Animating Ephemera through Oral

History: Interpreting Visual Traces of

California Gay College Student
Organizing from the 1970s
David A. Reichard

Abstract: Ephemeral evidence, or ephemera (including posters, flyers, and other

materials created for short-term purposes), poses numerous challenges to archivists
and researchers seeking to understand their provenance, veracity, and significance.
In particular, scholars of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people and
communities frequently encounter such materials since ephemera has become a
central element of much queer archiving practice. Drawing on an ongoing research
project examining the history of gay and lesbian college student organizing as an
example, this article suggests how oral history can help “animate” ephemera,
providing researchers a way to enhance the interpretive value of such fleeting
evidence. Oral histories can transform “queer campus ephemera,” traces of 1970s
queer student histories in the form of flyers, posters, and short-lived newsletters
produced by gay and lesbian students, into more substantive evidence of the
social and political climate in which such students lived, went to school, and
organized. Through these examples, the article explores the benefits (and
limitations) of using oral history to interpret ephemeral archival evidence.

Keywords: college students, ephemera, LGBTQ history, methodology, oral

history

I found the flyers first. Perhaps, it was the striking lettering, the 1970s styling,
or the small rips and tears where yellowing cellophane tape had been. I imagined
them on the wall of a library on campus, or a kiosk in front of the student union.
Sitting there at the GLBT Historical Society and looking at this random piece of
paper, I wondered about the students who had created it. How could such
ephemeral evidence help me learn more about political organizing by gay and
lesbian students in California, the focus of a larger research project?

doi: 10.1093/ohr/ohs042. Advance Access publication 29 February 2012

The Oral History Review 2012, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 37–60
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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Like other scholars seeking to understand the histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities, I have faced the limitations of
“official” records—with their silences and sometime particular agendas in
describing queer people as sinful, sick, or criminal. While such records have been
critical in shaping my understanding of the experiences of gay and lesbian
students in California, posters, flyers, newsletters, and short-lived newspapers
created by gay and lesbian students themselves have had special appeal.1 Flyers
and posters—advertising organization meetings, visiting speakers, film
screenings, public dances, or campus protests—and organizational newsletters
and newspapers, what might be called “queer campus ephemera,” reminded me
of materials created by other early gay liberation organizations, many of whom
used striking posters and flyers as part of what art historian Richard Meyer calls
a “visual strategy for sexual revolution.”2
Defined by most archivists as primarily paper-based materials designed by their
creators for short-term use, ephemera can provide a glimpse of how ordinary
people lived, worked, and played, presenting the “stuff people would see every
day,” as one archivist suggests, especially in comparison to formal records
archived in government repositories or in personal or organizational collections.3
However, ephemera present researchers with challenges, including but not
limited to determining who created it, how it was used, and what impact it had
in its particular context.4 Of necessity, being able to “read around the edges”
would enable a deeper understanding of what their historical significance was at
the time, and is now, for interpreting histories of a marginalized group like
LGBTQ college students in the 1970s.5 Without much corroborating evidence,
especially when a flyer, poster, or newsletter is one of, if not the only, documentary
record available, how does one really know? Are these kinds of ephemeral
materials, what Mary Desjardins describes as the “thrown-away which is not
thrown away,” particularly important for documenting LGBTQ histories,
especially students? And to what degree can oral history—which has become a
mainstay of LGBTQ history practice—contribute to making sense of such
evidence?6
To help answer these questions, this article takes a closer look at how oral
histories can “animate,” to adopt Amelie Hastie’s term, seemingly transient
evidence of LGBTQ experiences, drawing on a few compelling examples culled
from archival research and oral histories conducted for a larger study of gay and
lesbian college student organizing in California during the late 1960s and 1970s,
a formative period in the history of LGBTQ student organizing on campus.7
These examples, while not representative of the full complexity of LGBTQ
student experiences, shaped over time by the kind of campus, location, class,
race, gender, form(s) of gender expression, and sexual orientation, nevertheless

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illustrate the potential for using oral histories to animate queer ephemeral
archival materials.
As I suggest, oral histories can transform such “visual traces” of 1970s queer
student histories into more substantive evidence of the social and political
climate in which such students lived, went to school, and organized.8 A close
reading of such texts alongside the personal memories articulated through oral
history reveals how queer campus ephemera became critical ways students
promoted greater visibility for gays and lesbians on campus, found each other,
claimed public space, and created the kind of communication networks that
have served generations of LGBTQ people.9 Moreover, oral histories also reveal
the highly contested nature of that visibility, with narrators frequently describing
struggles over the very presence of such posters and flyers on campus. Thus,
being able to animate queer campus ephemera through oral history leads to a
much deeper understanding of gay and lesbian student experiences on campus
than would be possible with only ephemera to consult.
Using oral history to animate ephemera is especially important for understanding
a transient group of people like students, particularly gay and lesbian students.
With these materials sometimes being the only self-generated written record of
their activities on campus, oral history becomes the most available and accessible
way to triangulate personal recollections and memories (through oral history)
and trace archival evidence (flyers, posters, newsletters, and short-lived
newspapers) with “official” records generated by university officials. “In the
absence of institutionalized documentation or in opposition to official histories,”
as Ann Cvetkovich has urged, “memory becomes a valuable historical resource
and ephemeral and personal collections of objects stand alongside documents
of the dominant culture in order to offer alternative modes of knowledge.”10
Thus, interpreting ephemeral evidence through oral history makes such
alternative modes of knowledge visible.
As other scholars have suggested, such triangulation is essential in the recovery
of queer histories in general, given circumstances which can “invalidate the
historical facts of queer lives,” to adapt the assessment of scholar José Estebán
Muñoz.11 As such, scholars must use creative ways to breathe life into such
limited archival documentation. Moreover, as Muñoz urges, ephemerality is in
many ways a defining feature of queerness itself. “Instead of being clearly
available as visible evidence,” he contends, “queerness has instead existed as
innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be
interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere—while evaporating
at the touch of those who would eliminate queer possibility.”12 As such, because
of the ephemeral nature of such evidence, determining the meaning of such
evidence is essential and oral history is one such method to help do so. For, as

