Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons^™

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Lg Ms 052 Sage Hylton (-Lemons) Papers, K A. Perry

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Sage Hylton-Lemons grew up in Portland, Maine. In high school, Hylton-Lemons found sanctuary as a gay teenager in the youthdriven group Outright, where his involvement progressed from attending weekly meetings to being a member of the Board, then President of the Board. As an Outright member and activist, Hylton-Lemons spoke at schools and events, became a peer-advisor, and helped other communities organize their own Outrights. He was instrumental in conceiving and organizing Outright's first annual prom in 1998. He was profoundly influenced by Christian T. Chenard, a nurse practitioner for the City of Portland Public Health Positive Healthcare Program. …

Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan

English Faculty Scholarship

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …

Lg Ms 079 Steven G. Bull Papers, Jill Piekut Roy, Jeremy Rundstrom

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Papers include correspondence, photographs, publications, and ephemera documenting the beginning of the gay liberation movement in Maine and Steve Bull's participation in the movement both in Maine and nationally, especially through his involvement with the founding of the Wilde-Stein Club at University of Maine Orono in 1973 and his chairmanship of the first Maine Gay Symposium in 1974. Letters received by Bull and his friends, both personally and as Wilde-Stein Club officials, are evidence of the attitudes of both supporters of gay liberation and its opponents in the 1970s. Bull's research papers document the University of Maine's reaction to …

Woman Flytrap, Brianna Jo Hobson

Student Theses and Dissertations

Woman FlyTrap is a short story zine collection that explores the topic of sexual violence through the perpetrator and victim relationship with an explicit lens. Replete with cultural and entomological themes and motifs, Woman Flytrap seeks to remind survivors that we are not alone. In our bodies or in our lives. Neither in the world. There are over a million insects to every human, proving that there is strength in numbers. All five stories in the collection present different abstracts: revenge, transformation, justice, healing, body image, self-harm, mourning, etc. There is also a playlist and a section about the author. …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

Lg Ms 160 Dale Mccormick Gay Side Story Interview, Jill Piekut Roy

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Collection includes two copies of an oral history interview (one edited) and an automatically generated transcript.

In the edited version of the interview, Dale McCormick recalls her role as producer of "Gay Side Story," an adaptation of the musical West Side Story, with Diane Elze, Miles J. Rightmire, Cheryl Ring, and others. The play was performed for two nights in Luther Bonney Hall at University of Southern Maine during the 10th Maine Lesbian & Gaymen's Symposium in May 1983. McCormick discusses her work on the writing team, the set design, and the positive reception of the production during a …

Resistance/Refusal Of Violence In The Neoliberal City: Black Lgbtq+ Communities In Chicago And New York (1989 – Present), Marc Ridgell

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Since the 1980s, Black queer and trans communities across U.S. cities have experienced racist and classist exclusion from gay neighborhoods, police and interpersonal violence in neighborhoods more generally, and medical racism in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Despite these forms of antiblack and anti-queer oppression, Black queer and trans people have performed acts of resistance and refusal to build community and experience better worlds. This research project examines how Black LGBTQ+ communities have responded to systems of racism, classism, queerphobia, and misogyny by claiming their “right to the city.” Specifically, this project explores how Black LGBTQ+ people in both Chicago and New …

Loving Blackness: A Sense Experience, Ricardo J. Millhouse

Feminist Pedagogy

The late bell hooks framed feminist pedagogies as a set of practices and systems that provide a description of feminism, a feminist learning environment, and ways to cultivate a community that is ready for feminist instruction. Using intersectionality, hooks (1992) discussed “loving blackness” as a representational and destabilizing practice to de-center whiteness. hooks (1992, 20) writes, “loving blackness as a political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.” I propose a black feminist praxis teaching tool, “a sense experience,” …

Before They Could Be Saved: Aids Voices Before Protease Inhibitors, Julian J. Willis

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to explore writing during the start of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. States. This time period encompasses the early 1980s to mid-1990s before Protease Inhibitors were FDA approved which was the medical breakthrough drug that helped turn an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a chronic condition. This thesis will be an examination of three themes: “Gay White Cis Male Experience of HIV/AIDS”,” Marginalized Identity Experience of HIV/AIDS” and an exploration of two plays written during the height of the AIDS epidemic that were later turned into HBO productions: The Normal Heart …

Barriers To Outdoor Recreation For Marginalized Groups At The University Of Montana, Sabine R. Englert, Beatrix Frissell, Adrienne Liebert, Sophia Rodriquez, Margaret Jensen, Rachana Harris, Abby Doss

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

Exclusion from outdoor recreation reflects legacies of oppression of marginalized communities and makes access to the outdoors not equally available. In the United States, approximately 38% of Black Americans and 48% of Hispanic Americans participated in outdoor recreation in 2020. This is compared to 55% participation among Caucasian Americans. Many other intersecting identities are actively excluded, including people with disabilities, fat populations, and members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community; furthermore, class-based hierarchies are shown through the restricted outdoor access of low-income populations.

