)))
A Community’s Response to the Problem of
Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History
Project
Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney
Strub
The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were
not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school
students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students,
professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of
black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot screen. The images
were curated by Peggie Miller, a Newark activist and businessperson who has
been organizing New Millennium Butch fashion shows in Newark since 2000.
The crowd also viewed a series of photographs of Newark’s LGBTQ leaders,
produced for this event by Newark black lesbian photographer Tamara Fleming.
Each photograph was accompanied by an epigraph describing her subject’s vision
of social change.
“Mentorship is the key to our longevity as a community,” read the epigram by
Sauce Leon, LGBTIQ commissioner of the City of Newark. “I want to see a
community where we are all free and safe enough to unleash our unlimited
potential,” urged Janyce L. Jackson, Pastor of Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church. “We must individually and collectively create, organize and establish viable institutions that speak truth and realness to our lives,” Newark activist
Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter,
and Whitney Strub, “A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral
History Project,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1.2 (2014): 1–14. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights
reserved.
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This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
James Credle advised. Through the medium of Fleming’s images, which conveyed power, openness, and profound inner strength, Newark’s grassroots
LGBTQ leaders seemed to offer their blessing to the gathered crowd. It was a breakthrough moment in which black queer was beauty openly lauded in public space. By the
time the photographic series concluded, many in the crowd were in tears.
Although all social histories are challenging to uncover, the histories of
LGBTQ people are among the most difficult to preserve—and among the most
important for historians to retrieve. LGBTQ people are a minority that exists
both interdependent with and independent of the biological family. Therefore,
each generation faces the task of inventing a life for itself, often without the help
of family or extended relations. Although each generation of LGBTQ people
tries to pass on its strengths, skills, cultures, and traditions to the next, in fact
most youth grow up without knowledge of the histories of people like themselves, or with the awareness that people like themselves even have a history. This
absence of a grounding history, and this sense that they are nowhere reflected in
the history they learn in school, can add to the alienation that gay youth
experience simply by virtue of growing up in heteronormative families, communities, and religious traditions.
For these reasons, documenting and preserving LGBTQ community histories
can be literally a life-saving endeavor. Even thirty years into the writing of formal
LGBTQ historical scholarship, queer history remains underdocumented. After
all, as postcolonial critiques remind us, the archive itself “came into being in
order to solidify and memorialize first monarchical and then state power.”1 Yet
literal and discursive antigay violence, as queer historian David Churchill notes,
played a crucial role in modern state formation itself in North America and
elsewhere.2 Thus queer history has primarily survived in the interstices of texts
and archives, until the very recent past.
Resistance to that erasure has generated a massive body of queer historical
scholarship in recent years. The historical profession has slowly responded to
what has turned out to be a strikingly intense demand for queer history on the
part of queer people and even, increasingly, their straight friends and relatives.
Likewise, undergraduate LGBTQ history classes continue to be scheduled with
trepidation—will enough students be willing to have such a course appear on
their transcripts?— but turn out to be routinely overenrolled. The lines of
inquiry and recovery have not run evenly in this project. Instead, they have often
built upon the very inequities sutured into the archive itself. Community studies,
histories of activist groups, biographies, reconstructed sexual geographies, and
other leading formats of LGBTQ history as it has been written have been
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility
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powerful and empowering. At the same time, the gaps that remain often
compound the invisibility of already less-visible people and groups.
Newark, New Jersey, provides a case study in this erasure. Possessed of vibrant
queer communities, it departs from the examples set in studies of New York,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Buffalo, and other cities that have
drawn scholarly attention.3 Although those cities contain diverse populations, it
has frequently been their white middle-class gay communities whose formal
organizational activism in groups from the Mattachine Society and Daughters of
Bilitis through ACT UP and Queer Nation left the archival paper trail through
which their histories have been written. Newark’s history follows a different
course: for the past half-century, New Jersey’s largest city has been both a
black-majority, working-class community and, since the immigration reforms of
the 1960s, also reshaped by transnational migration. Until the early 2000s,
resistance to homophobia and heteronormativity was often enacted not through
official activist groups, but through the formation of alternative communities:
discos, ballroom houses, church-based communities, and other sites of solidarity
and sustenance. The result is, on the one hand, a powerful counterexample to
dominant LGBTQ historical narratives—and on the other, an elusive, often
unrecorded history.