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Alessandro Portelli has urged, one of oral history’s most important strengths is
the ability to tell us not only about “events” but also “their meaning,” including
the meaning(s) of such ephemeral evidence.13 If oral histories can serve as a
“living archive of desire,” in Horacio N. Roque Ramírez’s phrase, then oral history
can also transform ephemera into living evidence in the archive.14

Oral history and the interpretation of queer campus

ephemera
“A kiosk is an unequaled source of information,” noted an article in the
Sacramento State University student newspaper in 1978. Before social
networking sites like Facebook, these staple-encrusted kiosks were an integral
part of student communication networks, helping them find housing, learn
about campus events, and locate a student organization to meet their social and
political interests (see fig. 1).15
Like their peers, gay and lesbian students posted flyers on campus to advertise
their organizations and events.16 Even a cursory glance at surviving examples in

Fig. 1. Kiosk at Sacramento State University, 1978. Photo courtesy of Martin

Ong, The State Hornet, March 10, 1978.

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a variety of archival collections suggests the wide scope of their campus

organizing, including the formation of a student organization, a Gay Student
Union (GSU) meeting, a visiting speaker, a film screening, a dance, a holiday
party, a Gay Awareness Week event, or a protest.17 For example, the Gay Student
Coalition, organized in 1973 by students from several San Francisco area colleges
and universities, advertised their meetings by posting flyers on various
campuses.18
On the one hand, queer campus ephemera like this has great intrinsic value for
historians seeking to understand what kinds of events students planned, the
issues they cared about, how they expressed themselves visually, and how they
shared information. For example, the Gay Students Coalition flyer above (fig. 2)
invited students from across the San Francisco Bay area to gather informally for
social and educational events with opportunities for political work for those who
were interested. The flyer notes the time and place of the meetings (Lone
Mountain College) as well as mailing addresses at City College of San Francisco
and San Francisco State University. Barbed wire surrounds the text with a
prominent key hole at the center, a rising sun suggesting what stood on the other
side of the door, perhaps a closet door, a familiar and evocative image for the
flyer’s target audience. Archival research suggests how important such flyers were
for attracting that audience. A letter from a student to the Daily Bruin at University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in March 1973 about the existence of a lesbian
student organization on campus illustrates the importance of such ephemera.
After seeing a flyer for the more male-centered GSU, the letter writer wondered
if there was a comparable group for lesbians. There was, the Gay Sisterhood
(formed in 1972 and later renamed the Lesbian Sisterhood), and they also
advertised their meetings with similar kinds of flyers on campus (see fig. 3).19
Similarly, newsletters and newspapers produced by gay and lesbian students
were equally important platforms to exchange information and publicize their
organizing work on campus—and were just as ephemeral as flyers and posters.
Some hand-written, most typed and mimeographed, and a few professionally
printed, these newsletters and newspapers included information about gay and
lesbian student organizations, campus events, news from the local community,
and items of interest about other gay and lesbian student organizations on
other campuses. For example, the Gayzette, produced by the GSU at UCLA,
included organizational news (meeting times, sponsored events, information
about electing officers, and details about the GSU’s sponsored programs) as
well as stories about events of interest in the Los Angeles area. The Gayzette
also became a creative outlet for students, featuring their poetry, short stories,
and artwork. Similarly, the Voice of the Gay Students Coalition, produced in San
Francisco in the mid-1970s included articles about coming out on campus, film

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Fig. 2. Gay Student Coalition flyer, c. 1974. Courtesy of John De Cecco

Collection, GLBT Historical Society.

reviews, and guest spots from openly gay faculty members as well as local
politicians (including Harvey Milk). Importantly, such newsletters and newspapers
were inconsistently produced and designed, like flyers and posters, for short-
term use, surviving mostly in limited numbers.20

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Fig. 3. Flyer for Lesbian Sisterhood, UCLA, c. 1973. Courtesy of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles.