While numerous studies show a lack of diversity in outdoor recreation, little to no research has been conducted on …

Lg Ms 005 Maine Lesbian Feminist Archives Finding Aid, Siobain C. Monahan, Jill Piekut Roy

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Maine Lesbian Feminist was a social and political group based in Downeast Maine which operated from 1976 to about 1984. The archives includes records of the group, their political task force, and their communications committee, as well as event ephemera from the third Maine Gay Symposium in 1976.

Date Range:

1976-1982

Size of Collection:

5 File Folders

Lg Ms 107 Karen Bye Papers, Katelynn Paul

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Biographical Note

Karen Bye was born and raised in Stonington, Maine on Deer Isle in 1952. Karen enrolled at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, joining the class of 1975. Karen was a member of the queer community and went on to join Gay Support and Action (GSA), a community organization located in Bangor, Maine. Karen advocated for GSA to start a group at the university, but was initially denied. Nevertheless Karen persisted and continued to advocate, and eventually formed a group of students that would soon become the Wilde-Stein Club. Karen held the role of secretary, and had been …

How Marlon T. Riggs Queered The Documentary Form, Anthony M. Sweeney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marlon T. Riggs’s documentary films and their paratextual elements are rooted in his intersectional identities as a Black and gay man. His activist goal of Black gay liberation was based on what he saw as deeply engrained internal and external racist and homophobic societal structures that subjugated Black queers. In this thesis, I place research from Black cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies in conversation with one another to show how Riggs’s filmography is an example of queer form. In doing so, I attempt to redefine the focus of the scholarship on Riggs from an avant-garde filmmaker …

"You Can't Be Shakespeare And You Can't Be Joyce": Lou Reed, Modernism, And Mass Production, Daniel C. Jacobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the overlooked connections between American popular music and modernist literature’s scope and formal experimentation which arose in the mid-20th century. Because Lou Reed’s ever-changing persona situates his work uncomfortably between high art and pop-culture, modernism and “post-modernity,” literature and music, and ethics and aesthetics, I intend to consider Reed as this dissertation’s empty, refracted center. One that will allow for a critique of several major intellectual movements, both inside and outside the academy, that continue to influence thinking about art, ethics, and material culture. Additionally, I hope to show that the work of a …

The Vast Unsaid: Lesbian Erasure And Celebration, Kara Ireland

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Lesbian erasure negatively impacts the accessibility to literature, archives, and records of lesbian history as a result of being buried within queer and feminist discourse. As a result, scholars often classify lesbians into other categories, effectively rendering them invisible and unimportant. Across the literature, there is no cohesive definition of lesbian and it is difficult to be exclusive on the basis of sex and gender. In addition, lesbian relationships are often dismissed as friendships. All of these factors have influenced my decision to create a website dedicated to promoting lesbian visibility and combating lesbian erasure. I have made a website …

Lg Ms 111 Fortuna, Henderson, Prizer Collection, Caitlin E. Corrigan

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Donated collectively by Stan Fortuna, Susan Henderson, and Peter Prizer, early activists in Maine’s LGBTQ+ history, this collection of research material spans from 1974 to 2014, with the bulk of material from the mid-1970s.

This collection documents the development and activities of the Maine Gay Task Force, including the creation and publication of a newsletter from 1974 to 1980. It opens with planning materials and news coverage of the first statewide gathering for gay people, the Maine Gay Symposium held at the University of Maine’s Orono campus, an event which sparked statewide organizing efforts, including the creation of the Maine …

The Bodies Politic: Sex, History, And The Promise Of A Black Queer America, Jonathan Newby

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This essay examines and critiques the ways in which Black, Queer, and Black Queer people's culture, politics, and lived experiences are experienced in the United States, historically and in the present day. The Bodies Politics calls for American history and culture to be reoriented to acknowledge and center the contributions of Black Queer people to the nation.

