My research builds on the pioneering work of early lesbian and gay oral historians, but by attempting to record gay men’s cognitive maps of the area – how we negotiate routes between sites of pleasure and danger and how these have influenced our decisions about where to live, shop and cruise – attempts to chart the changing ways in which we respond to and adapt the urban landscape for our own ends. (Brown 2001, 50)

CITED

At 7:30 Tuesday morning, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s office issued a statement regarding the police raid on the two downtown Occupy Oakland camp sites. The statement, reprinted in its entirety, reads:

Many Oaklanders support the goals of the national Occupy Wall Street movement. We maintained daily communication with the protest0rs in Oakland.

However, over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the City could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism. Frank Ogawa Plaza will continue to be open as a free speech area from 6 am to 10 pm. Read the full statement at Oakland North.

The city filed on the charge of sex discrimination, based on statutes passed in the 1960s and used successfully in the 1970s by heterosexual women seeking access to all-male clubs.  As a result, at the present time in New York, it is illegal to have a lesbian-only bar. (Wolfe 1997, 320)

 To my knowledge, the law has never been repealed in the City or State of New York.

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Based on 640 responses, the ASA [American Sociology Association] Task Group concluded: “Sociologists and students who are known as homosexuals or, even more so, as activists, run considerable risk, according to the perceptions of department heads and chairs, of experiencing discrimination in being hired or promoted in a sociology department.  Hence, the vast majority remain closeted within the colleagues [sic].  This, in turn, inhibits them from displaying interest in, and engaging in, research, advising, or teaching courses on, the topic of homosexuality” (Huber et al. 1982: 165). - from Newton (2000, p220)

Less than a decade before, the Gay Academic Union (GAU) was founded in 1973 by a meeting of eight academics in a Manhattan apartment (Rainbowhistory.org 2000), and had made significant headway in visibilizing at least a small presence lgtq presence in the academy before it disbanded by the 1980s.  Today, every discipline has a sexualities or lgbtq division of study, most of which began in the 1990s.

CITED

Newton, E., 2000. Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas, Durham: Duke University Press, p220.

That said, I do think it’s time to look back not only to remember how far we’ve come, but to come to grips with our lgbtq past in as many ways and as deeply as possible, a past that is is surely as gorgeous as it is ugly.  My goal here is that by looking back queerly on our lgbtq contemporary history, we can help ourselves–as lgbtq people, those who know and love us, or those who will come to know us–think about homophobia and heteronormativity today anew by looking at the ways these forms of oppression have been deployed.  Just because we’ve moved on to face the next issue does not mean we’ve dealt with it.   In other words, I’m keen on interrupting and queering our forgetfulness, our remembering, and our re-membering of our stories by reclaiming this past and reckoning it to our present as well as the futures we desire and need.

Drawing from my research in various lgbtq archives and a reading of all things sexuality and space (and much more), I’m going to start sharing what I’ve read and seen in a series of blog posts that begin here and now.  I’ll add my thoughts when and where I can and I welcome you to do the same.  Let’s jam.

For those of you reading this on tumblr, come to jgieseking.org/blog for more.

I find this to be odd and inappropriate for two reasons.  First, who has the need to make a “best guess” of Katy Perry’s or Enrique Iglesias’ sexuality, or anyone’s sexuality for that matter (unless perhaps you’re aiming to ask them out and find that key)?  While I encourage everyone to be out, we live in a world where this is not yet safe for people because of different parts of our identities like age, race, class, citizenship, geography, and/or gender identity.

Second, I’ve spent a better part of the day trying to find trying to determine if Google is going to go the askjeeves route and give us answers to questions when we structure our web searches like a question.  The only information about google offering any sorts of such answers was a short lived project in 2006 called GoogleAnswers which had people pay to produce knowledge together.  (I believe that is called the internet.)  If Google’s first attempt at producing on the spot analysis to answer your queries without a cost is to tell you who’s a “Lesbian” or who’s “Straight,” this is a sad use of the minds and content available to Google.

In the publicness of the internet, there is still a form of privacy determined by culling through sites and other sources (a professor would pray the latter is always the case too for us all) to determine what those claims and data mean.  This “best guess”-ing eliminates the work of the mind as well as the privacy of the individual to individual sites, and this because someone was wondering if Katy Perry claiming she kissed a girl and she liked it meant she stuck around.