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As important as these sources are for revealing details about the campus lives of
gay and lesbian college students, they survive mostly as a plethora of random bits
and pieces of evidence—a lone flyer from a campus group, one poster advertising
an event, a single issue of a gay student organization newsletter—resulting in a
(seemingly) limited research value. Museum professionals, for example, frequently
face a similar dilemma in making sense of artifacts, sometimes turning to oral
histories to provide a more detailed understanding of the social and political
context in which such materials existed. As Janis Wilton suggests, material objects
require stories “to capture an object’s significance.”21 Moreover, oral historians
have long used objects, personal papers, photographs, and other materials to
enhance their understanding of oral histories. As Donald Ritchie notes, oral
historians have “explored the use of photographs and familiar artifacts to trigger
recall. Family photo albums, newspaper clippings, and letters have all served as
tools for unearthing otherwise forgotten information.”22 As such, turning to oral
history to help understand queer campus ephemera makes great sense. But what
can we learn by doing so? And what are the limits of using such a practice?
At the most elemental, oral histories with former college students confirm the
importance of flyers, posters, and student-produced newsletters and newspapers
in helping gay and lesbian students to find each other on campus and access
information not readily available elsewhere. While gay and lesbian student
organizations sometimes advertised their meetings in the campus student
newspaper, a flyer advertising a meeting of a gay and/or lesbian student
organization was often the first time a student became aware of the opportunity.23
For example, when Mark Thompson arrived at San Francisco State in 1973, he
recalled seeing a flyer for a gay student rap (discussion) group meeting. After
attending that meeting, Thompson joined the group and became an active
member. Similarly, Tom Coleman recalled first learning about a new gay law
student organization forming in Southern California through a flyer posted at
Loyola University School of Law in the spring of 1972 advertising an off-campus
gathering at a local bar. At first, he thought it was a joke, or even a trap, so he
did not attend this organizing meeting. Yet, determined to find other gay law
students like him, Coleman went the next week, meeting a half dozen other gay
men attending a variety of Los Angeles area law schools, including Loyola,
UCLA, USC, Southwestern, and Pepperdine. In his oral history, John Blackburn
recalled how the Gay Academic Union at San Francisco State used flyers and
posters to advertise meetings, dances, and other events. During our conversation,
Blackburn even produced a flyer advertising a holiday dance with “Don We Now
Our Gay Apparel” prominently displayed (see fig. 4). As we looked at the flyer
together, Blackburn recalled how such advertising, along with word of mouth,
enabled gay and lesbian students to find connection with each other, particularly
important on a primarily commuter campus.24

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Fig. 4. Flyer for a dance, Gay Academic Union, San Francisco State University,
c. 1976. Courtesy of Ephemera Collection, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

The importance of newsletters and newspapers for expressing the as yet unheard
of views of gays and lesbians on campus is nicely illustrated by the Voice of the
Gay Students Coalition, a short-lived newspaper edited and produced primarily
by Mark Thompson for the multicampus Gay Students Coalition in the San
Francisco Bay Area (fig. 5). While only a few issues were ever published,

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Fig. 5. Cover, Voice of the Gay Students Coalition. Courtesy of John De Cecco
Papers, GLBT Historical Society.

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Thompson described it as an important accomplishment of the Coalition. As he

recalled, it “really, really felt important that we have our own voice and that is
why we called it The Voice.” Noting that he laid out issues on his kitchen table,
Thompson also described how they marketed The Voice on campus and around
San Francisco, observing they “distributed them on all the campuses and
throughout the city, even a few bathhouses.” Assessing the impact of their
efforts, Thompson surmised that it “helped to attract new members so within a
year, this was quite a happening organization.”25
Oral histories also reveal more about the circulation of such newsletters and
newspapers. When a gay and lesbian student organization had an office at San
Francisco State in the mid-1970s, for example, that office became a distribution
hub for gay- and lesbian-themed materials for students to pick up. In his oral
history, John Blackburn recalled how flyers and gay-themed newspapers were
regularly on display, available for anyone who stopped in.26 Don Spring, a
member of the GSU at UCLA in the early 1970s, recalled how its newsletter, the
Gayzette, a collaborative effort by a team of the (mostly) white gay men who
produced it, was especially important for students who were closeted and did
not attend GSU meetings. As Spring suggested, the newsletter was more “for
those who were more on the periphery.” When tabling on campus, for example,
the GSU put out copies of the Gayzette. Spring recalled that sometimes, rather
than speaking with a GSU member, someone would come up to the table, take
an issue and just “run off.”27
Archival research hints at how students on campus responded to the increased
visibility resulting from such flyers, posters, newsletter, and newspapers. One
response was the destruction or defacement of flyers and posters advertising
gay and lesbian student organizational meetings or events. For example, flyers
posted advertising Gay Pride Week at California State University Long Beach in
the fall of 1975 drew a variety of reactions. As the student newspaper reported,
“Students have spit on the glass case which holds a sign proclaiming this to be
Gay Pride Week.” Others tore down flyers, replacing them with ones that read
“Gays are the scum of the earth.”28 At San Diego State, a GSU member wrote to
the student paper in January 1975 complaining that the organization’s flyers
were being torn down. After this, meetings were not advertised the next
semester.29
Oral histories enhance an understanding of such struggles, especially how gay
and lesbian students responded. For example, in the fall of 1977, the GSU at
West Los Angeles College was in its infancy when the group began publicizing
its meetings with brightly colored flyers. One such flyer was illustrated with a
simple hand-drawn hanger and the words “Closets Are for Clothes” printed on
the front. As soon as the flyers were posted, however, copies were defaced or

