Queer Humboldt Past & Present
Currently queer issues are a major focus of social work as HSU culminating in the Queer Student Union, events like Q-Fest, and organized queer safe spaces on campus. This is the result of groups and individuals having worked in the past to increase representation, awareness, and local knowledge of queer issues. Some of these efforts were large movements meant to inform the public as a whole as well as smaller interactions. The history of queer issues at HSU varries in scale and quality of the experience.
The Importance of Queer Visibility:
Queer visibility on campus hinges on the institution’s acceptance of queerness. As dictated by Mimi Marinucci in her book Feminism is Queer, “homosexuality is not a condition by which people are affected, but rather a social role to which people are assigned.” (Marinucci 5) Essentially, this author is saying that society pathologizes certain behavior, and lumps all people who behave that way together under a shared negative label. Humboldt State University designated the social role of homosexuality to certain students and in turn dictated what parts of those students were valuable, like their success in class, and deemed other parts of them shameful, like their gender expression or sexual preferences. It then became inappropriate for those students to outwardly project the parts of themselves that the University stigmatized. When events for queer students were held, they were typically not recorded. The Sexual Identity Conference is one example of a queer event that was recorded, but was done so poorly. the only evidence that could be found of the conference’s existence was in Humboldt United Gay’s newsletter, and one vaguely worded piece of mail from the University requesting attendance to the event, which it strategically referred to as “the identity conference.” This item exemplifies HSU’s attitudes towards queerness and queer students, and the schools resistence to acknowledge or value queerness.
History as Storytelling:
History is made up of stories and those with the power and privilege to decide what is published and saved for public viewing chooses what is shown and what is hidden. In this project we have come across many attempts to hide these stories and our goal has been to make the history of Queer students on campus and in Humboldt county open to view and to actively alter the incomplete narratives. Jeanette Winterson calls this, in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, a damaged reality where stories act as “medicines” (42). Winterson was writing about the use of fiction and poetry but this still applies to the stories that we are compiling in that they repair the damaged reality that has persisted as long as the narrative remains incomplete. However we are aware of how woefully incomplete our compilation is and how much more there needs to be written and recorded in order for this to be even vaguely cohesive. Jacqui Theobald warns us when she says that “even if every person involved has their experiences equally represented, no historical account can claim to represent ‘truth’ because ‘evidence’ is always partial” (372). Some of the core methodology in this project has been to act as “Feminist researchers” (Boyd 177) who, as Nan Boyd writes, “empower (rather than exploit) historical narrators by trusting their voices, positioning narrators as historical experts, and interpreting narrators’ voices alongside the narrator's’ interpretation of their own memories”. We kept this in mind when working with the H.U.G. newsletters and news articles written by/about queer students. Rather than attempting to speak for the historical subjects we prefered to allow them to speak for themselves through the work that has been left behind. Ultimately our intentions are to attempt to repair the incomplete narrative without making the outlandish claim that we could somehow complete the narrative. We hope that this exhibit may make some sort of dent in the current dominant narratives and move the conversation forward in some way.
Works Cited:
Marinucci, Mimi. Feminism is Queer: The Intimate Connection Between Queer and Feminist Theory. London: Zed, 2010. Print
Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? New York: Grove, 2011.Print
Theobald, Jacqui. "Feminist Oral History And The Victorian Domestic Violence Services Movement." Australian Feminist Studies 28.78 (2013): 364-374. Academic Search Premier. Web. 8 May 2016.
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. "Who Is The Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History." Journal Of The History Of Sexuality 17.2 (2008): 177-189. OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. 8 May 2016.