Chapter One:
Queer Spaces as Sites of Memory
Queer spaces are as varied as the bodies that move through them. Friedman explains that, “our entire bodily systems are the source of thought processes, concept production, and actions in the world.”[1] Therefore, since queer individuals cannot remove the queerness from our bodies, how our bodies interact with the world is always through a queer lens. While moving through the world, we are constantly queering spaces, whether consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes we leave traces of this queerness and sometimes we actively try to cover it up. This means that queer spaces and our relationships with them are extremely diverse.
This chapter will explore the spaces queer communities in Springfield, Ohio have claimed, either publicly or privately. These range from spaces intentionally created for LGBTQ+ communities, to those that spontaneously became safe spaces for queer expression. These spaces are sites of memory that have shaped the embodied experience of queer individuals in Springfield, helped them find community, and pass down queer knowledge.
The idea of “sites of memory” comes from French historian Pierre Nora, who uses this concept to discuss how removed researchers are from the actual past. He says, “There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no
longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory.”[2] He believes these sites of memory are where one can feel most connected to the past. Nora asserts that we can use sites of memory to see a truer representation of the past than what “history” provides.[3] As oral historians we work almost solely in the field of memory and subjectivity. While this project centers around physical spaces, it should be understood that we are only ever listening to somebody’s subjective embodied experience of that space, their individual site of memory.
Nora believes that “true memory” is passed down and embodied, but the only way in which we can acquire this kind of memory is if we have a space to experience it in. Unlike communities based around race, ethnicity, religion or class, of which a person is often born into, most people in the queer community must go searching for the kind of passed down knowledge Nora is talking about. Reversely, many older members of the queer community do not have children and therefore have no one to pass down their embodied knowledge to. Finding, amplifying, and creating more queer spaces is a way in which we can preserve these sites of memory. In this chapter, the stories of five narrators will illustrate how these physical queer spaces have functioned as sites of memory, and how we can use these sites to show a more nuanced version of the Midwestern queer landscape.
The Narrators
The five narrators interviewed for the Midwest Queer Spaces Oral History Project were diverse in race, gender, and upbringing which led to them all have very different experiences with queer space. Following Nien Yuan Cheng’s idea that we are “a collection of our corporal knowledge,” the embodied experiences of these narrators go beyond their queerness - intersecting with all of the knowledge and identities they carry. The introductions below will help readers better understand these narrators and their sites of memory.
Floyd Hook Jr.
Floyd Hook Jr. (JR) was the first narrator in this project. As was described in the introduction, JR owns a gay bar called Why Not III, in Springfield, OH. JR opened the first Why Not fifty years ago and its main customer base has predominantly been white gay men since the beginning. I did three interviews with JR: two that took place in his bar, and were life history interviews in which we talked about his childhood, the Air Force, his coming out journey, his life partner Sam, his education, career and other talents; and one that was a driving tour of Springfield where we visited the many locations that are important to the queer history of the city. JR has been an integral member of the Springfield gay community for over five decades.[4] He holds detailed knowledge of not only his own bar’s history but that of many other queer spaces in the city. As we drove through town, his memory was sparked, and we discussed the importance that places like parks, the YMCA, a local AIDS non-profit, and even some straight bars held to the queer community.
JR is a white gay man in his eighties who was born and raised in Ohio. Because of his family situation, JR ended up moving out on his own at the age of sixteen and has been making his own way ever since.
As JR points out, his embodied history with this bar extends to long before he purchased the building. He remembers being in this space with his father as a child and having his first drink there as well.
In high school, JR started exploring his sexuality and that exploration continued when he joined the Air Force.
In 1970, JR was out of the service, working full time at a factory called Parker Sweeper, and decided he wanted to open a bar. When it first opened the bar was not strictly a gay bar; however, JR would host private parties exclusively for the gay patrons. Relatively quickly it became widely known within Springfield that The Why Not was a gay bar, and even though the city tried to close it multiple times, JR is still running The Why Not to this day.
JR in drag, phtographer unknown
In the interviews with JR, he took me through the entire history of the gay community as he had seen it. He shared stories about everything from secret house parties, to living through the AIDS crisis, all the way to the first Springfield Pride just a few years ago. Within his narrative, JR described his participation in queer spaces, as well as creating and safe guarding a space that became vital to the preservation of queer culture in Springfield.
