I've been utilizing a text called "The Gay Liberation Movement" by Jack Onge, published in 1971, which he, as a gay man himself, dedicated to his fellow brothers and sisters of the movement. The text is.. well... it's not the most well written or edited thing I've ever seen, and not published by a university press or well-known publisher which is an issue. I found so, so, so much stuff in this text though-- nearly 6 pages of instances of police harassment of gays in the 20s and 30s, invaluable information about beginnings of Chicago Gay Liberation organizations, and general historical background that I hadn't found anywhere else in this much detail. But then, I looked into a point he had made about the Gay Lib group picketing a Chicago American Medical Association conference and protesting the man presenting due to his extremely anti-homosexual agenda. I found an episode of "This American Life," one of my favorite podcasts, from 2002 talking about this exact event and I was thrilled because as a podcast addict, if I could just do all my research based on podcasts that would be perfect (kidding, mostly.) And then my face fell. This whole protest situation didn't happen in Chicago, despite two texts in my carrel insisting it did (the Onge text as well as a more recent text by Kathie Bergquist called "A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago") and upon googling it, I found dozens of reputable sources talking about this same event, but telling me that it was, in fact, in San Francisco. Disappointed, I started to look into other claims Onge had made. Luckily, he was spot on about pretty much everything else, but I'm going to have to mention this in my paper now and it gave me a lot of extra work I wasn't expecting. I think the mix-up is largely due to the fact that Onge's main sources are almost entirely newsletters from Gay and Lesbian Liberation societies (mostly the Midwest branch of the Mattachine Society) which are somewhat reliable but not written by professional researchers and are all entirely from a first or secondhand personal experience. Despite this setback, I found a
ton of new resources because of my extra research to look into Onge's credibility. I'm including some of the gold that I found in this credibility-based expedition into the research ether, a two clips from a woman who was one of the initiators of the Gay Lib movement in D.C., and a remarkable activist to this day. I highly recommend watching them-- they're now available online because of her personal donation of her film and other manuscript materials to the Library of Congress. All in all, today's research moral of the day is that even if you find yourself swimming through garbage, you'll probably find something good in there.
http://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2014/06/lilli-vincenz/
Sources:
Bergquist, Kathie. A Field Guide to Gay & Lesbian Chicago /, n.d.
Mashon, Mike. “Lilli Vincenz and the Power of Pride | Now See Hear!” Webpage, June 5, 2014. http://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2014/06/lilli-vincenz/.
Onge, Jack. The Gay Liberation Movement /, n.d.
81 Words. This American Life. Accessed October 13, 2015. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-words.
Challenging, but you have done the due diligence that your second source obviously did not. One false claim can endure if subsequent scholars do not seek corroboration. And when dealing with a publication that may not have been peer reviewed (you were so right to be skeptical of a publication that did not come from a university press or similarly reputable source), a scholar should *always* seek corroboration. So kudos to you, even as this caused you headaches.
ReplyDeleteIt's curious that information can get so muddled from place to place. What year were these Gay and Lesbian newsletters from that Onge used in his research? Were they contemporaneous to the event or happen after? I wonder if there is some reason why these were wrongly recounted. It may just be an error of poor scholarship, but it creates a very different cultural memory to have this event in San Francisco or Chicago.
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome that you were able to get something helpful out of something that could have just been frustrating and discouraging. I feel like a lot of time my research is just reading things that don't really help but turn out to be positive in the end because they point me in the direction I need to go. You just have to keep digging until you find what you're looking for!
ReplyDeleteTo me Onge’s error suggests that queer history may have been (at least in 1971) detached from the concept of place. For him what mattered was more the content of the event than any sense in which it was determined by or anchored in a specific locale. If you can spot any of this tendency in your secondary sources (i.e. post 1975), it gives you a good hook to pull the reader into your discussion since your work is *all about* place!
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