Fifty Years of Pride at Why Not III

You are standing in front of a plain white door set into a small green building. When you look around, you can see you are completely alone on a street in a deserted industrial part of town. Then, you hear a voice asking if “you know where you are?” You are a stranger to this place and while you are welcome to come inside, you are warned to not start any trouble. The door opens and you hear “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross playing loudly inside along with warm sounds of familiar bar chatter. You enter Why Not III.

This is the way you are introduced to JR’s bar, if you participate in the virtual tour I recently constructed using the interviews with JR. From anywhere in the world, viewers are able to walk into JR’s bar and listen to his story and the story of his remarkable queer space. I believe this firsthand experience using technology to create immersive oral history exhibits will help to illustrate the difficulties, benefits, and ethical considerations that go with including these tools into oral history practice.

The exhibit is called “Fifty Years of Pride at Why Not III: Creating Queer Space in the Midwest”. The tour was created using the free virtual tour tool Theasys, through which you can upload 360° images and create pathways for  viewer to move through the space. Within the tour one will hear a combination of narration from me, interviews with JR, and a couple gay anthems to set the scene. Visitors are able to see pictures of the bar and its patrons from over the years, and can also view excerpts from the bar’s old newsletter.

There is no set path to exploring the space. This was done on purpose to allow the visitor to move through the space freely, just as they would if they were visiting in-person. Background bar chatter and music was added to some of the audio clips to give you a sense of the normal atmosphere that would fill the space. Different spots of the bar were described by the activity you may do if you were visiting the space, some of these included: “Have a drink at the bar,” “Try your hand at bartending,” “Play some pool,” “Sing karaoke.” All of these aspects were included to provide the online viewer with an opportunity to experience some of the embodied elements a normal patron would have.

We can never perfectly recreate the embodied experience of coming into JR’s bar, however providing visitors with a sense of place as they listen to his stories not only allows the audience to “comprehend a concept in more depth,” as Gallagher explained, it opens up the opportunity for visitors to experience and formulate their own opinions or connections to the information being presented.[1] People from all over the world who went on this virtual tour expressed that they were interested in going to Springfield just to see the bar in-person because they feel invested in its story. Older LGBTQ+ visitors told me it reminded them of places they went to in their youth, and they started to remember stories similar to JR’s. Experiencing the space through oral histories allowed viewers to become invested and create connections with the stories in a way that would have been difficult to achieve without an embodied element.

Using this technology allowed for the oral histories and the space to become accessible by a much broader audience. JR’s virtual bar was visited by people in Egypt, New Zealand, and China who would have never been able to visit this space otherwise. However, it is also serves as a resource for the Springfield community. Many people are unaware JR’s bar exists and creating a digital version may make the space more accessible and interesting to younger generations. This digital tour will continue to be available online, and additionally, it will be downloaded and preserved at the Clark County Historical Society Archive so that the community can continue to learn from it.  While I hope that JR’s bar will continue to be a place the queer community can go for many years to come, if that is not the case, this tour has documented the space as it was in this particular moment and future interested parties will be able to experience it.

The New Normal

In current times, being in space together can be dangerous and we are unsure what the world will look like when this pandemic is over. This time has forced us as oral historians to expand how we imagine accessibility in our practices and products. Sarah Dziedic points out that thinking about safety and accessibility for narrators is something we should have long been taking more seriously in our practice, as there have always been individuals whose involvement in a project may be hindered by our lack of flexibility. She says, “At this moment, where physical distance from others is necessary, shouldn’t oral historians be leaning into our skills as listeners — no matter the recording format — and reevaluating the longstanding insistence on doing this work in person?”[2] I agree that we need to evolve our interview practice, and I think we should also think about how we evolve our curating practice to match this focus on accessibility.

At a time when museums and libraries are closed, we should be thinking about ways we can make the stories we are preserving accessible to the communities we want to reach in a more effective way. Even without a pandemic, many people do not have access to oral histories, even ones conducted with their own communities, because of the focus on archiving with powerful institutions.[3] As Sarah points out, it is unfortunate that it has taken a global pandemic for us to think more intentionally about these aspects of our practice, but we should take this as an opportunity to evolve as a field. While safety and privacy are major concerns with making oral histories accessible online, it is often a great way to make sure that communities have access to their own stories.

While virtual interviews may be more accessible for some narrators, not sharing the same space as our narrators will inevitably change our embodied interaction with them and their space. Each person involved in the interview may be experiencing completely different spaces, so in what way will this change our ability to communicate with each other effectively? I believe this means as interviewers we need to be more observant about how these spaces, the physical and digital spaces, are affecting both ourselves and the narrators.

The Value of Queer Space

Whatever the form, it is important that Midwest queer spaces continue to be documented and their stories shared. As communities that were formed in secretive safe spaces, and whose stories have been continuously undervalued, queer communities have been unable to preserve a large portion of their collective memory. Unlike other communities where embodied knowledge can be passed down through generations, members of the queer community have to search out this knowledge and they need queer spaces to do this.[1] Space plays an integral role in how and where we build communities, who we learn from, and how we preserve that knowledge for future generations.

Through oral history, we have the opportunity to not only preserve stories of past queer spaces but create new ones within the interview space itself. Whether it is noticeable or not, the space does play a large role in shaping an interview and instead of attempting to remove its traces we should try to listen to the additional information it is providing. Oral historians should keep in mind the embodied elements of a space - its effect on how the narrator shares a story and also its effect on what we hear as interviewers. However, an interviewer’s embodied experience of a space is completely subjective and therefore it is important for future listeners to understand the ways in which these embodied elements are having an impact on the interview. Keeping detailed fieldnotes, using video during the interview, and curating embodied experiences for audiences are ways in which the interviewer can be transparent and allow audiences to interpret the space in their own way.

Preserving the history of these spaces means to preserve the history of resilient communities that have continuously fought for their right to exist. These queer spaces and the lives lived inside of them are able to teach queer individuals about their heritage and help validate the experiences of younger generations. JR’s space highlights the beautiful sense of community and belonging that can come out of creating intentional queer space. Winkie’s story gives an example of how we can use our voice to create safe spaces for the vulnerable and shows how, when we set out to help others we almost always discover something new about ourselves. John and Bill have always invited people into their space, and through this are able to build bridges in their community and inspire through example. Lastly, Avery’s stories of solitary space reminds us of our own agency and to value self-love over societal acceptance. As a pastor and public speaker, Avery often is in direct contact with younger generations who are searching for this kind of knowledge, just as she was in her youth.

When I heard Avery tell this story, I was reminded of the story she told about meeting Christine Jorgenson. That event was such an important moment for Avery because it was the first time she met someone whose gender journey she identified with. Now, Avery is the person giving lectures on college campuses for the next generation of queer youth, who have questions but may have no space in which to ask them. Creating that space is important, whether that space is a bar full of people or it is, as Avery says, just two people having a conversation. In oral history we have the opportunity to not only create these spaces, but preserve them in a way that future generations can engage and connect with them. Hopefully, those generations can then use the knowledge they gain to create a world where queer space is seen, accepted, and valued.

1. Gallagher, “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History,” 470.

2. Sarah Dziedzic, “Immunodeficiency and Oral History,” Medium, April 6, 2020.

3. For more information on the history of oppression in archiving and how archives can work to become “justice-oriented social assets” see Lae’l Hughes-Watkins “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voice,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5 , no. 6 (2018), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6/.

4. Fox and Ralston, “Queer identity online,” 635.