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

Lgbti+ Language And Understandings In Nepal: Creating Spaces And Forging Identities, Patrick Sonnenberg

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The 1990 Nepali Constitution opened up opportunities for many forms of activism, and identity groups thus began solidifying to advocate for social change and justice (Karki 2012). After the Nepali Supreme Court ruling in 2007, Nepal became one of the first countries to offer a third gender category “Other,” becoming a leader for human rights in South Asia and the world (Mahato 2017). As Coyle and Boyce (2013) point out, there is little research on LGBTI individuals in Nepal. Furthermore, they advocate for more research and closer work with gender and sexual minority individuals in Nepal.

This research attempts to …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Diamante, Robert, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Robert Diamante is a photographer from an Italian America family from New Jersey. He also has a graduate degree in theology. At an early age, he began to doubt religious dogma. He came out as gay in 10^th grade and stood up against homophobic taunting by successfully physically defending himself. He briefly had a girlfriend in high school who remains one of his best friends. He moved to NYC and attended Pratt University before transferring to the Portland School of Art (now MECA) where his interests in art and theology combined in a body of work based on Catholic …

Crewe, Dan, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Description: Dan Crewe is an 84 year old gay man originally from New Jersey. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1957. Crewe was a member of the United States Air Force for four years, after which he moved to New York City and began a lucrative career in the music industry in production and publishing. He then moved to Los Angeles, California where he met his then wife, the musician Cindy (now Cyd) Bullens, and they had two daughters. The family eventually moved to Maine, where Crewe opened Gateway Mastering Studios and continued working in music. During …

From Heo To Zir: A History Of Gender Expression In The English Language, Brodie Robinson

Senior Honors Theses

With the growing presence of the LGBTQ+ community on the global stage, the matter of gender has been rushed to the forefront of the public consciousness. News outlets have hotly debated the topic of gender expression, a topic which has motivated mass demonstrations and acts of violence, and this has promoted a linguistic conversation at the international level.

This thesis is intended to provide the historical context for the contemporary debate on gender expression in the English language, and explores both the grammatical background (the Indo-European origins of linguistic gender, the development of the modern pronoun system, etc.) and the …

Harrison, Dick, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Dick Harrison is a 68-year-old gay man who uses he/him/his pronouns. Originally from Buffalo, NY, he moved to Van Buren, ME as a young adult to pursue work as an art teacher. He soon set to work connecting with other LGBTQ+ folks in northern Maine and just over the border in Canada, an effort that culminated in the founding of Northern Lambda Nord. NLN published a newsletter, organized dances, conferences, and social events, and operated a resource center and hotline for LGBTQ+ people for more than 20 years, providing a crucial lifeline for queer and trans Mainers in some of …

“Jailed On The Charge Of Sodomy”: A Same-Sex, Interracial Marriage In 1888, Adam Yeich

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Adam Yeich explains and presents an Ohio newspaper report of a same-sex, interracial marriage in 1888 in Arkansas. This article includes the full text of the newspaper report, an introduction explaining its significance, and a bibliography.

Representations Of García Lorca In American Poetry: Articulating And Floating Metaphor Of The Historical Connections Between Spain And The United States, Carlos Aguasaco

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Inversion And The Third Sex: Gender Variance And Queer Expression In Anti-Suffrage Rhetoric, Anthony Pankuch

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In the early decades of the 20^th century, critics of the women’s suffrage movement commonly denounced their opponents’ perceived disregard for the gendered norms of the era. Given the clear delineation of rights provided to either sex at that time, any expansion of women’s liberties meant an incursion into what was seen as a predominantly masculine realm. Countless arguments put forth by anti-suffragists suggested a complete breakdown of what is today contextualized as a predominantly cisgender, heterosexual society. Simultaneously, the development of psychology and sexology as fields of study lent moralizing voices a highly pathologized foundation upon which to …

Lessons For Legalizing Love: A Case Study Of The Naz Foundation's Campaign To Decriminalize Homosexuality In India, Preston G. Johnson

Capstone Collection

In 1860, British colonizers codified Section 377 into the Indian Penal Code. 377 is an anti-sodomy law based on Victorian/Judeo-Christian values which criminalizes homosexuality through judicial interpretation and the manipulation of ambiguous language. On August 15^th, 2017, India celebrated 70 years of independence from British control, yet 377 still exerts oppressive control over the safety and freedom of Indian LGBTQI communities. Defining queerness as perversion has caused LGBTQI individuals to become victims of false accusations, blackmail, harassment, housing and workplace discrimination, familial rejection, forced “conversion therapy”, assault, rape, torture, and even murder because of this power imbalance and …

Joy, Drew, Andrew Volkers

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Drew Joy is a 37 year old living in Portland, ME. They are the executive director of the Southern Maine Workers Center. They have been organizing and participating in activism since early adulthood. They have participated in public housing activism with Survivor's Village in New Orleans, anti-racism work in San Francisco with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), and now working class issues such as healthcare for all with SMWC.

