Presenting a Queer Past: A Case for the GLBT History Museum

Radical History Review EXHIBITING ARCHIVES/ARCHIVING EXHIBITS Presenting the Queer Past A Case for the GLBT History Museum Don Romesburg T he January 2011 opening of the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood marked the culmination of over a quarter century of collecting, preserving, and interpreting the Bay Area’s queer history. The museum is a project of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society, home to one of the world’s largest and most accessible community-based queer archives. Organizers conceived the museum as a vehicle through which archival materials could be presented to the public in compelling ways, with an eye toward diversity and social justice. The museum was to showcase the archive’s depth and breadth, attract new collections, engage the public with the importance of queer history, and produce powerful exhibitions linking past and present. Organizers also hoped to attract new GLBT Historical Society supporters and deepen commitments of those already invested in its mission. Even as the museum brings the archives into interaction with many publics, however, contemporary forces in San Francisco threaten to render it complicit in a sanitized, tourist-oriented Castro and gay history. How successfully this museum can represent its related queer archive — and the past, present, and future it endeavors to sustain — remains an open question. By assuming the identity “museum,” the GLBT Historical Society runs the risk of being disciplined into its long-standing colonial, hierarchical, bourgeois structures that tend toward elitism. Mainstream museums increasingly mount GLBTrelated shows and will always play a crucial role in winning converts, solidifying GLBT legitimacy, and creating threads for our belonging in the tapestry of history. Radical History Review Issue 120 (Fall 2014) DOI 10.1215/01636545-2703769 © 2014 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 131 Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 132 Radical History Review Yet queer museum studies scholarship details the challenges of doing GLBT history in public and other large endowment institutions. These include the pressure toward grand progressive narratives that reproduce the repressive-hypothesis-topride trajectory, emphasis on famous gays, inclusivity that sustains heteronormative master narratives and upholds homo/hetero binaries of difference, consignment of queerness to temporary displays, and censorship of nonnormative or explicit lives, acts, and representations. Additionally, restraint among professionals at nonqueer museums can have a closeting effect on their “erotic intelligence.”1 To date, GLBT History Museum curators, who have generally been queer historians who are also activists committed to social justice, have countered many of the big M museum challenges. They have done so by being accountable to the GLBT Historical Society’s grassroots archive that links saving our objects and telling our stories to saving our lives. The Lesbian Herstory Archives had it right back in the 1970s, when it insisted that the “will to remember” relied upon a commitment to those it claimed to represent and a mandate to keep expanding and complicating who might fall under that sign.2 The GLBT Historical Society has its struggles and shortcomings but has developed goodwill by keeping the Bay Area’s GLBT history safe and accessible as it strives to incorporate racially, gender, and socioeconomically diverse components of the region’s complex queer community. One might question, given the resources required to maintain the archives, whether the added burden of a brick-and-mortar museum is worthwhile. This article proposes that it is vital to the evolution of the organization’s mission. The archive matters crucially to the way the GLBT History Museum does public history, which, in turn, grows the archive in important ways. I combine interpretation of how archive and exhibition correspond, analyses of museum media coverage and visitors, exploration of how exhibitions from its first three years (2011 – 13) reflect key interventions emerging within queer museum studies, and scrutiny of the organization’s site-specific opportunities and challenges. This assessment is grounded in my active participation in the museum’s creation (then as a GLBT Historical Society board member and archival volunteer) and exhibitions (now as a curator). By both intention and design, the GLBT Historical Society engages in three approaches linking queer museum and archive: coordinating communities, demonstrating queer belonging, and making power plain. Coordinating communities involves the design of exhibitions that consciously bring together disparate networks across time and space. Through such coordination, diverse materials come into the GLBT Historical Society’s archives. Moreover, people seldom encouraged to maintain and share their history gain the skills and platform to do so in ways that strengthen