Preservation and Place: Historic Preservation by and of LGBTQ Communities in the United States

Abstract

Visibility and representation are two principal goals in any group’s pursuit of equity and inclusion. The LGBTQ community in the United States has made significant gains on both fronts in mass media, the legal system, and politics over the past several decades. But the same could not be said for the community’s representation in efforts to document and preserve historically significant places related to queer individuals, organizations, and activities. Preservation and Place is a work that attempts to help researchers and preservation practitioners understand the complex and varied histories of LGBTQ individuals and groups across both space and time and the preservation efforts that have been associated with those places.Preservation and Place offers many important contributions to the fields of history and preservation and is useful to those who are seeking to use the established tools of the preservation trade—listing/designation, interpretation, education, and marketing/tourism—in the service of LGBTQ history. The book is a pared-down and revised version of select chapters from a 2016 National Park Service theme study on LGTBQ history and historic places. The remaining chapters of the theme study have been published by Berghahn in two companion books, Communities and Place and Identities and Place. This volume focuses on topics related to the identification of places associated with the LGBTQ community, establishing contexts for evaluating the significance of those places, the history of preservation efforts for queer spaces, and the ways in which queer history has been interpreted and taught. There are also chapters that offer city-level case studies on the development of context statements for LGBTQ history in New York and San Francisco.Among the most illuminating themes in the book is the discussion of how to go about finding narratives and spaces that were often deliberately hidden, ignored, or destroyed. Gerard Koskovich, an author and curator from San Francisco, provides a thorough historiography of the study and documentation of queer history and pointedly states the problem that seemingly validates the purpose of the book:Koskovich goes on to discuss a century’s worth of collecting and documentation efforts by individuals and organizations intent on preserving the archival and oral histories of the LGBTQ community across the country. What is perhaps most useful about this chapter are the copious and detailed endnotes that serve as something of a breadcrumb trail for other researchers.A second important contribution of this book to the field is the discussion of sexual and gender identities and how these concepts were intertwined and understood in the past. This issue is addressed most directly in a chapter written by Megan Springate, one of the book’s editors and the author of the NPS study, on the topic of LGBTQ archaeology. As with most areas of historical inquiry, the author cautions against trying to apply modern conceptions of gender to the past, especially the archaeological record. The archaeology of gendered spaces is not new, but what Springate brings to the discussion is an exploration of how to interpret the physical records of individuals who did not follow traditional gender roles and a charge for archaeologists to consider research questions that do not presume heteronormative roles and relationships: “In thinking about such questions, we cannot assume that the people had only two genders, two sexes, or were necessarily heterosexual. This forces us to look closely at what the evidence tells us, rather than forcing the evidence into our own assumptions” (140).The third contribution of this book to the field is especially relevant to public history practitioners and educators. There are chapters dedicated to the topics of interpreting historic associates with LGBTQ associations, as well as teaching about LGBTQ history. These chapters on their own are valuable guidance to museum educators, curators, and teachers, all of whom may be tasked with understanding and communicating some immensely complicated, controversial, sensitive, and potentially unfamiliar topics to diverse audiences. This work is unquestionably important to documentation and preservation efforts but brings with it the complexities of ensuring sensitivity and fairness to the LGBTQ community while effectively reaching an array of target audiences. As Susan Ferentinos puts it in her chapter on interpreting LGBTQ historic sites “Beyond a simple concern about visitor statistics, historic sites can perform a public service by restoring a past to people who quite often have been cut off from their historical identities” (170). These lessons and tips for public engagement are accompanied by a series of activities developed as teaching devices that practitioners can use at their sites or in their classrooms.Perhaps the only drawback to this volume is that it doesn’t directly address the history of the LGBTQ community, only how that history has been documented, preserved, and interpreted over time. For that historical information readers will have to look to the companion volumes in this series. Still, this book and the larger theme study are critically important contributions to the field, especially for those interested in preservation and public history of LGBTQ history.