Drew has a very 'do it yourself', anarchism grounded ideology in their political beliefs. Their peer environment was in punk music, specifically the radical political sub-genres of queercore punk …

Ellison, Marvin, Elyssa Pennell

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Marvin Ellison is a 69 year old gay man originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. He earned his bachelors degree in Religion at Davidson College. He then went on to get his Masters in Religion and Society at The Divinity School at the University of Chicago. Ellison then got his PhD in Christian Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was a professor of Christian Ethics at Bangor Theological Seminary from 1981-2012. He was also an Ordained member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) until he retired. In 1988 Ellison was on the Presbyterian Special Committee on Human Sexuality and …

Waitzkin, Rich, Kristen Cates, Emma Donnelly

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Rich Waitzkin is a 69-year-old social worker originally from Akron, Ohio residing in Portland, ME. Waitzkin came out as a gay man in his late twenties after moving to Maine. He holds two Masters degrees in both education and social work. Waitzkin has years of experience working both in administration and in the home health care field providing therapy to the LGBTQ community. During the AIDS epidemic, Waitzkin worked as a social worker helping to guide clients on resources and even preparing some for death. Waitzkin also helped establish Portland’s first LGBTQ community center known as the Equality Community Center. …

Dionne, J. Remi, Daija Paradis, Johnna Ossi

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

J. Remi Dionne is a 42-year-old educator and was born in Northampton, MA but currently residing in Portland, ME with his husband. He spent some time as a professional dancer, touring and performing around the country and the world. J. discovered a passion for education, holding positions in both teaching and administration. He is currently a principal intern at Westbrook High School and is finishing up a post-graduate education leadership program at University of Southern Maine.

Citation

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

O'Day, Janet, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Janet O'Day is 71 years old. She lives in Maine with her wife, Rosemary. She has one adult son. She was raised in a Catholic Family in Quincy, Massachusettes. She came out later in life after being married to a man and having a son. Religion is important to Janet and she was involved with Dignity in Boston and Maine, an organization that provides Catholic Mass and religious support to Catholic LGBTQ people. Janet continues to stay involved in her church community. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Janet worked at the Deaconness hospital in Boston as a discharge nurse with patients …

Wood, Barb, Isabella Rieger

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Barbra ‘Barb’ Wood is 63 years old and lives in Portland M.E with her partner Carol. Barb realized she was queer her junior year in college when an underclassman that she met at a party took her back to her apartment and kissed her. After this kiss Barb recovered her other queer crushes through her series of romantic friendships with women. After college Barb worked as an insurance inspection agent in the state of Maine and later went on to become a resident of Portland. Barb was instrumental in the creation and distribution of Maine’s first queer newspaper OUR PAPER …

Pezet, Antoinette, Emily Durgin

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Antoinette Pezet was born in New York April 23, 1937 as William Anthony Pezet. She recognized she was bisexual in her early teens. Her family was accepting of her sexuality very early on. Before enlisted in the military in her early twenties, she married her first wife, Helga. Due to mental health issues, Helga and Antoinette divorced. Antoinette then married her second wife, Emily, and went on to have two children.

It was not until Antoinette was divorced from Emily that she started dressing as a woman. In her early fifties she had a conversation with Jean Vermette that first …

Smallwood, Thomas, Maisarah Miskoon, Devyn Winter

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Thomas Smallwood moved to Portland, Maine in 2002 from Maryland and made the city his home. He has been a nanny for 14 of those years to two boys and watched them grow up under his care and treats them as family. He now nannies for two little girls, volunteers as an Outreach Counselor for the Frannie Peabody Center because he feels it is his duty to his community to educate and spread awareness. Thomas acts, sings and dances in theater, Maine Gay Men’s Chorus and performs as a drag queen, Miss Lajoy, at Blackstones during his free time.

His …

Rich, Penny, Bianca Sturchio, Johnna Ossie

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Penny Rich is a 70-year old lesbian living in Portland, Maine. She recieved a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Maine. She is known for her involvement in major social events such as Portland Pride and the Women's Coffeehouse, as well as her experiences with gay bar culture throughout the 60's and 70's. She spends her time socializing, exercising, reading, and getting involved in local political and social issues that affect the LGBTQ+ community in Portland, Maine.