community. In the process, other audiences are brought into the conversation. For Love and Community: Queer Asian Pacific Islanders Take Action, 1960s – 1990s, which ran September 2012 – January 2013, models the critical practice of Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 133 Figure 1. Marion Abdullah (left), one of the community organizers whose story was featured in For Love and Community: Queer Asian Paciic Islanders Take Action, 1960s – 1990s. Photo credit: Gerard Koskovich / GLBT Historical Society coordinating communities. Curator Amy Sueyoshi began the exhibition process by surveying the archives. She found that only 30 percent of the materials cover women, less than 5 percent are from the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community, and only 2 of the 709 collections come from queer API women. Because the first generation of openly out API queer women and trans people were approaching their late sixties, she created the Dragon Fruit Project. It held archiving seminars, collected oral histories and materials for deposit at the GLBT Historical Society, and mounted the exhibit. Programming brought together generations of API queer people (fig. 1) and attracted many other audiences.3 In fall 2012 the GLBT History Museum also developed the Community Gallery Project to partner community curators with the museum’s exhibitions professionals to create new perspectives on Bay Area queer history and attract new audiences and acquisitions. An early Community Gallery show, Legendary: African American GLBT Past Meets Present, which ran February-July 2013, utilized the relatively few black-related holdings in the archives and exposed gaps that could inform future acquisition strategy. Community curator Byron Mason, collaborating with me as the museum’s Community Gallery Project curatorial consultant, brought archival Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 134 Radical History Review artifacts and images into conversation with a video montage of five contemporary Bay Area queer and trans African American activists and cultural producers. The interviews, now in the archives, testify to tensions of belonging within the Bay Area’s black queer communities, racial marginalization within white-dominant gay spaces, activism and accountability, the importance of drag and nightlife to black queer vitality, racialized and gendered politics of erotic representation, and struggles with AIDS and poverty. The opening reception attracted a multiracial, multigendered, and multigenerational audience. During the run, thousands saw Legendary.4 Another Community Gallery show, Vicki Marlane: I’m Your Lady, ran from November 2013 to March 2014. It showcases the life of a trans woman and drag performer who, as the chat panel reads, “got her start as a sideshow carny, rose to fame as a female impersonator, and, in her third act, transformed into the community icon she was born to be.” Community curator Felicia “Flames” Elizondo has been active in San Francisco’s queer community for nearly fifty years and was a “screaming queen” involved in the 1966 Compton’s cafeteria riot.5 As the keeper of Marlane’s personal archive once the performer passed in 2011, Elizondo was wary when I approached her in June 2012 to consider the GLBT Historical Society as a home for the materials. She felt that transgender people generally and the Compton’s riot specifically had not been given enough prominence at the museum, a criticism others shared. An extended dialogue ensued, involving many Facebook messages, several meetings where she shared artifacts and stories, and a back-and-forth dialogue conceptualizing a potential exhibit. Working in earnest on the show from July through November 2013, trust continued to build. By the time the show opened, Elizondo and the organization developed a solidly collaborative relationship. The reception was packed with generations of drag and trans performers, longtime fans and friends of Marlane, and regular museumgoers. Elizondo now intends to deed the Marlane collection to the archives.6 All three shows produced intersecting social and cultural space within the museum through openly addressing deficiencies within the archive’s holdings. Through coordinating communities, they also created practices through which the museum and the Castro, a neighborhood that overwhelmingly favors white, affluent gay men, could better realize their potential as gathering places for all queer people. They underscore the effort and intentionality necessary in queer practices linking museum and archives. The GLBT Historical Society has long valued diverse queer peoples’ materials over famous gays’ papers, even if such shows suggest that results have been uneven. While its archive has outstanding famous gays’ collections, mostly established in its early years, such materials can today find university and public archival homes. The same cannot reliably be said for the rest. Additionally, while many archives focus mostly on manuscripts and photographs, the GLBT Historical