The Queer Newark Oral History Project (QNOHP) was intended to rectify
this omission. Founded by Darnell Moore, a Newark-based activist and writer,
and Beryl Satter, a history professor at Rutgers University-Newark, the project
was designed to intervene into the narrativization of the queer past, and put
academics, activists, and community members into collaboration based on a
model of shared authority. As such, its goal was scholarly, but not merely
scholarly. It was designed to bridge gaps—those existing among generations of
LGBTQ people, among LGBTQ advocacy groups in Newark, among programs
interested in LGBTQ issues within Rutgers-Newark, and, finally, between
Newark LGBTQ groups and the Rutgers campus community. The conveners
decided to bring various, often disparate, bodies of people together, not only in
conversation, but in a sharing of knowledge, skills, and resources. We are also
committed to empowering LGBTQ youth, in part through the production of a
more concrete sense of memory and queer genealogy. The statement of principles
around which the project was organized largely reflect the aforementioned
objectives. They are:
Statement of Principles
The Queer Newark Oral History Project is community based and community
directed. We are committed to inclusivity and access. Our aims include the
following:
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Interview the full diversity of members of Newark’s LGBT community.
Engage LGBT Newark youth in interviewing each other as well as LGBT adult
Newark community; mentor LGBT Newark youth to ready them for career
and higher education opportunities.
Engage college and university students and faculty in interviewing, cataloging,
transcribing, publicizing, organizing, or other tasks that will facilitate the
growth of the Queer Newark Oral History Project.
Cement collaboration between Newark’s LGBT political, service, and faith
organizations and Newark and Newark-area colleges and universities on the
Queer Newark Oral History Project.
Encourage LGBT Newark and former Newark residents to donate their papers
and other artifacts to our growing collection on Queer Newark.4
●
●
●
●
Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
Oral history has played a central role in the writing of LGBTQ history from
the start, and continues to undergird much ongoing work. So we committed
early on to a primary emphasis on oral history as a means of historical recovery.
Yet, most oral histories are taken in private space, and read largely by other
scholars. Given Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez’s recent
claim that “something transformative” often occurs in the “social space of the
queer oral history,” we purposely staged our first round of histories in the public
sphere, using them not only to document the queer past, but also to celebrate,
commemorate, and honor it in an open, collective setting—which would then
become generative, inspiring further work.5
Most important, our oral history project was committed to a process that
involved listening to the needs of the community, and using what resources we
could draw from the university to respond to those needs. In other words, as much
as we remain interested in contemporary currents in queer historiography, the
content of public events we create would not be determined by those currents.
We had no interest in the too-common model whereby academics at a university,
fired up by the latest scholarship, plan an event (filled with academic experts) and
then invite community people to come. Instead, our model was to listen to the
ideas that LGBTQ activists in Newark had about what sort of conference, event
or histories they would most like to see. We then worked together with community activists to make their vision come true.
Such a collaborative model would only work if at least some of the event
organizers came to the table with a preexisting knowledge of the many strands of
LGBTQ activism in Newark. Darnell Moore had this knowledge, built from a
few years of activist work in Newark. In order to empower the community to
determine our first project’s direction, Moore called a meeting in June 2011.
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility
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Approximately fifteen longtime LGBTQ Newark activists attended, along with
a few Rutgers-Newark faculty. Over several hours we went around the room,
listening to each person’s vision of the queer history they felt would be most
important for their community. The mix of activists who were present—
including Ball House mothers and fathers, ministers of LGBTQ-welcoming
local churches, heads of programs for LGBTQ youth, founders of the Newark
Pride Alliance, gay and lesbian entrepreneurs, journalists, teachers, and photographers—was itself a testimony to the richness and vitality of queer life in
Newark.
The excitement and energy in the room that day was palpable. Ideas flowed.
Some wanted a program that would give youth the information they needed to
protect themselves from HIV infection. Others spoke about the need to replace
media myths with honest representations of both queer and black urban life. One
participant suggested a conference on the needs of “AGs” (“aggressive” or butch
lesbians), running the gamut from economics to spirituality to health. People
spoke of the importance of publicly reclaiming our neglected history in the city
of Newark, which could serve as a means of granting LGBTQ Newarkers the
same legitimacy and visibility as every other community in the city. Some
insisted that whatever we produce must include comprehensive information
about local resources currently available for LGBTQ Newarkers. Others stressed
the importance of recording and preserving some sort of community discussion
that would demonstrate the full diversity of queer Newark life. Some wanted a
program that would showcase the work of queer Newark artists. Everyone agreed
that youth participation was key.