Winkie (Blontas) Mitchell
The next set of interviews I conducted were with Blontas (Winkie) Mitchell. Winkie is a black gay woman in her sixties who also grew up in Springfield, Ohio. I was interested in interviewing Winkie because of her involvement in the softball scene in her youth, and because of her vital role in advancing the rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Springfield. Winkie and I did three life history style interviews that covered a broad range of topics, but often focused on her frequent role as an activist. The communities she has been an advocate for include but are not limited to: differently abled communities, the Black and African American community, and LGBTQ+ groups.
Winkie was born and raised in Springfield and was the middle sister of five girls. At a young age Winkie and her sisters were enrolled in a Catholic school where she was one of the only Black students. While attending this school, Winkie remembers facing some discrimination from the white students, and also getting into confrontations with other black kids in her neighborhood for going to private school and having a lot of white friends. However, she feels like this school and her experiences there started her on her path towards social justice and advocacy. [5]
Winkie also started playing softball from a young age which had an extremely large impact on her life. Softball was Winkie’s passion and it not only provided her with a tight-knit group to be a part of, but ended up being where she was first introduced to the lesbian community.
Winkie would then marry, retire from softball, become a mother, get divorced, become a grandmother, and then finally, after being inspired by her bisexual grandson, start identifying herself as a lesbian. The fight for social justice that Winkie started in her youth continued to play an important role in her career as a nurse and public administrator. Later, when her grandson “came out” she used this activist experience to fight for LGBTQ+ rights. Winkie’s experience with queer spaces spans from the historically queer community of women softball players, to the newer queer spaces of youth support groups and activist movements. These stories shed light on the multiple ways in which one can interact with queer space and the variety of motives that can be behind those interactions.
John Hamilton and Bill Robinson
The third and fourth narrators are John Hamilton and Bill Robinson, a couple whom I interviewed together at their home in Springfield. From 2010 to 2016 John and Bill co-owned Springfield’s other gay bar, Diesel. This bar also has a long history in Springfield, originally opening under the name of The Gaslight relatively soon after JR opened The Why Not. Since then, ownership of the bar has changed hands multiple times, at one point becoming a lesbian bar called Chances. Diesel is still open today, under new management, and is still an active gay bar.
I was also interested in interviewing John and Bill because of how “out” they are within the Springfield community. They are an extremely well-known gay couple, and living this openly is still relatively uncommon in Springfield. This interview was unique because it was the only one I conducted with two narrators, but also because John and Bill’s one year old daughter, Paisley, can be heard on the recording in many places and played an active role in shaping the interview.
John and Bill are both middle-aged white men who were born in Springfield. While John grew up in the area, Bill’s family moved to Tennessee when he was young, and he didn’t return to Springfield until he was eighteen.
While they had very different childhoods and coming out experiences, both make a point of emphasizing that they grew up in religious households. Bill came out at a young age and was adamant about living an authentic life. While John knew he was gay from a young age, he didn’t start coming out until after nursing school where he met and started dating Bill.
This interview not only shines light on different public queer spaces - Diesel and the other gay bars they have experienced individually and as a couple - but it also provides a unique look into the more private queer space of John and Bill’s home. This interview was conducted on March 18th, right at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, so while it took place in person, the larger state of the world was also a very present force in this interview.
Avery Sledge
Pastor Avery Sledge was the last person I interviewed for this project. Avery is the only narrator who is not from Ohio originally. In fact, Avery did not move to Ohio until later in life but has had a large impact on the Springfield community by creating safe queer spaces within it. Avery is an outspoken advocate for the trans community and made waves in Springfield when she became the first trans pastor at a local church. Even though that church is no longer open, she continues to actively support the queer community in many ways.
Avery grew up in Georgia, went to college, joined the Air Force, got married and started a family before she was finally able to transition.
“Avery: With all of this stuff, even from the earliest days I was also fighting the gender dysphoria stuff. I didn’t know what it was called there was no name for it, I just knew I did not feel like a guy. It was like I had to split myself into two people. And I would get all kinds of lectures from my parents, particularly my mom when she would discover, at that time, girl’s clothes in my room somehow. I mean, I would get just a horrendous Biblical lecture, because we were Southern Baptist, and God only made two kinds of people, male and female- and it was male or female, not male and female, that’s what the Bible says - and God don’t screw up. If you have a problem with that, suck it up. You need to get your faith stronger. So that’s the earliest message I got.”
Even with the negative messages she received from the church about her gender identity, Avery continued to maintain a strong connection to Christianity her whole life. Avery started to transition while in the military, but did not fully transition until after she retired, and it wasn’t long after that that she felt called to ministry.