Citation

Please cite as: Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer+ Collection, …

Rand, Erica, Danella Demary

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Erica lived in Chicago for many years, but relocated to Maine because of her teaching position at Bates College. She is a Professor of Art and Visual Culture and of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is acting interim chair of the Gender and Sexuality Studies department. She discussed her coming out process as well as her experiences as a budding activist in ACT UP and a branch of ACT UP, called The Pissed Off Dyke Cell. Erica talked significantly about her previous relationships and how those connections shaped her activisim as well as how her activism shaped her relationships. She …

Sawyer, Charles, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Charles Sawyer was born and raised in Philadelphia in 1940. He describes the need to be closeted as a young man, dating women, entering the military, and being discharged on suspicion of being gay. This outed him to his family who were largely supportive. He fell in love with a young man for the first time at age 21; his then lover was 17. Once the boyfriend outed himself to his parents, the boyfriend was sent to a psychiatrist who, he reported, he had sex with. Sawyer talks about gay bars and police harassment in Philadelphia and describes early monogamous …

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. …

We Just Need To Pee: Bathroom Bills And The Intersection Of Human Rights, Gender, And Race, Lena Tenney

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Although rarely publicly discussed, bathrooms are a fundamental element of everyday life. In fact, the majority of the population does not question their right or ability to access public restroom facilities because they are a mundane aspect of daily routine. However, the recent rise of “bathroom bills” in state legislatures has sparked significant media coverage and highlighted activist movements seeking to guarantee safe, affirming, and legally protected access to bathrooms for people of all gender identities and expressions.

This paper will illustrate that bathroom access is not only a matter of public policy, but also a question of human rights. …

Johnson, Myke, Marwa Abdalla, Colleen Fagan

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Myke Johnson (she/her pronoun) is a 64 year old Unitarian minister currently living in Portland Maine with her partner of 24 years. She is from Michigan and later moved to Texas and Wyoming with her family. She is the oldest out of 9 children. She grew up Catholic and found herself being an activist during her college years. She became a feminist and was part of the Women's Peace Encampment, March on Washington, Marriage rights campaigns and many more. She got her doctorate degree in the Feminist Liberation Theology Program and became a minister in Massachussets. She then continued to …

Bunker, Lisa, Molly Roberts, Jesse Lucas

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Lisa Bunker is an author who lives in Exeter, New Hampshire and worked at WMPG at the University of Southern Maine for fourteen years during her process of coming out as transgender. She is the author of Felix Yz and an upcoming book called Zenobia July, but spent most of her life in broadcast radio before she left to pursue a full time career in writing.

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. …

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. …

Butch Between The Wars: A Pre-History Of Butch Style In Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, And Film, Karen Allison Hammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Butch Between the Wars is a pre-history of “butch,” a twentieth-century masculine style that became an identity category for lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s. Between the two world wars and in the early postwar period, women used the energy of butch to create literature, music, and character on film. Butch-styled artists expressed a muscular orientation to the world, one with close associations to lower and working class black and white masculinities. Those who were recognizably lesbian and those with less clearly defined sexualities challenged the idea that strength, authority, and independence are qualities “naturally” bound to the male body. …

"A Most Disgraceful, Sordid,Disreputable, Drunken Brawl": Paul Cadmus And The Politics Of Queerness In The Early Twentieth Century, Samuel W D Walburn

The Purdue Historian

This paper examines the work of Paul Cadmus from 1930 to 1948. Over the span of nearly three decades, Cadmus's art evolved from covert depictions of queer culture to an explicit depiction of the politics of queerness in immediate postwar America. Cadmus’s legacy is unique because his art documents the shifting conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also notable because he so masterfully maneuvered the liminal space between private and public, painting subversive images immersed in covert queerness early in his career and later using queer art as a tool of …

Woman Energy: How Our Lesbian Past Informs Our Lesbian Future, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

Sinister Wisdom Issue 3, published the year 1977 holds an essay by poet Adrienne Rich, titled, “It is the lesbian in us...”; The cover of the same issue has art by photographer Tee Corinne. Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal. This non-fiction creative essay written by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz reflects on the first year of Sinister Wisdom's publication as a celebration of 40 years through this special edition anniversary print for which only 1000 have been printed. The essay remarks on the shift in lesbian identity and community and the potential impact of the Sinister Wisdom journal …

Berger, Fred, Wendy Chapkis

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Fred Berger was born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio. He went to college at University of Rochester and New York University in the 1960s. His older brother, who was part of the Israeli Olympic Team, died tragically in the attacks in Munich in 1972. Fred Berger moved to Portland, Maine in 1981 and played a central role in the gay community from 1981 to 1989 when he moved to Massachusetts to go to Social Work school. During the 8 years in Portland, he helped found the AIDS Project (with Frannie Peabody, Kristen Kramer, and Susan Cummings Lauren) and served …