maine, Inc. is a private nonprofit organization whose members share an interest in the leather/levi lifestyle. The organization was originally incorporated in Maine in 1984 to serve as a social club for like-minded gay males. However, members of any sex are allowed to join Harbor Masters. The club was founded with the goals of promoting fellowship among and tolerance for individuals interested in the leather lifestyle and continues to work toward those goals.

Over time, the Harbor Masters took on a more active role in New England’s LGBT community. The organization has regularly participated in charitable …