“Avery: About that time, cause I’ve been arguing and I’ve been arguing for about a year before this with God. That - you can’t be calling me in the ministry. The Methodist Church is never going to ordain me because it had only been one transgender person who had been ordained and was forced to give up her credentials after her surgery and transition. So I said, “the Methodist Church isn’t going to accept me. God, this is a stupid thing you’re asking me to do. Well, that lasted until that meeting and then as clear as you and I are sitting here talking, this voice said, “I’m not calling you to be a Methodist pastor. I’m calling you to be a pastor for my people.” That’s a way totally different call. It doesn’t include Methodist. It doesn’t include solely anybody else. It means being out on the streets with folks. It means greeting folks in a grocery store line sometimes and hearing what their problems are. And so if it happens to be in the church, great. And so that was my call, and it was, like I said, it was like a four-by-four across the face.”
Unfortunately, growing up and even in adulthood Avery was unable to find many queer spaces that she felt a connection to. However, Avery found ways to claim space for herself in the world and she continues to foster and participate in queer spaces now. Avery’s experiences will help illustrate the concept of solitary queer space that will be discussed below.
All of these narrators have been members of and played roles in creating a variety of queer spaces in Springfield, Ohio. These spaces, though very different from one another, were often sought out for similar reasons: finding a community to connect with and having a safe place to express oneself. The embodied experiences of these narrators will allow us to look deeper at the complex and intersectional nature of these spaces, and how queer spaces have grown and changed in Springfield over time.
The Spaces
Queer spaces are experienced uniquely by every person who interacts with them. This means infinite sites of memories could be created in one physical location. Queer communities have always found ways to survive, pass down knowledge and support each other even in very conservative places such as Springfield. The queer spaces listed in this section will illustrate the ingenuity and endurance that made this survival possible. The spaces analyzed have been separated into three categories: Public Queer Spaces, Discreet Queer Spaces, and Private Queer Spaces. While these categories provide guidance in clarifying the spaces’ purpose, actors, and legacy, they are extremely flexible and in no way complete. Through oral history, narrators are able to express the nuances of these spaces and the diverse ways queer individuals engage with them.
Public Queer Spaces
Some spaces are known by both queer and straight communities to be a place where queer individuals go to gather. Historically, the most well-known spaces of this kind are gay bars or dance clubs, but these are not the only public queer spaces. There have been spaces that specifically provide services for the LGBTQ+ community such as LGBT centers, GSA support groups, and HIV/AIDS centers. While Springfield does not have a LGBT center, during the AIDS crisis they had a non-profit devoted to the treatment and care of those with HIV or AIDS, called Wings of Love or Arms of Love. [6] Springfield has a community group called Equality Springfield and members of this group were involved in creating LGBTQ+ youth groups within the city. Lastly, it is important to note that LGBQT+ events such as Pride, Trans Day of Remembrance and other public speaking events are queer spaces present in Springfield. In this clip, Avery talks about the first time she met a trans person through an event like this.
The public queer spaces in Springfield normally serve one of two purposes. They can provide a way for people questioning their sexual or gender identity to have access to information and community, and they are also important in exposing outsiders to queer culture and building acceptance with the public. Gay bars and queer support groups are examples of the first purpose. While they are public places that are technically accessible to everyone, they cater to queer individuals and rarely focus on educating or being in conversation with the straight community. These kind of public queer spaces often come with both a feeling of acceptance and of underlying fear. John and Bill speak to this when talking about the gay bar scene. Being associated with these spaces often meant “outing” yourself, at the very least to the other individuals in that space, but possibly to the entire community.
However there is also a sense of pride that comes from having a space that belongs to the queer community and this need to create and preserve queer spaces is present in many of the selected clips. Winkie was dedicated to creating a safe space for her grandson and the other children who she saw needed a place to go. John and Bill saw JR create this same type of space, saying “people could always go to JR’s.” This example led them to taking on the preservation of a queer space themselves when they decided to take over Diesel and keep it running.
John and Bill were also interested in making that space into a place they could show off to the straight community. They talk later in the interview about the bar, and the events they put on inside of it, being a great way to introduce their straight friends to the gay community.
Exposing the larger community to queer culture is the second purpose of public queer space. Public events such as festivals or even plays and other types of performances are generally aimed to invite the larger community to engage with and understand queer experiences. Because the dominant culture in the United States is so heternormative, the public often has very warped ideas of queer spaces. John and Bill faced these stereotypes when having conversations with their families.