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torn down, sparking a response from the fledgling group. As a researcher, I only
discovered the flyer itself and the conflict over its distribution through an oral
history with former student and GSU co-founder Preston Reese. During our
conversation, Reese produced two versions that are, to my knowledge, the only
original copies still extant. One included two hand-scrawled phrases defacing
the flyer: “Go to sleep with a hanger in your mouth, and wake up with a smile,”
and “Fist Fuckers unite!!” The other was a clean version with a note asking
faculty to post the flyers in classrooms, a direct response to the destruction and
defacement of the flyers on campus30 (see fig. 6).
During our conversation, Reese recalled how the GSU reacted to news of people
tearing down their signs. “Since I was the club president and I had to go to the
ICC [Inter-Club Council] every month and so at one of those we had decided
that we could ask the college to put up a glass and enclosed space for these
signs and announcements.” While not successful in their request, the students
took it upon themselves to ensure that the flyers would make their way into
West Los Angeles College classrooms. They asked professors to post clean
versions of the flyers with a typed note attached informing faculty that the
flyers “have been torn down with alarming regularity.”31
Reese’s oral history also suggests the challenges the GSU faced in distributing
these kinds of flyers on campus. One example was GSU distribution of pamphlets
from the (then named) National Gay Task Force (NGTF) that Reese described as
one of the organization’s few visible political acts (see fig. 7). He recalled the
details:
“We found that anything that was just left out or posted would be ripped down
or defaced or graffitied,” Reese noted, “so we never had things where there
could be a rack of things because that would just be tossed immediately or
defaced or whatever so we did pass out during the noon hour we would pass
some literature out . . . .” Reese went on to describe student reaction to the
distribution of the NGTF pamphlets:

People usually took them because, especially if you covered the title with
your thumb where it says “Who Is Behind the Gay Rights Movement” but
I think also it was a clever National Gay Task Force use of a headline. Here’s
this black background with white lettering saying “Who Is Behind the Gay
Rights Movement.” It doesn’t really say, you know; it could be Anita Bryant
because she was trying to portray gays as these child molesters, these
horrible people, and then you open it up and it has quotations from
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, President Carter, Senator Alan Cranston,
Margaret Mead, Shirley Maclaine, Bishop Paul Warren and these kinds of
people who were making pro-gay statements. So, some people, once they

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Flyers, GSU, West Los Angeles College, c. 1977. Courtesy of Preston Reese.
Fig. 6.

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Fig. 7. NGTF Pamphlet, c. 1977. Image courtesy of Preston Reese and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

walked away would walk back and hand it back without a word, other
people would throw it on the ground, other people would drop it in the
trash can, so [there were] a variety of reactions. A couple of people made
a point of coming back and saying, “You know I’m not gay, but that’s cool
that you’re passing that out.”32

What is critical is how oral history reveals the impact such sharing of information
about the GSU or gay rights issues had on campus. Rather than just relying on

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a flyer or poster itself as evidence, illustrating what students may (or may not)
have actually distributed, oral histories allow for a deeper understanding of the
process of distribution—how a flyer found its way to campus, how students on
campus reacted, how the GSU approached the challenges of those reactions,
and what those challenges reveal about the climate for gay and lesbian
organizing.

Oral history, ephemera, and LGBTQ community histories

As these few select examples culled from the experience of gay and lesbian
college students in California in the 1970s suggests, oral history can play an
important role in interpreting ephemeral evidence. That interplay has wider
implications for scholars who rely significantly on making sense of ephemera to
uncover the experiences of marginalized communities whose histories are not
well represented in “official” records and/or for whom few archival materials
have been saved, preserved, or made public.33 This is especially the case for
scholars of LGBTQ lives and communities who have made extensive use of
ephemera in their work. In their pioneering history of lesbian communities in
Buffalo, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community,
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis describe how one narrator
shared a newspaper clipping of an obituary, prompting further research in local
newspapers and a deeper understanding of one network of lesbians.34 In
Greetings from the Gayborhood: A Nostalgic Look at Gay Neighborhoods,
Donald F. Reuter examines posters and flyers, among other ephemeral sources,
to trace the histories of gay neighborhoods in several U.S. cities.35 Susan Stryker
and Jim Van Buskirk drew on many kinds of ephemera to interpret and represent
the LGBT history of San Francisco in their lavishly illustrated Gay by the Bay: A
History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area.36 Collections of everyday
artifacts have served similar purposes. For example, t-shirts from the collection
of the GLBT Historical Society are the centerpiece of Steve Gdula’s brief history
of the gay rights movement, which he interprets through the lens of what people
wore. Scattered throughout the book are quotes from individuals recalling the
importance of a t-shirt they owned for remembering a particular moment in
their past, especially in connection to gay politics.37 For researchers and their
audiences, hungry for queer historical representations, ephemera can be a vital
and accessible link to that past, even if visible only in its fragments. As David
Deitcher observes in the introduction to a book of historical photographs of male
friends, these “enigmatic artifacts” represent “having a history to refer to.”38
In some ways, ephemera has become the “stock in trade” of gay and lesbian
archives, as Ann Cvetkovich has suggested, influencing the kinds of available