Building on these important insights, we continued to meet every two weeks
for the remainder of that summer as we hammered out a program that would
meet as many of these visions as we could. Some meetings were small and
targeted towards dividing up specific goals. Others were larger and more focused
on the generation of ideas. The group ultimately agreed on the following points:
●
the City of Newark has a history of brutality against LGBTQ people, and of
great courage and creativity among queer Newarkers, both of which need to be
remembered;
● the preservation of this history would be an immensely important resource for
Newark residents, for artists, and for historians locally, nationally, and
internationally;
● the population we most wanted to reach was Newark’s queer youth; a crossgenerational sharing of local queer history and knowledge was especially
important at this moment, because the AIDS crisis had wiped out a whole
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
generation in Newark and left the next generation of queer youth with few
people to turn to for guidance and mentoring.
Drawing on the ideas and resources that emerged from months of meetings
and discussions, the Queer Newark Oral History Project created a full-day,
public celebration of queer Newark history in November 2011. Our goal was to
share knowledge across generations. No academic experts spoke. Instead, we
shared images and photographs of the community; footage from a forthcoming
film about Newark lesbians jailed for defending themselves from sexual harassment;6 and most of all, stories. Our first panel featured four queer Newarkers in
their sixties and above; the second, people in their forties to fifties; and the third,
young queer Newarkers in their twenties and thirties. Each panelist responded to
questions posed by a moderator about topics that emerged from community
discussion. These included childhood, schooling, and educational life; religion
and spirituality; families and parenting; sexual worlds and practices; club scenes
and ball scenes; and friendship, fashion, art, and music. The stories our panelists
shared were gripping, entrancing, and sometimes heartbreaking. Three generations of LGBTQ Newarkers talked about their most memorable dates, and their
most fashionable cruising outfits. Some discussed coming out as gay. Others
talked about coming into the womanhood they always knew they possessed, rather
than the male identity that society pressured them to accept. Each concluded by
presenting advice, benedictions, or requests for the next generation.
The result was not only a celebration of queer Newark’s history. As the largest,
most public intergenerational discussion of LGBTQ life in Newark’s history, it
was a historic event in its own right. It received wide media attention, including
a full-page, full-color spread in the Sunday Star-Ledger that heralded “Gays in
Newark: Our Stories, Our Lives.” The conference functioned as a first step, in
other words, towards preserving the history of LGBTQ Newark, thereby bringing these voices and experiences into our communal history.
The particular result, namely, that of making visible those black and brown
queer and trans bodies otherwise invisible in the public imagination, mainstream
(and queer) media, and some queer histories, proved vitally important for the
Newark LGBTQ community in late 2013. Eyricka Morgan, a twenty-six-yearold black transwoman student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and
participant on our youth panel, was tragically murdered in September 2013.
Following the murder, which rightly enraged and saddened many within the
Newark LGBTQ community of which Eyricka was part, a reporter writing for
New Jersey’s Star-Ledger referred to Morgan by her given name and used male
pronouns to refer to her. Newark-based activists and trans-activists across the
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility
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country began pushing the newspaper to correct its error and to properly name
Eyricka’s preferred gender.7
As a result of the burgeoning protest, the reporter eventually corresponded
with a few Newark-based sources, namely, Gary Paul Wright, executive director
of the African American Office of Gay Concerns (an organization where Eyricka
received a range of services) and Darnell Moore. Despite the reporter’s insidious
request for “evidence” to corroborate that Eryicka indeed self-identified as a
transwoman, the video from the QNOHP conference proved to be a vital source
of such evidence. The video, which captures Eyricka describing, in her own
words, her experience as a black transwoman in Newark, illuminates the force of
and need for tools of self-representation and preservation in a society structured
by systems that remain largely antagonistic to queer and trans people, especially
LGBTQ people of color living within economically challenged communities like
Newark, New Jersey. Thus, QNOHP profoundly enriched current understandings of Newark’s history, and represented an enormous step forward in the
ongoing process of saving queer histories.