Unfortunately because of long-standing stereotypes, the queer community often has to take on the additional burden of educating the broader public. This is mostly done through exposure: connecting with queer individuals and learning their stories. In Springfield, plays with queer themes, public talks with LGBTQ+ community members, and presence at community events such as the Farmer’s Market has helped educate the city. These spaces also provide important access points for queer individuals, but they are curated to educate and often intended to create some sort of political or social change. Pride is a unique event that attempts to fill both of these roles. However, depending on where you are in the country, it may lean more towards one purpose than the other.[7]
Even as public acceptance of gender and sexual diversity grows, many in the queer community continue to feel fearful being open and intentional about creating public queer spaces. These people have still found ways to connect with each other and form communities in less public facing forms.
Discreet Queer Spaces
There are many public spaces that queer people use discreetly to find each other or learn about the queer community. These spaces would often not look “queer” to those on the outside, and maybe not even to those in the space who are not queer themselves. Gay men in Springfield have often used places such as parks or the YMCA to find sexual partners, and places like the local dance school offered opportunities to create friendship and find mentors. Many gay women played sports, specifically softball, and within that world players were often very open about their sexuality with each other. The library is an additional space that many older LGBTQ+ individuals remember using to find information on the queer community and read stories that they could relate to.
Queer individuals may find these places by accident, as in Winkie’s case, through assumptions, which Bill’s experience illustrates, or word of mouth, as was the case for the YMCA, but these spaces are not as easily accessible as public spaces. Additionally, because these spaces were not intentionally created for queer use, there was less structure and maintenance. Bars have owners, support groups have leaders, but in these discreet spaces, with the exception of Bill’s dance classes, individuals were unprotected and were responsible for figuring out how to engage with these spaces on their own.
While the discreetness of these locations provide some anonymity for the LGBTQ+ individuals who frequent them, they have the potential of being just as dangerous as going to a public queer space. The men looking for partners in the parks have to worry about the possibility of arrest or, if you are in a position like Avery was, the very act of checking out a book may end up outing you to the world. [8] The fear of discovery and the backlash that may follow is why many queer people tried to completely distance themselves from anything that could connect them to the LGBTQ+ world. Many of these individuals created private queer spaces where they could gather only with trusted friends or express themselves on their own.
Private Queer Spaces
To many in the LGBTQ+ community, the safest place to express yourself was at home. This is why the gay house party is another historically queer space. Some cities had large networks that would hold house parties on a regular basis so that no one had to go to a more public place to find connections. The more organized of these would have gay men and women at the same party, and they would show up and leave with a person of the opposite sex so as to not draw suspicion.[9] However, this practice was largely restricted to the middle and upper classes because they had the money and space to gather.[10] In this clip you will hear a little about the history of these parties in Springfield, and also from Bill and John who preferred private get-togethers to the bar scene.
However, many individuals do not initially have access to a queer community and instead create solitary queer space. These solitary spaces are created to provide individuals with the opportunity of self-expression and to validate one’s identity, wants and needs. Even though these spaces do not provide the opportunity for communities to form, they have long been vital to the queer experience. Avery’s clip will illustrate the importance of solitary space to her personal journey.
The spaces included in these three categories provide clear examples of the different purposes queer spaces can have. One of the most important roles queer space plays is to facilitate the process of self-discovery. The coming out experience has been studied exhaustively and several scholars have pointed out that there are multiple stages of this process. Richard Troiden separated it into three different stages: the sensitization stage, where the self-questioning begins; the assumption stage, when self-acceptance starts to set in and the individual starts to seek out role models and community; and the commitment stage, where one fully embraces and widely discloses their identity. Fox and Ralston believe that “During any of these formative stages, it is likely that LGBTQ individuals seek out information and attempt to learn more about their identity.”[11] Queer space provides LGBTQ+ individuals with a starting place to find this information.
Those at the beginning of this process are less likely to enter a public queer space than they are to create solitary queer space or enter a discreet space where they might be able to remain anonymous. However, you heard multiple instances where involvement in one kind of queer space led the narrator to another. Avery’s interest in solitary research led her to a public event and Bill’s friends from his dance class introduced him to the local gay bar scene. While people are often moving from private spaces into more public spaces as they become more self-confident, the reverse can also happen. We heard from Bill and John who decided they weren’t interested in the bar scene anymore and so their house became the gathering place for their friend group. With Pride festivals becoming more popular, it is likely that queer youth will interact with a public queer space before learning of or being invited into private spaces.