Society has collected objects and textiles essential for dynamic and compelling museum Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 135 exhibition. For the purposes of queer public history, diversity in subject matter and form merit the space, resources, and labor they take to maintain. Without constant and specific diligence, however, holdings will always veer toward those most likely to have the space, time, and sense of entitlement to claim a place in history — often well-connected white, gay men. Museum exhibition has begun to play an important role in building an archive truly representative of the communities it ostensibly serves, an ongoing effort necessarily involving many strategies and activities. The museum’s approach to queer public history, then, relies upon its intimate relationship with the archives. Easy access allows for a cost- and time-efficient exhibition attuned to our community’s complex dynamism. The GLBT Historical Society’s twenty-two thousand linear feet of archive contains approximately two hundred artifact, textile, and art collections; five hundred manuscript collections; seventy linear feet of ephemera; nearly three thousand T-shirts and five thousand posters; over five hundred oral histories; and over two thousand hours of recorded media. Through the museum, the institution has an exponentially greater level of visibility. More people now want to preserve their queer history. Ever more diverse and rich materials will find a home at the GLBT Historical Society. Still, the organization’s work to professionally maintain and make holdings accessible has been strained by rapid acquisition of new materials, causing the organization to slow the flow. Genuinely inclusive collection, preservation, and organization are expensive and time-consuming, and the current archive space is nearly full. To continue and expand its eclectic and queer approach, the institution will require a substantially bigger archival footprint, more staffing, and costly space-efficient storage. This is not a simple problem to solve — to date, the museum’s success has not brought with it resources substantial enough to make such changes into reality. Unless this situation changes, the museum’s potential to coordinate communities vis-à-vis the archive will be truncated. Despite this state of affairs, the museum has by many measures been a success. The GLBT Historical Society has capitalized on the stamp of legitimacy bestowed on a museum that looks like a museum, located in one of San Francisco’s most touristed parts. Coordinating communities facilitates engagement with wider publics who may or may not have a deep investment in a particular show or its subject matter. Selling “the public” on the worthiness of a queer history museum is also about explaining the function and value of sustaining a long-standing archive by and for GLBT people. Organizers expected an enthusiastic reception when they opened the GLBT History Museum, but they could not have anticipated the worldwide media coverage it received. With modest in-house public relations, a local interest and national GLBT story became a global phenomenon. The story went viral on the web on January 12 and 13, 2011. A January 11 Google search for the term “GLBT History Museum” produced 16 pages, while a January 13 search yielded approximately 70,400 pages. On January 25, a Spanish-language search for “museo Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 136 Radical History Review gay” plus “San Francisco” found an additional approximately 27,400 pages for the preceding month. Within its first months, coverage occurred in at least thirty-eight languages and at least seventy-five countries. Online, broadcast, and print reportage was overwhelmingly positive or neutral. Coverage often identified San Francisco, and the Castro, as a good fit, given its reputation as a site of GLBT historical and present significance. The museum’s arrival suggested the queer past was interesting to society in general.7 In the first two years, approximately thirty thousand visitors came through, with staff estimating a 70/30 split between tourists and locals. Docents gave nearly one hundred tours to everything from high school gay-straight alliances to corporate employee groups. Audio tours provided visitors a deeper experience in English, German, Japanese, and Spanish. In the first three years, GLBT History Museum staff and volunteers have mounted six major exhibitions, twelve short-term shows, and over sixty programs, almost all well attended.8 While many visitors would like a “greatest hits” exhibition of the GLBT past, organizers understand that this is not enough. The demonstration of any GLBT belonging can, of course, be revelatory. Many, particularly non-GLBT, visitors to museums have given queer pasts little thought prior to interacting with related exhibitions. It is as if we jumped out of the shadows into Stonewall and, after a brief detour through AIDS, landed in gay marriage. So the GLBT History Museum begins by giving