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documentation historians readily use to support LGBTQ historical projects.39 As

a long-time volunteer at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, I have
noticed the importance of flyers, posters, buttons, photographs, match book
covers, Pride paraphernalia, and other items for the people who save and donate
them. Often arriving in small boxes, having been stored under someone’s bed,
in the back of the closet, in a basement or a personal file cabinet, the saving of
queer ephemera must be situated within a broader context where collecting and
preserving evidence of the queer past is still political. For, as E. G. Crichton, the
GLBT Historical Society’s first artist in residence, describes it, “people whose
collective and individual traces have so often been erased, taking charge of our
community memory is still a radical act.”40
Yet working with such materials, as the example of queer campus ephemera
suggests, presents certain challenges, particularly if ephemera (the posters,
flyers, unmarked photographs, and other random materials) are the only
written or visual record remaining of an event or an organization. In describing
available documentation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in Great Britain,
Sue Donnelly notes that having “rejected the traditional organizational
structures of committees, minutes, and membership lists,” the organization
nevertheless “left a trail of leaflets, photographs and manifestos” of its
political work which became a critical basis for reconstructing and
understanding the organization’s work and impact.41 Angela Vanegas suggests
a similar concern about understanding physical objects documenting the
everyday lives of gays and lesbians. She illustrates with the example of an
ordinary electrician’s drill, owned by a lesbian, and included in a local history
exhibit in Croydon. Without contextualizing such items “there is a danger that
lesbians and gay men will become invisible within the exhibition.” As Vanegas
notes, “unless the objects are explicitly connected with lesbian and gay life”
and their histories recorded, “their real meaning is lost.”42 For scholars
examining the histories of LGBTQ people and communities, while ephemera
can be particularly valuable, if not essential in their efforts to uncover evidence
of the queer past, interpretation of such evidence demands a creative
response.
Oral history holds great promise in this regard.43 Horacio Roque Ramírez, for
example, describes his approach as a process of mediation—stressing how the
interplay between something public (like a flyer from a gay Latino political
organization) and something personal (the memories shared through oral
history) can result in an enriched understanding of what otherwise might be a
scrap of paper.44 Such interrogation of evidence through personal recollection
illustrates Judith Halberstam’s call to uncover the “self-understandings
of producers” of materials found in queer archives as a way to inform the

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“construction of collective memory and a complex record of queer activity.”45

Because of ephemera’s sometimes questionable provenance—how we know
who produced it and why—“self-understandings” of ephemeral evidence
becomes all the more crucial in being able to make optimal use of such materials
in one’s research.
Oral history is well-positioned to serve this project. Whether as a source of
information (content revealed through oral history) or the ways in which events
are recalled by narrators (memories of such content), oral history provides rich
evidence from which historians can seek to understand the past. As Ronald Grele
notes, through oral history “we can marshal the evidence to begin to explore
how history is constructed, not through self-conscious literary efforts, but
through the experience of broad swaths of people as they struggle to situate
themselves in their world and demand their rights to their own understanding of
that world.”46 In this vein, oral history has become critically important in recent
LGBTQ historical research, as a host of academic studies and community-based
oral history projects in LGBTQ communities illustrate.47
Despite oral history’s value, researchers investigating the LGBTQ past must
approach it with caution, recognizing its limitations as well as its benefits. As
Nan Alamilla Boyd urges, given the absence (and sometimes silences) of
traditional “historical markers,” oral history can provide effective evidence for
drawing general conclusions about queer historical experiences, informed by
what she calls the “ephemeral sex factor” common to the collection of such oral
histories. Yet she is careful to urge awareness that oral histories in LGBTQ
research are “always offered up in relation to the larger gay and lesbian research
project, always articulated around what the narrator thinks the researcher wants
to hear, always structured around a certain historical desire for gay and lesbian
political visibility.”48 Similarly, Alessandro Portelli reminds us that oral sources
are “not objective,” their specific characteristics being “artificial, variable and
partial.”49
As such, a triangulation—of oral history with ephemera and vice versa—can
verify and enrich our understanding of both kinds of historical evidence. While
using oral history in relationship to ephemera may come with challenges—
especially connecting a particular narrator with a particular piece of ephemera—
being able to do so provides tremendous benefits. Given the ephemeral nature
of much of the evidence of LGBTQ lives, oral history helps minimize the
limitations of such ephemerality, a way to verify, triangulate, and confirm what
limited archival evidence suggests. Being able to interrogate ephemeral evidence
through oral histories enhances the historical value of that evidence, connecting
memory with an ephemeral artifact in a way that expands an understanding of
the importance of both.

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Fig. 8. Banner, GLF, San José State University. Courtesy of Warren Blumenfeld.
Photo by the author.