) ) ) Sources of Queer Newark History
One reason for our choice to emphasize oral history as the methodological
window in Newark’s queer past was the paucity of other available sources for this
history. The steady march toward the digital arena as the focal point of
knowledge-production in the twenty-first century has democratized some histories but failed to include others. Indeed, the history of Queer Newark remains
largely unindexed, much less digitized, and despite the advances of the Internet
era, historical research in Newark remains beholden to essentially the same
methods used decades ago by Jonathan Ned Katz, John D’Emilio, and George
Chauncey in early gay histories: poring over microfilm reels in search of news
snippets, or seeking privately held documents from local community members.
To date, no full, systematic history of Queer Newark has been written.
Canvassing the record left by the city’s best-known literary lights, we can see
glimpses of a lost past: Amiri Baraka’s autobiography, recalling “sissies” and a
friend’s “funny” cousin in the 1940s, novelist Nathan Heard’s 1968 novel Howard
Street vividly depicting the milieu of the M&M, a barely fictionalized Third
Ward gay bar with “fags,” “stud-broads,” and “queens with their ‘husbands.’”8
“Rutgers-Newark,” recalled the gay activist Arnie Kantrowitz, who later helped
found New York’s Gay Activist Alliance, “housed a diverse crowd in an illassorted collection of converted office buildings, breweries, and factories scat-
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
tered around Washington Park in the downtown shopping district,” where he
found “new sexual freedoms” that nonetheless seemed “more links in the same
old chain.”9 Despite these authors’ varying degrees of sympathy toward their
queer characters, in the absence of more substantive documentation, they preserve the traces of an otherwise hidden history.
The historical record of Queer Newark has remained subject to the double
marginalizations of sexuality and race. Once an important destination of the
Great Migration, Newark became an important center of black political empowerment in the 1970s, as the first East Coast city to elect a black mayor with Ken
Gibson in 1970 (and only the third major city nationally, after Carl Stokes in
Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary). Yet the city’s LGBTQ life still has been
neglected. None of the leading histories of Newark in this era include substantive
discussion of queer life.10 Even as the 1970s witnessed a massive proliferation of
gay print media after Stonewall, Newark appeared only in the pages of the
campus newspaper at Rutgers-Newark, which reported on the founding of
Rutgers Activists for Gay Education (R.A.G.E.).11 Recovering the history of
Queer Newark requires us to seek out urban black communities even where their
histories have been preserved by others. To take but one example, the Gay
Activists Alliance of Essex and Union Counties met weekly at the Ethical Culture
Society in Maplewood (adjacent to Newark), a more white and middle-class
suburban enclave.12 Its newsletter rarely addressed Newark at all. And yet there
are fleeting, valuable exceptions, such as a brief “Commentary on Being a Black
Lesbian,” by Marie Teresa, published in 1972, in which Teresa challenged the
antigay claims then being advanced by Baraka and other black nationalists.
Because “we are burdened with the responsibilities of reproducing armies of
black children,” she wrote, lesbians came under particular attack in the black
community, for rejecting their imposed duty. The attack went beyond the
banalities of conventional homophobia, to regard black lesbians “not only as a
deviation, and a ‘sick’ behavior needing to be changed, but as a traitorship
needing to be wiped out in order to save the pride of the Black Race.”13
It was precisely this history we sought to recover, and yet such moments are
few and far between in the existing paper trail. Gary Jardim, for instance, has
offered an important look at early disco and house music in Newark, critical sites
of queer community formation. Yet what sort of archive has been left by Club
Zanzibar, a central queer Newark institution of the 1980s? We have some
photographic images, but to date no business records, no in-depth memoirs, and
no oral histories outside of those compiled by Jardim in his invaluable collection
Blue: Life, Art and Style in Newark.14 Not even the building itself to which
Zanzibar was attached, the Lincoln Motel, still exists. Perhaps its richest docu-
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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mentation survives on a photo-and-discussion thread on discomusic.com, which
contains the seeds of a vibrant community history, but in yet-inchoate form.15
As we look forward into the 1990s and beyond, we begin at last to see
increasing preservation of Queer Newark history, much of it accomplished not
by historians, but rather anthropologists. The Mapping Newark initiative, led by
Karen McCarthy Brown, a prominent anthropologist of religion at Drew University, spearheaded a major ethnographic undertaking to document religious
life in Newark, with significant attention paid to queer religious practices. Brown
published a pioneering study of gender performance in the predominantly black
and Latino(a) ballroom houses of the city, capturing a community resisting
homophobia and the AIDS crisis through its own chosen families and ethics of
care.16 Meanwhile, Brown’s student Peter Savastano began his scholarly work on
the Mapping Newark project, and has since gone on to publish a series of
valuable examinations of gay Catholic men in Newark and their long devotion to
St. Gerard, the gentle icon commemorated in statute and annual feast at St.