The Glass Coffin: Gothic Adaptations And The Formation Of Sexual Subjectivity., Colton T. Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is now an almost foregone conclusion that classic depictions of vampirism resonate with contemporary queer audiences. A sympathetic response to the monster’s persecution is often the key factor in these arguments, yet little attention is paid to the textual details that prompt such a process of identification. This study posits that the iconography used to establish a connection between monstrosity and non-normative sexuality has its origins in Victorian Gothic fiction, whose descriptions of vampirism were assimilated into the discourse of the fin-de-siècle medical field known as sexology. Theories that defined homosexuality as an illness with physical and psychological symptoms …

Lg Ms 141 Artistic Amazon Bookstore Collection, Emily Newell

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

The Artistic Amazon Bookstore was a feminist bookstore operated by Cherie Monnell
and Dottie Logue in New Hampshire and Maine from the early-1990s through the mid-2000s. The store was first located at 28 Chapel Street, Portsmouth, New Hampshire before it moved to 182 Clay Hill Road, Cape Neddick, Maine in late 2001, when it became the only feminist bookstore in Maine. In addition to books, the store sold jewelry, clothing, artwork, and gifts.

The store’s website, artisticamazon.com, is archived on web.archive.org through 2008. The website lists examples of merchandise include pages for news and events in the local feminist and …

Queer And Trans Prison Voices: A Podcast Archive On Prison Abolition, Josefine Ziebell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is located at the intersection of Critical Prison Studies, Gender Studies, Sound Studies, and American Studies. It highlights the importance of sonic modes of anti-carceral resistance by featuring the recorded voices of incarcerated people through the creation of a sonic archive of prison writings. By integrating that sonic archive into the podcast medium, this project functions as a digital archive for incarcerated voices, consisting of two tracks: a collection of short-spoken readings by queer and transgender incarcerated authors, and podcast-style interviews with activist scholars, organizations, and sound artists working towards prison abolition. In this paper, I establish …

Indie Developers And The Queer Content Renaissance In Video Games, 2013-2017, Shane Michael Hansaruk Mr.

Major Papers

Queer content in video games has existed since the 1970s, but as time and technology have progressed, so too have the potential for queer content in video games. During the mid-2010’s, a sudden increase in the number of games with queer content began, lasting between the years 2013 and 2017. This research project examines this period in great detail to determine the cause of this drastic increase. Through examining queer games literature, two queer games databases, and two select titles from this period, I determine that independent, or “indie” developers, have a substantial impact on the increase of queer games …

Campy Musical Black Queer Forms: Finding Utopia In Lil Nas X’S World Of Montero, Jaymi Leah Grullon

Theses and Dissertations

Lil Nas X, a breakout music star has broken into the mainstream and has stirred up controversy and moral panic among conservative Christians as well as those who are not in support of over Black queer representation in media. Moreover, I am interested in which ways he queers the forms of pop, hip hop and camp through his music videos, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” “Industry Baby,” featuring Jack Harlowe, and his performative skits. In my first chapter, I will be laying down the theoretical framework that I will be connecting from various scholars to define campy musical Black …

Part-Time Normals: Embodied Trans Geographies Of Homonationalism, Ivy Faye Monroe

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Self-understanding of one’s gender identity both emerges from, and rearticulates into, the ways one experiences and mediates their personal and social relationships with the geographic worlds they inhabit. Trans geographical literature has, to date, created compelling work on the social geographies of trans people in highly-gendered spaces. This thesis extends the existing literature to research how gender is both experienced and performed in the mundane structures of everyday life. Building from theories of cruel optimism and homonationalism, this research examines how the discursive and spatial epistemologies of gender identity inform attachments to structures of normativity. Through archival research of transvestite …

Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

This piece looks at queer characters in the Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016). The film takes place during the heyday of the Hollywood film studio set in 1951 and draws on many films during that time period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Distribution Struggle: Assembling A Media History Of J. Brian’S Enterprises With Court Proceedings And Public Records, Finley Freibert

Faculty Scholarship

This article introduces the concept of “distribution struggle”—the panoply of cultural and industrial conflicts that must be traced and accounted for in distribution histories—to sequence a primary-sourced media history of J. Brian’s gay media enterprises. In tracing this history, primary sources are surprisingly accessible, and provide new insights into J. Brian’s industrial operations. By triangulating archival records with secondary accounts, this article provides a more nuanced cultural and industrial portrait of J. Brian. It argues that media industry historiography must frame historical narratives by accounting for the cultural and industrial struggles that culminated in the available archival sources, in this …

Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …

Suicidality As A Discourse Of Safety In The Queer Youth Movement, Robert M. Cleary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In November 1991, a group of queer teenagers gathered to rally at the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Two years later, the state passed the first law in the nation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes in the state's schools. The November rally was the first public expression of what became the safe schools movement, which went on over the following decade to transform the landscape in public education for LGBTQ students. A notable feature of the rally was the staging by the youth of a mass performative act of queer suicide. This paper uses Foucauldian concepts …

"Rainbow Is The Way To Go" Sign, Betsy Parsons

Betsy Parsons Collection

Sign created by Betsy Parsons for demonstration or march. Text reads: "Rainbow is the Way to Go!"

Multicolored marker on white posterboard.