them what they often think they came for. The first exhibition people encounter features Harvey Milk’s kitchen table and bull horn as well as the pantsuits in which Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were legally married in 2008 alongside an issue of the Ladder and other materials by these pioneering lesbians. From that jumping-off point, however, exhibitions complicate matters and stay truer to the archives in the process. In conversation with visitors, I have been struck by some tourists’ amazement at the century of materials and multiple forms of belonging showcased. Through realizing that they did not know this history, they begin to question why it never even occurred to them. This encounter opens up new possibilities for queer recognition beyond the normative frames with which they arrived. In the past decade, queer museum studies scholars have sought to articulate how museums might demonstrate and facilitate queer and GLBT intelligibility beyond “hidden from history,” heroic, or sanitized narratives. Within exhibition theory, best practices emphasize what I characterize as demonstrating belonging and making power plain. Demonstrating belonging builds upon and affirms processes of community, whether civic, liberal humanist, identitarian, intersectional, coalitional, or conditional. GLBT people have often been estranged from national identities and other normative imagined communities. Museums can “demarcat[e] who is legitimate or illegitimate; acceptable or unacceptable; worthy of grieving or not worthy of grieving,” writes Anna Conlan. “Thus, museum practice and theory have respon- Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 137 sibilities towards disavowed queer lives past and present.”9 Simply bearing witness to the struggles for access to civil rights, markets, subcultures, relationships, bodies, and psyches can affirm queer lives beyond narratives of normativity. In the GLBT History Museum’s first main gallery exhibit, Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating San Francisco’s GLBT History, cocurators Sueyoshi, Koskovich, and myself sought to underscore multiple forms of belonging. As the introductory chat panel reads, these are “sometimes interlinking, sometimes isolated, sometimes in conflict.” Even as the show highlights plurality, the introduction makes a universalizing appeal for visitors to connect with the show’s twenty-two subject cases. “All of them reflect deeply human themes,” it states: “the search for companionship and pleasure; the struggle for self-determination and respect in an often-hostile society; the value of individual and collective expression; and the spirit, ingenuity, and wit that have been keys to our survival.” In addition to predictable themes such as “The Strategy of Equality” and “Bar Life: Going Out,” cases such as “Queers of Color Organizing” and “Lou Sullivan: A Life Transformed” demonstrate multifaceted and contested belonging. In the former, curators initially began with several items representing overt gay community racism. We edited down to one, a newspaper clipping describing the 1984 protest of racial discrimination at the Midnight Sun, a Castro bar. Other case materials suggest how queer people of color worked together and distinctly to create community, media, activism, and wellness. Even the Midnight Sun item was later replaced with a more dynamic postcard representing queer youth of color coming together through LYRIC, a local GLBT youth organization cofounded in 1988 by Japanese American lesbian Donna Ozawa. The curators made this exchange because, as Sueyoshi says in the audio tour, we wanted the case to “speak to not what’s obvious — that racism exists — but, instead, to what’s inspiring.” While GLBT racial discrimination still introduces the case’s chat panel, curators felt that the core message was less about inclusion into gay, white, and middle-class norms than about the collectivity of queer people of color on their own terms. The latter approach better reflects the archive’s queers of color holdings than the former does. While some materials document antiracist protests of gay establishments, far more convey rich worlds of arts, politics, sex, and community that render such protests marginal to the lives contained within.10 The Louis Sullivan case showcases the ways one trans man and GLBT Historical Society cofounder fought to belong to multiple communities, identities, and histories. The chat panel describes how, as a sexually active gay man, doctors initially disqualified him for sex-reassignment surgery and how he pioneered alternative access models for female-to-male (FTM) services. A newsletter of Golden Gate Guys, an early trans men’s social group, displays his role as an FTM social and political organizer, while a snapshot of Sullivan in a tuxedo demonstrates his lived identity as a man. Curators placed his groundbreaking book From Female to Male: The Life Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 138 Radical History Review of Jack Bee Garland