Lucy’s Church in the city.17
Other work has followed suit, largely from social scientists— of particular note
here are sociologist Ana Ramos-Zayas’s studies of “urban erotics and racial
affect,” including an examination of the interwoven racial and sexual identity
development of Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark’s high schools, as
well as Zenzele Isoke’s urban studies work on black women’s activism, including
a recent article on Black women’s queer activism following the murder of Sakia
Gunn.18
We honor this work, as invaluable contributions to the scholarly record of
Queer Newark. Yet our vision differs slightly: our aims are more historical than
those of scholars seeking to elucidate present-day queer social formations, and
our goal is to create more accessible forms of history than those created for
professional academic audiences. So as we formulated QNOHP, we were informed by these ongoing scholarly projects, yet set out in directions closer to
those of earlier queer community historians such as Allan Bérubé, Susan Stryker,
and Eric Wat.19
) ) ) The Future of the Queer Newark Oral History
Project
The work of sustaining a fluid community-based oral history project is not
simple. Challenges run the gamut from the technological (the mechanics of
preserving digital material), to the legal (how to protect the rights of interviewees
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
while allowing the greatest possible access to their words and insights), from the
fiscal (what browser service hosts the material, who pays for transcriptions and
the proper “tagging” of interviews so that they become searchable), to the
bureaucratic (how to tap university resources without becoming entangled in
unwieldy university processes such as the dreaded “IRB” [institutional review
board], which has the power to crush oral history research by treating narrators as
“human research subjects”).20 Most important of all, how do we stay vital and
relevant to the queer Newark community?
For now, we feel that relevance is best ensured by sticking to the core principle
of fostering local intergenerational queer historical knowledge, with topics to be
determined through the community listening process we pioneered with our 2011
conference, “Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories.” At a meeting last fall
held at Newark’s newly opened LGBTQ Community Center, local artists and
activists decided that our next project should be a history of queer club spaces in
Newark. According to LGBTQ Newarkers, such spaces have long functioned as
an ambiguous sanctuary—places of celebration, community, and cultural and
erotic self-expression, on the one hand, and locations that sometimes encourage
addictions and unhealthy relationships, on the other. We plan to chart the
histories of Newark’s queer club cultures, including Murphy’s, Club Zanzibar,
the Globe, the Fireballs of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the rotating club spaces
of present-day queer Newark. We’re currently amassing photos and other
personal documentation about these clubs. We’re organizing a public panel for
fall 2014, at which club designers, managers, DJs, and club goers will come
together to talk about the creation and meaning of these spaces. We also hope to
use these public events to initiate intergenerational discussions on addiction,
drug use, and HIV/AIDS in Newark. Finally, we are putting out a call for art,
including film and poetry, on the topic of queer club spaces in Newark, that we
will display at a month-long open house show in October 2014. The show will
also include some of the magnificent holdings of Drew University’s “Mapping
Newark” project, thus sharing these rare archival records of 1990s Newark
ballroom performances with the community that produced them. Of course, we
will record everything, thus enriching current archival holdings on our city’s
queer history.