When I interviewed Warren Blumenfeld, an early member of the San José State
College GLF, he recalled a time when about thirty GLF members marched down
a street in San José. During our conversation, he retrieved a medium-sized box
from upstairs in his house. Opening it carefully and unfolding tissue paper
inside, he removed a small hand-made felt banner with the words “Gay Liberation
Now” imprinted in block letters (fig. 8). As we examined the banner now spread
before us on the table, Blumenfeld recalled how students marched behind it
down First Street in San José, eventually turning onto the San José State College
campus. While they marched, Blumenfeld recalled how people “threw rocks,
garbage at us, and called names and everything.” When they turned onto
campus, his first impression was one of surprise and exhilaration. “Oh my God!
I’m going to be an out and proud queer at San Jose State University on
campus!”50 As with posters, flyers, newsletters, and newspapers produced by
gay and lesbian students, this artifact’s meaning is significantly enhanced by
oral history, capturing the “self-understanding” of those who created it as part
of gay and lesbian campus organizing. For it is oral history that animates such
queer campus ephemera in particularly important ways, interjecting the
subjectivity of those who created, distributed, and experienced the impact such
flyers, posters, newsletters, and newspapers—and even homemade banners—
had on students and on campus.

David A. Reichard is Professor of History and Legal Studies in the Division of Humanities and
Communication at California State University Monterey Bay, CA, U.S., where he teaches courses in
U.S. history, politics, and legal studies. E-mail: dreichard@csumb.edu.

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NOTES
This article is an elaboration on a paper first delivered at the Oral History Association
meeting in 2009 and derives from a larger study of gay and lesbian college student
organizing in California in the 1970s. The author would like to thank all the
interviewees for their participation as well as several people who read the manuscript
and offered helpful critiques and advice, including Rina Benmayor, Deborah Cohler,
Nelson Graff, Colleen O’Neill, Craig Scott, and the OHR’s anonymous reviewers.
1 On evidentiary challenges in the writing of LGBTQ history, see Estelle Freedman,
“‘The Burning of the Letters Continues’: Elusive Identities and the Historical
Construction of Sexuality,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (1998): 181–200;
Materials commonly found in queer archives are difficult to find elsewhere. For
example, in researching the history of gay and lesbian students at UCLA, the subject
file for “gays and lesbians” in the University Archives contained few items. When I
made a similar request regarding UCLA at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian
Archives in Los Angeles, four or five bulging folders were the result, suggesting how
important such specialized archives are in collecting, preserving, and cataloging
materials from queer communities otherwise unavailable in more traditional archives.
For a discussion of the formation of a “Western Gay Archives” and its champion Jim
Kepner, whose collection (much of which could be described as ephemera) eventually
became the core for what is now the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, see C.
Todd White, Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
2 Richard Meyer, “Gay Power Circa 1970: Visual Strategies for Sexual Revolution,”
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 441–64.
3 Stephanie Walls, interview by author, San Francisco, January 8, 2010; Archivist Danelle
Moon suggests that “you can get a lot of cultural meaning out of ephemeral sorts of
materials” particularly for marginalized communities, where “there is a lot of voicelessness
in certain groups.” Danelle Moon, interview by author, San José, June 22, 2010.
4 Timothy Young suggests that while most archivists conceive of ephemera as primarily
print based, one should consider not only its format (it is not like other bibliographical
print materials) but also its function (the “intent or life utility” of the material).
Rebekah Kim, managing archivist of the GLBT Historical Society, defines ephemera
as mostly “paper based,” material “that was meant to be thrown away” and “not
having a long term use.” Beyond the type of materials and intended use, designating
something as “ephemera” is an act of cataloging, not necessarily reflecting the
intent of who those who created the materials. Archivist Stephanie Walls calls
ephemera an “artificial collection,” an invented grouping of materials standing in
contrast to a more coherent manuscript collection in which identifying authorship,
or at least the provenance of a particular item in a collection, is easier to do. Timothy
G. Young, “Evidence: Toward a Library Definition of Ephemera,” RBM: A Journal of
Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 4, no. 1 (2003): 11–26, 22, available
online at http://rbm.acrl.org/content/4/1/11.full.pdf+html (accessed July 30,
2010); Rebekah Kim, interview by author, San Francisco, June 11, 2010; Stephanie
Walls, interview by author, San Francisco, January 8, 2010.

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5 Sherry Katz, “‘Researching around Our Subjects’: Excavating Radical Women,”

Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (2008): 168–86, 169.
6 Mary Desjardins, “Ephemeral Culture/eBay Culture: Film Collectibles and Fan
Investments,” in Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire, ed. Ken Hillis et al.
(New York: Routledge, 2006) and quoted in Amelie Hastie, “Introduction: Detritus
and the Moving Image: Ephemera, Materiality, History,” Journal of Popular Culture
6, no. 2 (April 2007): 171–4. In recent years, archivists and scholars in a variety of
disciplines—from music history to film studies—have urged a reconsideration of
ephemera’s usefulness. Two recent examples of scholars using ephemera in new
ways include Joseph Heathcott, “Reading the Accidental Archive: Architecture,
Ephemera and Landscape as Evidence of an Urban Public Culture,” Winterthur
Portfolio 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 239–68 and Christina Bashford, “Writing (British)
Concert History: The Blessing and Curse of Ephemera,” Notes 64, no. 3 (March
2008): 458–73.
7 Hastie, describing ephemera as the “detritus” of the film experience, argues that the
“over-looked or the thrown away might animate” what scholars study and “expand
what counts.” Hastie, “Introduction,” 171–4.
8 John K. Walton, “Commemorating the Co-op: Nostalgia, Identity and the Visual
Traces of the Co-operative Movement in Twentieth Century Britain,” Visual Resources
24, no. 2 (June 2008): 159–72.
9 Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community,
1940s–1970s (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
10 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public
Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 8.
11 José Estabán Muñoz, “Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin
Aviance,” in Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On & Off the Stage, ed.
Jane C. Desmond, 423–42, 423 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
12 José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,”
Women & Performance 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16.
13 Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader,
2nd ed., ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 32–42, 36 (London: Routledge,
2006).
14 In his analysis of queer Latina/o lives in San Francisco, Ramírez argues that personal
memory (collected through oral histories) are especially critical given the limited
archival records documenting queer communities of color, even in LGBTQ archives. As
he suggests, oral history can counter the “whiteness of queer archiving practice.”
Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita La Campesina and the
Embodiment of Queer Latino Community Histories,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions
and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton, 111–35 (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005); See also Horacio Roque Ramírez, “Gay Latino Histories/Dying to be
Remembered: AIDS Obituaries, Public Memory and the Queer Latino Archive,” in
Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, ed. Gina M. Perez, Frank Guridy
and Adrian Burgos, Jr., 103–28 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
15 Beverly Maertz, “What Is a Kiosk?” The State Hornet 30, no. 47, March 10, 1978,
Special Collections, California State University, Sacramento. On a smaller scale, using

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such visual communication strategies is an example of what Martin Meeker calls “do
it yourself” networks—guidebooks, feminist self-published magazines, and news
services—created by gay and lesbians to circulate their own information and share
knowledge. Meeker, Contacts Desired.
16 Similarly, faculty occasionally used flyers and posters to advertise early gay and/or
lesbian themed courses on college campuses. Susan K. Freeman, “Building Lesbian
Studies in the 1970s and 1980s,” in Breaking the Wave: Women, Their Organizations,
and Feminism, 1945–1985, ed. Kathleen A. Laughlin and Jacqueline L. Castledine,
229–45 (New York: Routledge, 2010).
17 GSU, University of California, Berkeley, Flyer for a Halloween Dance, c. 1970, Charles
Thorpe Papers, Box 1, Folder 26, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public
Library; GSU, San Diego State University, Flyer for a “Peaceful Picket Against Military
Recruiters,” mid-1970s, GSU San Diego State University Subject File, ONE National
Gay and Lesbian Archive; GSU, UCLA, “Gay 70’s Dance,” c. 1974, GSU UCLA Subject
File, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archive; Gay Peoples Union, University of
California, Berkeley, “Gay Awareness Week,” c. 1978, Organizations, Ephemera
Collection, GLBT Historical Society.
18 “S.F. Students Form City-Wide Coalition,” The Voice of the Gay Students Coalition,
December 13, 1973, 3, John DeCecco Papers, Box 140, Folder 11, GLBT Historical
Society.
19 “Gay Meeting Info Sought,” The Daily Bruin, March 5, 1973. “Gay Women Organize
Here,” The Daily Bruin, March 8, 1973, Flyer for the Lesbian Sisterhood, c. 1977,
University of California Los Angeles Subject File, ONE National Gay, and Lesbian
Archives.
20 A full run of The Gayzette, an unusually well-documented example, is available at
the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Copies of newsletters
from other gay and lesbian student organizations are still available from other
campuses, but typically only a few copies remain. Some can be found in the subject
files of ONE (organized by campus) though many others are scattered in collections
across the state, from university archives to the Ephemera Collection at the GLBT
Historical Society. Only four issues of the Voice of the Gay Students Coalition were
produced and are available at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
21 Janis Wilton, “Telling Objects: Material Culture and Memory in Oral History
Interviews,” Oral History of Australia Journal 30 (2008): 41–49, 41.
22 Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), 99; Ron Grele describes photographs and other documents used in this way
as “memory jogs.” Ronald J. Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” in History of Oral
History: Foundations and Methodology, ed. Thomas L. Charton, Lois E. Meyers and
Rebecca Sharpless, 75 (Lanham, MA: Altamira Press, 2007). Judith Modell and
Charlee Brodsky used a strategy of “talking around photographs” to tease out
alternative views of Homestead’s history to emerge from oral histories. Judith Modell
and Charlee Brodsky, “Envisioning Homestead: Using Photographs in Interviewing
(Homestead, Pennsylvania),” in Interactive Oral History Interviewing, ed. Eva M.
McMahan and Kim Lacy Rogers, 141–61 (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1994).