at the top to emphasize how Sullivan, like many other queer people, claimed belonging through historical identifications.11 British blogger Ceri Padley reflects the affective force of the exhibition’s demonstration of belonging. Like many, she came to bear witness to Milk’s “fight for equal rights.” But she was transformed as she “wandered” through the museum. “So much pain and suffering was caused and so much bravery and togetherness rose up so everyone could be able to walk down the street with their head held high and not be treated like an outsider,” she wrote. “I began to cry. I suddenly understood the bravery so many people needed to step forward [and] be proud of who they are.” In an act of solidarity she declared her “official and long- overdue coming out” as bisexual.12 Not all bisexuals have shared her enthusiasm. Another blogger experienced the lack of a specific case dedicated to “bisexual/pansexual/fluid/+ people” as yet another example of bi erasure by gays and lesbians. She observes that when bisexuals are mentioned in Our Vast Queer Past, it is “in the context of BDSM [bondage/discipline/ sadomasochism], swinging, and group sex.”13 While not technically accurate — bisexuals appear, for example, in a case on spirituality — the larger point remains. The exhibition’s design, lacking a designated bisexuality case, plays into a way in which belonging is often not demonstrated for bi people, namely, erasure or obfuscation through a casual folding into larger initialisms, movements, and communities. The exhibition does not bring visitors into a dialogue about why this might be, what historical dynamics inform it, and what readings of the past have furthered such erasures. The GLBT History Museum is looking toward new exhibitions that demonstrate histories of “nonmonosexual” belonging and organizing. In the process, the GLBT Historical Society hopes to augment related archival holdings. In addition to demonstrating belonging, the other best practice queer museum studies scholars advocate is making power plain. Queering the production of knowledge means highlighting and destabilizing frames of perception through which we come to, or lose, embodiment, subjectivity, space, rights, and affect. Museums can, but seldom do, disrupt normative modes of representation linking past and present, including progress narratives of GLBT assimilative inevitability. James Sanders calls for queer exhibitions to not just break silences and uncover secret histories but also “guide perceptual deconstructions as well as intersectionalities.” Hilde Hein similarly promotes feminist perspectives that underscore fragmentation and ambiguity. She advocates exhibition that encourages visitors to produce irreverent classifications against seemingly omniscient narratives. Exhibitions and programming should dissolve boundaries between curators and visitors through inviting the latter to test new associations between past and present, self and other, and the forms of social power that discipline people’s lives. Museums allow visitors to try on the complexities of subjugated knowledges with intense, cursory, and/or critical engagement. This experience can create what Barbara Soren calls “transforma- Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 139 tional” triggers, through which “interconnectedness” results in “more inclusive . . . open . . . and reflective” perspectives.14 Our Vast Queer Past is spatialized in thematic cases rather than chronologically sequenced. The introductory panel explains that the show “calls on its visitors to help paint the bigger picture”: “As you mix and match among the themes and materials, what new connections do you find? How do the stories speak to our lives today and our possibilities for the future?” In terms of visitor reception, results of this approach have been mixed. Of forty-three comments on four visitor websites (such as Yelp), six complain that the approach is “random,” “confusing,” or “lacking organization,” while ten appreciate it as “thematic,” “well- organized,” or “jampacked.” One blogger was “pleasantly surprised by the way stories were told and, more importantly, questions [that] were asked,” in particular how the museum “incorporated different racialized GLBT histories throughout many of the exhibits,” resulting in a “complex (and accurate) representation of queer history.”15 The processes through which museum organizers attempt to present the queer past reflect tensions within public history more generally, but the stakes are arguably higher at the GLBT History Museum, given its accountability to its archive. In Our Vast Queer Past, one way power is made plain is by bringing unexpected associations together through its themes. “Lesbian Sex Wars” positions Women Against Violence in Pornography and the Media’s late 1970s and early 1980s letters, photographs, and press releases alongside sex-positive lesbian artifacts from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The chat panel encourages visitors to grapple with “links