The work of QNOHP is driven by community needs and interests, but also
informed by contemporary scholarly theorizing of queer memory work. For
instance, our amassing of visual material from the history of Newark’s clubs is
intended to be used in conjunction with the narrators who experienced these
spaces; David Reichard has recently argued that oral history plays a crucial role in
“animating” otherwise ephemeral or “transient” evidence of the queer past, and
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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QNOHP will embody his suggestion that the most vibrant history combines
archival material with oral histories.21 In addition, Pascal Emmer has further
proposed “meta-generational” approaches to recent queer history as a means of
complicating more linear, bifurcated narratives of “older” and “younger” generations (which often collapse into triumphalism or declension), in his work on ACT
UP Philadelphia. Like that group, the club spaces of Queer Newark hosted simultaneous, overlapping, interactive intergenerational contact and community, and thus
even as our project takes chronological form as clubs emerge and close over time, it
pays heed to the ongoing meta-generational sociality of these spaces.22
We believe that by listening to local people, we will create both meaningful
and accessible public history, as well as scholarly breakthroughs. This is because
the stories that queer Newarkers tell about their lives have the potential to
transform the ways we understand U.S. history. Their stories integrate categories
that scholars have often place in separate boxes, such as sexuality, race, gender,
spirituality, and economics. In the experience of queer Newarkers, these aspects
are inextricably interconnected. By recording and preserving the insights of queer
Newarkers, many of them working-class people of color who have spent decades
giving time and energy to support their communities, the QNOHP has the
potential to give us a real American history.
NOTES
1. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), 69.
2. David Churchill, “Transnationalism and Homophile Political Culture in the
Postwar Decades,” GLQ 15, no. 1 (2008): 31– 65.
3. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual
Minority in the United States, 1940 –1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983); Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia,
1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Nan Alamilla Boyd,
Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and
Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); George Chauncey, Gay New York:
Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890 –1940 (New
York: Basic Books, 1994); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War
Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
4. Queer Newark Oral History Project, Statement of Principles, adopted December
2011, http://queer.newark.rutgers.edu/.
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
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Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
5. Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, eds., Bodies of Evidence: The
Practice of Queer Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2.
6. Blair Doroshwalther’s Out in the Night (in progress) depicts the injustices faced by
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
the so-called New Jersey 4 (originally 7). Hir Kickstarter page for the film contains
a wealth of information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blairdoroshwalther/
out-in-the-night-a-the-fire-this-time-film. See also Christina Carney, “The Politics
of Representation for Black Women and the Impossibility of Queering the New
Jersey 4/7,” in Wish to Live: The Hip-hop Feminism Pedagogy Reader, ed. Ruth
Nicole Brown and Chamara Jewel Kwakye (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 71–77.
Sunnivie Brydum, “New Jersey Paper Refuses to Correct Coverage of Trans Woman’s
Murder,” Advocate.com, September 28, 2013, http://www.advocate.com/politics/
transgender/2013/09/28/new-jersey-paper-refuses-correct-coverage-trans-womans-murder.
Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997, orig.
published 1984), 25; Nathan Heard, Howard Street (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 36, 22, 50.
Arnie Kantrowitz, Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay (New York: Pocket Books,
1978), 46.
Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and
Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Kevin
Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York:
New York University Press, 2008); Brad Tuttle, How Newark Became Newark: The
Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2009). For a four-part illustrated sketch of Newark’s queer past, see Timothy
Stewart-Winter and Whitney Strub, “Queer Newark,” on the public history site
OutHistory.org, at http://www.outhistory.org/exhibits/show/queer-newark/exhibit.
Randy Price, “RAGE Reactivated,” Rutgers Observer, undated clipping (fall 1973),
in possession of authors.
On Maplewood, see Arlene Stein, “What’s the Matter with Newark? Race, Class,
Marriage Politics, and the Limits of Queer Liberalism,” in The Marrying Kind?
Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Lesbian and Gay Movement, ed. Mary
Bernstein and Verta Taylor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Marie Teresa, “Commentary of Being a Black Lesbian,” Gay Activists Alliance of
Essex-Union Counties newsletter, Summer (1972), 3.
Gary Jardim, “Al Murphy and the Club Music Aesthetic in Newark,” in Blue: Life,
Art and Style in Newark (Orange, NJ: De Sousa Press, 1993), 143–55; also Ace
Mungin, “The Roots of Club in Newark,” in Jardim, 113–24, and Shelton Hayes,
“The Club,” in Jardim, 127–34.
“Club Zanzibar,” http://www.discomusic.com/clubs-more/890_0_6_0_C/.
Karen McCarthy Brown, “Mimesis in the Face of Fear: Femme Queens, Butch
Queens, and Gender Play in the Houses of Greater Newark,” in Passing: Identity
and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. Maria Carla Sanchez and
Linda S. Schlossberg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 208 –27.
