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“Remembering
the Queer Old Days:American Cultivators of Collective
Memory in the Production of a Useable Past”
Lara
Kelland
University
of Illinios at Chicago
(Estados
Unidos)
Throughout the 1970’s and
80’s a popular preoccupation with the past thrived
within the gay and lesbian community. The gay liberation
movement had gained enough momentum to look backward and
claim not only its own legacy, but to look further back
for origins preceding the current community of activists.
Articles in popular LGBT newspapers and slide-show
lectures in community centers posed questions and offered
answers regarding earlier same-sex loving practices; a
quest for origins in a revolutionary movement.
Writers for community
newspapers explicitly link a claiming of the past with a
demand for equal status, claiming that “as more
knowledge about human sexuality and behavior has been
discovered and disseminated, greater numbers of persons
have begun to realize that not only is it okay to be it is
the normal lifestyle for some people.”
A clear link between a
search for legitimation and an articulation of historical
presence comes through in periodicals from this period. In
tracing the trajectory of community history into the
legitimation of gay and lesbian studies in the academy, we
can better understand the role of collective memory in
understanding the past, forging identities in the
production of a useable past, and the relationship between
popular understandings of the past and the discipline of
history.
About Lara Kelland
Lara Kelland is in her
third year of PhD work at the University of Illinios at
Chicago, where she works on collective memory and american
social movements of the 19th and 20th century.
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