between sexual practices, personal identities, and political power” and notes that while “sex-positive feminists . . . prevailed,” sexual violence and discrimination against women continue to warrant activism. The audio tour directs the listener to a flyer to a 1979 women’s BDSM party hosted by Pat Califia at the Catacombs, a gay male sex club. It notes that Califia is a transgender theorist who once identified as a lesbian and wrote a famous essay about lesbians and gay men “doing it together.” Refusing to mischaracterize lesbians as one side or the other, contain the issues in the past, or stabilize bodies and identities among those involved, the case confronts museumgoers with multiplicity and the potential risks and affordances of various positions.16 A widely mentioned case is “Jiro Onuma: Documented/Undocumented,” which comes from the only known archive of an adult queer internee of the World War II Japanese American concentration camps. A minimal assemblage of photographs, personal effects, and government documents mark the location and dislocation of Jiro Onuma (1904 – 1990) across the twentieth century, from his 1923 Japanese passport, through a 1930s Japantown studio portrait with dandy friends, to his 1942 classification as an enemy alien, to physique pictures he may have taken into internment, to his 1956 US naturalization papers and, later, his US passport. The audio tour explains, “We only know about him because the brother of a longtime Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 140 Radical History Review Figure 2. Close-up of the Jiro Onuma case in Our Vast Queer Past. Photo credit: Gerard Koskovich / GLBT Historical Society friend of his brought the GLBT Historical Society a small box of materials years after Onuma died” and told the archivist that Onuma had been a lover of men. The case (fig. 2) makes power plain, first, by disorienting what many visitors think that they know about a major world event, placing queerness into the history of internment. Second, it testifies to the precarity some sexual subjects —particularly transnational ones — have in relation to states. Third, it directs visitors to the precariousness of archives for subordinated knowledges and subjects. What is made knowable through these artifacts is up for interpretation, given their reliance on the collection’s provenance and the vast remaining gaps. Scholar Tina Takemoto challenges the GLBT History Museum’s interpretation of a key snapshot on display. She proves that a snapshot that archivists and curators claimed is of Onuma, a lover, and a friend in the Topaz camp is actually of Onuma’s lover, his friend, and another man relocated to the high-security Tule Lake camp. Takemoto’s essay underscores how crucial it is for queer public historians to resist our yearnings for coherence in the documents and objects we preserve and display. The GLBT History Museum is changing the photograph’s object tag and will feature a program by Takemoto in which she will walk visitors through her research. The audio tour raises a further question: Would this collection even exist today if not for the GLBT Historical Soci- Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 141 ety’s archives? One Japanese blogger reflected that he was surprised to find this case at the museum. Such an unsettling realization compels reconsideration of queerness, history, and the contingency of mobility and citizenship across time.17 One of the GLBT History Museum’s strengths is its capacity for ongoing revision and adjustment. Moreover, the museum is directly accountable to diverse constituencies with deep investments in the stories told. Highlighting archival holdings, growing areas where collection has been weak, and reinterpreting materials are open and visible processes of exhibition and programming. In ways impossible previously, the museum puts the archives into ongoing dialogues with many publics. Its archives, in turn, help produce a museum where people looking for gay San Francisco can visit queer history. The museum’s Castro location presents distinct challenges, however. Few would doubt that it is an optimal location for attracting local gay patrons and tourists from around the globe. Still, the neighborhood has had a history of hostility toward women, people of color, youth, trans people, and the poor ever since it became a gay ghetto. Its 1970s emergence as a gay political district relied upon its production as a gay spending and tourist zone. The gay-led Castro Village Association and the citywide Golden Gate Business Association (GGBA) oversaw this process. Nan Alamilla Boyd details how this neighborhood dynamic parallels the refashioning of other “ethnic” or “cultural” neighborhoods in San Francisco (such as Chinatown) from locations of policing, segregation, and economic hardship into desirable tourist destinations in the city’s postindustrial, neoliberal economies. Tourist appeal granted some racialized, sexualized, and gendered constituencies political and economic clout, often at the