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility
)
13
17. Peter Savastano, “‘Will the Real St. Gerard Please Stand Up?’: An Ethnographic
18.
19.
20.
21.
Study of Symbolic Polysemy, Devotional Practices, Material Culture, Marginality
and Difference in the Cult of St. Gerard Maiella,” (PhD dissertation, Drew
University, 2002); “‘St. Gerard Teaches Him That Love Cancels That Out’:
Devotion to St. Gerard Maiella among Italian American Gay Men in Newark,
New Jersey,” in Gay Religion, ed. Scott Thumma and Edward Gray (Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2005), 181–202; “Changing St. Gerard’s Clothes: An
Exercise in Italian-American Catholic Devotion and Material Culture,” in Italian
Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives, ed. Joseph Sciorra (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2010), 171– 88.
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “Urban Erotics and Racial Affect in a Neoliberal ’Racial
Democracy’: Brazilian and Puerto Rican Youth in Newark, New Jersey,” Identities:
Global Studies in Culture and Power 16.5 (2009): 513– 47; Zenzele Isoke, “Can’t I Be
Seen, Can’t I Be Heard? Black Women Queering Politics in Newark, New Jersey,”
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 2013), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/0966369X.2013.781015. See also Ramos-Zayas, Street Therapists: Race,
Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012) (in particular Chapter 5, “Of ‘Black Lesbians,’ Hate Crimes,
and Crime-Talk: The Sexuality of ‘Aggression’ in the City”); Isoke, “The Politics
of Homemaking: Black Women Transforming Politics in Newark, New Jersey,”
Transforming Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2011): 117–30; and Urban Black Women and
the Politics of Resistance (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013).
See Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture
in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996); Eric Wat,
The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); on Bérubé’s unique, pioneering
community history work, see John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, “Allan Bérubé
and the Power of Community History,” in their coedited collection of Bérubé’s
work, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1– 40.
On the perils posed by Institutional Review Boards—which grew through missioncreep and epistemological colonization from science and medicine to assert
questionable oversight of the humanities as well—to queer history, see Michael
David Franklin, “Calculating Risk: History of Medicine, Transgender History, and
the Institutional Review Board,” in Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, ed.,
Queer Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 20 – 40. For
a spirited historical account of (and challenge to) IRB authority, see Zachary
Schrag, Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences,
1965–2009 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
David Reichard, “Animating Ephemera through Oral History: Interpreting Visual
Traces of California Gay College Student Organizing from the 1970s,” Oral
History Review 39, no. 1 (2012): 37– 60.
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.
14
(
Darnell L. Moore, Beryl Satter, Timothy Stewart-Winter, and Whitney Strub
22. Pascal Emmer, “Talkin’ Bout Meta-Generation: ACT UP History and Queer
Futurity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 89 –96.
)))
Darnell L. Moore is a writer and activist. He is a fellow at the Center on
African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS) at
Columbia University. He is also a managing editor of The Feminist Wire and
cofounder of YOU Belong. He is on the board of directors at the Center for
Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York and he was
appointed the inaugural chair of the city of Newark’s LGBTQ Advisory
Concerns Commission by Mayor Cory A. Booker.
Beryl Satter is professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. She received
her PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 1992. Her BA is from
Barnard College, and she also holds a Master of Theological Studies from
Harvard Divinity School. Her book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and
the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), won the
Liberty Legacy Award for civil rights history and the National Jewish Book
Award in history, and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and
the Ron Ridenhour Book Prize.
Timothy Stewart-Winter is assistant professor of history at Rutgers UniversityNewark. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2009. His first
book, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, traces the rise of
urban gay politics in Chicago since the 1950s. His writing has been published in
Gender & History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Los Angeles Times, and
has received the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits and James C. Hormel
fellowships. He serves on the Governing Board of the Committee on LGBT
History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association.
Whitney Strub is assistant professor of history, and program director of
Women’s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author
of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
(Columbia University Press, 2011) and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States
and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (University Press of Kansas, 2013).
His work has been published in American Quarterly, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, Radical History Review, and other forums, and he blogs about queer
history and the cinematic history of Newark at http://strublog.wordpress.com.
This work originally appeared in QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 1.2, Summer 2014, published by Michigan State University Press.