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23 Warren Blumenfeld discovered the GLF at San José State College as the result of
reading an article in the San José State College student newspaper. Warren
Blumenfeld, “School is Not a Very Gay Place to Be,” Gay Sunshine, October/
November, 1971, Periodicals Collection, GLBT Historical Society. A few of the many
examples of articles or advertisements related to gay and lesbian students on
campus appearing in student newspapers in California include: “Gay Women Rap on
Femininity,” The State Hornet (Sacramento State College), April 23, 1971; “Gay
Liberation Sponsors Films Tonight in Haines,” UCLA Daily Bruin, April 25, 1972;
advertisement for a meeting of the Gay Student’s Union, San Jose State University,
Spartan Daily, February 17, 1977.
24 Mark Thompson, interview by author, Los Angeles, September 23, 2007; Tom
Coleman, interview by author, Los Angeles, July 15, 2008; Coleman elaborates about
his experience organizing Gay Law Students in his autobiography: Thomas F.
Coleman, The Domino Effect: How Strategic Moves for Gay Rights, Single’s Rights,
and Family Diversity Have Touched the Lives of Millions, Memoirs of an Equal Rights
Advocate (Glendale: Spectrum Institute, 2009).
25 Mark Thompson, interview by author, Los Angeles, September 23, 2007.
26 John Blackburn, interview by author, San Francisco, October 1, 2007.
27 Don Spring, interview by author, Los Angeles, September 10, 2008.
28 Cathy Franklin, “Gay Pride Week Reaction Analyzed,” The Forty-Niner 27, no. 37,
October 24, 1975, 1.
29 “Homosexuals,” Letter to the Editor, The Daily Aztec, January 28, 1975, 5.
30 Preston Reese, interview by author, Gold River, California, June 6, 2006; John
Blackburn also recalled that flyers and posters were frequent targets of vandals at
San Francisco State in the 1970s. John Blackburn, interview by author.
31 “Closets Are for Clothes” flyer, GSU, West Los Angeles College, c. 1977, Courtesy of
Preston Reese.
32 Preston Reese, interview by author.
33 Andrew Flinn, “Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and
Challenges,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 28, no. 2 (October 2007): 151–76.
34 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold:
The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993), 390, FN 8; Davis
and Kennedy shared copies of these clippings with the Lesbian Herstory Archives,
extending the reach of these clippings further.
35 Donald F. Reuter, Greetings from the Gayborhood: A Nostalgic Look at Gay
Neighborhoods (New York: Abrams Image, 2008).
36 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).
37 Steve Gdula, Wearing History: T-Shirts from the Gay Rights Movement (New York:
Alyson Books, 2007).
38 David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918
(New York: Harry Abrams Publishers, 2001) quoted in Charles E. Morris, III,
Introduction to Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical
Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris, III (Columbia: The University of South Carolina
Press, 2007), 6.

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39 Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 243; Amanda Kreklau, “Collections Conundrums:

Considering the First Major GLBT Museum” (MA thesis, Brandeis University, 2009), 6.
40 E. G. Crichton, “Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive,” Fabulous: The Journal of the
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society (Summer 2009): 15. For
more about the project, see E. G. Crichton, “Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive”
at http://www.lgbtlineage.net (accessed September 20, 2009).
41 Sue Donnelly, “Coming Out in the Archives: The Hall Carpenter Archives at the
London School of Economics,” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 180–4;
Echoing this observation, Lisa Power, in her history of the GLF in Britain, urged
anyone with materials related to GLF history to preserve them. “DON’T THROW
THEM OUT,” she noted in an Appendix. Lisa Power, No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles:
An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front, 1970–73 (London: Cassell, 1995),
Appendix 5.
42 Angela Vanegas, “Representing Lesbians and Gay Men in British Social History
Museums,” in Museums, Society, Inequality, ed. Richard Sandell, 98–109 (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
43 Compare how oral history can inform historical interpretation of another somewhat
ephemeral “event,” dance performances. “Because of the temporal nature of dance,”
as Jeff Friedman suggests, “the art form has a lack of primary documents; it is
difficult to record an account of live performance. As a result, we know little of how
movement practices speak to history. This lack, while due to many complex factors,
also can be attributed in part to the contingencies of live performance.” Jeff
Friedman, “‘Muscle Memory’: Performing Oral History,” Oral History 33, no. 2
(Autumn 2005): 35–47, 35.
44 Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “Memory and Mourning: Living Oral History with Queer
Latinos and Latinas in San Francisco,” in Oral History and Public Memories, ed.
Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, 165–86, 173 (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2008). Compare Anandi Ramamurthy, “The Politics of Britain’s Asian Youth
Movements,” Race and Class 48, no. 2 (2006): 38–60, which draws on interviews
with participants supplemented with flyers, posters, and calendars preserved and
provided by members of Birmingham Asian Youth Movement.
45 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 169–70.
46 Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” 81.
47 On the importance of oral history to LGBTQ historical research, see Elizabeth
Lapovsky Kennedy, “Telling Tales: Oral History and the Construction of Pre-Stonewall
Lesbian History,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 58–79; Horacio N. Roque
Ramírez, “My Community, My History, My Practice,” Oral History Review 29, no. 2
(2002): 87–91; Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Who Is the Subject?” Queer Theory Meets Oral
History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (2008): 177–89. Most studies
of twentieth-century queer history have relied to a great degree on oral history.
Some notable examples relying significantly on oral history include Alan Bérubé,
Coming Out Under Fire: A History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New
York: The Free Press, 1990); Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather; John Howard,
Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999); Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia,

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1945–72 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide
Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003); Steve Estes, “Ask and Tell: Gay Veterans, Identity and Oral
History on a Civil Rights Frontier,” Oral History Review 32, no. 2 (2005): 21–47;
Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired; Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the
Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll
and Graf, 2006); E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, an Oral
History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
48 Boyd, “Who Is the Subject?”
49 Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different.”
50 Warren Blumenfeld, interview by author, Ames, Iowa, July 16, 2006.

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