cost of marginalizing others. In the Castro, residential and commercial rents soared across the 1970s and continued to climb while the GGBA promoted the neighborhood as a gay tourist destination beginning in the 1980s. In 2009 the San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau launched a GLBT tourism effort. It markets San Francisco to gays and sells the “historic” Castro district to tourists generally.18 In the past decade, many aging gay people and people with AIDS have been forced from longtime Castro rentals by new gay and nongay owners of what are now million-dollar flats. Police work with neighborhood merchants to enforce San Francisco’s sit/lie law, which criminalizes resting on public sidewalks and disproportionately affects homeless and marginally housed people, including queer youth. From 2004 to 2006, GLBT people of color and allies mounted a protest against racial and gender discrimination at the Badlands, a popular Castro nightclub, only to see owner Les Natali purchase the Pendulum, the neighborhood’s only bar with a primarily African American clientele, and turn it into another white-dominant venue. When nudists recently congregated in Jane Warner Plaza, the neighborhood public parklet, openly gay San Francisco supervisor Scott Wiener (who holds Milk’s old seat) responded with legislation that banned public nudity citywide. Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 142 Radical History Review Meanwhile, the Castro Community Benefit District promotes a planned “Rainbow Honor Walk” memorializing global GLBT “heroes and heroines” through plaques placed into neighborhood sidewalks. Natali’s replacement for the Pendulum is called Toad Hall, meant to invoke a beloved 1970s gay bar of the same name. Harvey’s, a nearby restaurant, features blown-up photographs licensed from the GLBT Historical Society that celebrate the 1970s Castro. In January 2013 city officials designated Twin Peaks Tavern, which sits at the heart of the neighborhood, a historic landmark in large part because it is thought to be the first gay bar anywhere with open plate glass windows and thus to represent the openness of a liberated gay community. As I write elsewhere, “Even as the Castro ramps up as an international tourist destination where people come to consume gay history, to read the plaque where Harvey Milk’s camera shop was, to buy a postcard at the GLBT History Museum, and to get a drink at Twin Peaks, I want this place to provide the kinds of generative diversity that queer life allows.”19 The GLBT History Museum’s queer curatorial and programming methodologies and relationship to the Historical Society’s archive enable its resistance to the gay history theme park bent of today’s Castro. Even so, the museum participates in the neighborhood’s touristic mobilization. This tension makes for odd bedfellows. To give just one example, Badlands / Toad Hall is one of the museum’s major sponsors. For now, the museum is part of what is going right in the Castro when so much else is not, because it pushes for more awareness, dialogue, diversity, critique, and justice. The framing of our past only through nostalgia, heroics, inclusion, or commodity does little to sustain us collectively as we struggle for possibility here and now. So far, the GLBT History Museum has balanced its relationship to its archive, proximity to a capital M museum, and a changing Castro with its functionality as a site for coordinating communities, queer belonging, and making power plain. To continue to present the past meaningfully the museum and archive will have to critically engage multiple publics by linking the history they convey to contemporary dilemmas facing diverse queer peoples locally, nationally, and across the globe. Stay tuned. Notes Elements of this essay were presented at the 2012 American Historical Association conference and the 2013 Queering the Museum symposium at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. I thank fellow panelists, audience members, and this issue’s anonymous reviewers and editors for their insights. 1. Stuart Frost, “Secret Museums: Hidden Histories of Sex and Sexuality,” Museums and Social Issues 3, no. 1 (2008): 29 – 40; Robert Mills, “Queer Is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Histories and Public Culture,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums: A Routledge Reader, ed. Amy K. Levin (New York: Routledge, 2010), 80 – 88; Michael Petry, “Hidden Histories: The Experience of Curating a Same-Sex Exhibition and the Problems Encountered,” in Levin, Gender, Sexuality and Museums, 151 – 62; Maria-Anna Tseliou, “Disruptive Paradigms: Challenging the Heteronormative Frame in Museums,” Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review Romesburg | The GLBT History Museum 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 143 International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts 7, no. 2 (2013): 1 – 12; Paul Gabriel, “Why Grapple with Queer When You Can Fondle It? Embracing Our Erotic Intelligence,” in