The internet is also a space where many LGBTQ+ individuals start their self-discovery, especially those born into more recent generations. Avery mentions that they didn’t have the internet when she started trying to learn about her gender identity, and so this forced her to enter a more public space. The internet is a space that falls into all three of these categories and allows users to do everything from anonymously seek information to publicly participate in conversation with their community. [12]
These categories are in no way fixed and they do not analyze the spaces based on the race, class, and gender divisions that played major roles in their creation. These spaces are not equally accessible to all members of the queer community, and while some may have chosen to not participate in a certain space, it is important to remember that others may have been unwanted or even excluded from these spaces. An example of this is shown when Avery talks about how difficult it was to find a trans community or even a gay community that accepted trans members.
While the broad diversity of queer spaces may make the task of documenting them seem insurmountable, it is also the reason there needs to be an urgency to preserve them. If the memories of these spaces are lost, so is the generational queer knowledge that they hold, and this prevents younger generations from learning from and connecting with a history they can relate to. An example of this loss can be seen when I attempted to learn about what spaces Black gay men created in Springfield. A handful of Black gay men would come into the bars, and JR believes that they also had house parties, but unfortunately the only men JR knew from that community have passed away. It is possible that there is a gay Black community that is still creating queer space and passing down their knowledge, and as an outsider it is understandable if that information is never revealed to me. However, if the knowledge and stories of those Black gay spaces are genuinely gone, what a loss for young Black gay men in Springfield, who could have learned from and felt validated by those experiences.
While documenting these spaces provides an opportunity of validation within the queer community, it also has the potential to, as Maria Nugent suggests, “disturb public histories,” that have attempted to ignore the history of certain groups.[13] Up until about ten years ago, Springfield was mostly successful at ignoring or at times even erasing the presence of queer spaces on the city’s landscape. All of the spaces talked about in this chapter are ones from the narrators’ memories. Some of them I have seen, and experienced, such as the parks and JR’s bar, but others are gone. Many of their physical buildings have been destroyed, as I found out when I asked JR to take me to their locations on our driving interview.
Below you will find 360 degree images of the parking lots where many queer sites in Springfield used to stand.
While this destruction of queer history is upsetting because it deprives a younger generation of ever being able to access those spaces except through the stories of their elders, it can at times also have political consequences. Starting in 2012, the LGBTQ+ rights group, Equality Springfield, began advocating for the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity into the city’s list of “protected classes” alongside race, religion and others. At this time, LGBTQ+ individuals could legally be discriminated against in the workplace and evicted from their housing. The first time this proposal was voted on it was voted down. The grounds for this decision were that the city didn’t find any evidence of discrimination taking place and therefore the additional protection was not needed.[14] By ignoring the presence of queer space it is easy then to ignore the existence of queer individuals within a community. The city decided to not see the queer members of their community and to invalidate the experiences of the ones who were making their voices heard. This would be much harder to do if the extent of queer spaces in Springfield were included in Springfield’s public history.
Even though younger generations may never be able to experience the queer spaces where these narrator’s sites of memories are housed, we can, as I suggested before, create new queer space where knowledge is passed down and community is built. While doing this project, the interview itself became one of these new queer spaces. The interviews became sites of memory for me as I learned about the lives of these narrators, and our embodied interaction was an important part of this oral history project.
Friedman, “Oral History, Hermeneutics, and Embodiment,” 290.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations no. 26 (1989): 7.
ibid.
See definitions page for more explanation around the difference in my usage of the terms “gay” and “queer.”
Winkie Mitchell, interviewed by Lauren Instenes, Jan. 10, 2020, 29:30. In the interview Winkie says, “It was hard in the sense that the kids in our neighborhood used to see us as uppity … we had to have confrontations going and coming from school with kids.”
JR is the narrator who mentions this space in his interviews and references it as both Wings of Love and Arms of Love because there was a name change at some point. The dates of when this non-profit opened and closed are unknown. There are no surviving records in the archive and I haven’t spoken with anyone who has this information.
Springfield’s Pride has struggled to decide which purpose it wants to serve. One side of the community wants the festival to be family friendly and a way of gaining acceptance by the straight community, and the other side wants it to cater to queer adults, having less focus on education and more focus on celebration. Neither one of these are incorrect, but they would create very different events.
Springfield has run multiple sting operations to target gay men in the parks. 2014-2016 many of these sting operations made the news. In these articles they would print the names and occupations of those who had been arrested before any trial or convictions had taken place. These links will take you to examples from 2014 and 2016.
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers : A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, New York: Columbia University Press: 2011, 108.
Faderman, Odd Girls, 181.
Fox and Ralston, “Queer identity online,” 635.
ibid, 636.
Nugent, “Mapping Memories,” 60.
“Sexual orientation amendment vote expected Tuesday,” Springfield News-Sun, May 6, 2012.