Levin, Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, 71 – 79. Joan Nestle, “The Will to Remember: The Lesbian Herstory Archives of New York,” Feminist Review, no. 34 (1990): 86 – 94. A promising British museum trend has been inviting visitors to pursue queer readings through interpretive frames and exhibition across multiple galleries. R. B. Parkinson and Kate Smith, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity across the World (London: British Museum Press, 2013). Gerard Koskovich, Amy Sueyoshi, and Don Romesburg, “Imperial Theme Park or Site of Resistance? The Case of the GLBT History Museum” (paper presented at the Queering the Museum symposium, Seattle, June 8, 2013); GLBT Historical Society, “Exhibition Opening: For Love and Community” album, www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151021603861176 .416942.12195271175&type=3 (accessed June 28, 2013). See GLBT Historical Society, “Exhibit Opening: Legendary” and “Exhibit Installation: Legendary” albums, www.facebook.com/GLBTHistory/photos_albums (accessed June 28, 2013). Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman (2005; San Francisco: Frameline, 2006), DVD. See GLBT Historical Society, “Exhibit Opening: Vicki Marlane: I’m Your Lady” and “Behind the Scenes: Installing Vicki Marlane” albums, www.facebook.com/GLBTHistory /photos_albums (accessed November 20, 2013). Correspondence in author’s possession. Not all reportage was positive or neutral. But of approximately five hundred instances of coverage from the first six months of the year, only twelve were clearly negative. Curator and media consultant Koskovich generated much of the media and assessment. GLBT Historical Society, “The GLBT History Museum Attracts Worldwide Media Coverage,” www.glbthistory.org/museum/museummedia.html (accessed December 26, 2011); Gerard Koskovich, “Media Pick-Ups: Opening of GLBT History Museum,” GLBT Historical Society internal report (October 22, 2011); Koskovich, “Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating San Francisco’s GLBT History” (paper presented on the “History: Remembrance and Memory — Preservation of Cultural Heritage” panel at the International MANEO Conference, Berlin, December 1, 2011). Author correspondence with GLBT Historical Society staff, 2011 – 13. Anna Conlan, “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” in Levin, Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, 261. The “Queers of Color Organizing” audio tour can be accessed online via m.glbthistory.org or by calling 415-226-2580 and pressing 39#. Louis Sullivan, From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland (Boston: Alyson Books, 1990). GLBT Historical Society, “A British Blogger’s Visit to The GLBT History Museum Inspires a Life- Changing Decision,” History Happens, December 2012. Hannah, “GLBT History Museum, San Francisco,” Non-mono Perspective, August 21, 2012, nonmono-perspective.tumblr.com/post/29889500513/glbt-history-museum-san-francisco. James Sanders, “The Museum’s Silent Sexual Performance,” Museums and Social Issues 3, no. 1 (2008): 20 – 21; Hilde Hein, “Looking at Museums from a Feminist Perspective,” in Levin, Gender, Sexuality, and Museums, 53 – 64; Barbara J. Soren, “Museum Experiences That Change Visitors,” Museum Management and Curatorship 24, no. 3 (2009): 234. I reviewed all comments posted from January 1, 2011, to October 10, 2013, on Yelp, www .yelp.com/biz/glbt-history-museum-san-francisco; Trip Advisor, www.tripadvisor.com Published by Duke University Press Radical History Review 144 16. 17. 18. 19. Radical History Review /Attraction_Review-g60713-d603315-Reviews-GLBT_History_Museum-San_Francisco _California.html; Gay Cities, sanfrancisco.gaycities.com/organizations/301044-the-glbt -history-museum; and Foursquare, foursquare.com/v/glbt-history-museum-san-francisco -ca/4ce453c3f5f9236a1bd58461 (all accessed November 1, 2013); Becky Cory, “GLBT History Museum vs. Port of San Francisco,” Becky Cory, May 6, 2013, www.beckycory.ca /cultural-critique/glbt-history-museum-port-of-sanfrancisco. The audio tour “Lesbian Sex Wars” can be accessed online via m.glbthistory.org or by calling 415-226-2580 and pressing 44#. Tina Takemoto, “Looking for Jiro Onuma: A Queer Meditation on the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II,” GLQ (in press); the “Jiro Onuma: Documented/ Undocumented” audio tour can be accessed online via m.glbthistory.org or by calling 415226-2580 and pressing 41#; Diary of a Normal Life (blog) [in Japanese], August 3, 2012, spornberger.blog21.fc2.com/blog-entry- 66.html. Nan Alamilla Boyd, “San Francisco’s Castro District: From Gay Liberation to Tourist Destination,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 9, no. 3 (2011): 228 – 39; Boyd, “Sex and Tourism: The Economic Implications of the Gay Marriage Movement,” Radical History Review, no. 100 (2008): 223 – 35. Don Romesburg, “The Glass Coffin,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 14, no. 2 (2013): 172. Published by Duke University Press