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Week 11: Fin

This is the point in the semester when my anxiety spikes at the thought of writing a paper. Even though I know all the points I need to make, the order I should make them in, and have past experience that my papers are strong papers, I still get skittish at the thought of actually sitting to write them. As always, I’ll have to wrangle both my procrastination and perfectionism into order. This week, I made some last-minute touches to the timeline, adding links to the Omeka database, finished my readings, and created a rough outline for the paper. 

A lot happened this summer, both inside my internship and otherwise. A lot is still happening. With fall quickly approaching, I am glad I had this internship to be able to adjust better to working on bigger projects from home and to come away from the stress and anxiety I experienced at the end of the spring semester after we transitioned to remote work. It certainly hasn’t been a perfect system--my productivity drops after about 3 in the afternoon--but I definitely feel a lot better about fall. Further, the practical skills I gained from doing this work, such as a stronger sense of editorial style and a new ability to conduct local history, will help me as I move into other projects, both old and new. For my thesis, a deeper appreciation of the difficulty of queer history and queer theory will help as I round out my argument. And as of this writing, in two weeks’ time I will be receiving a decision from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History about a remote fall internship. (Fingers crossed!) The skills gained in this internship will, I am sure, apply in some way to that one. 

Endings are hard. Conclusions have always been my weakest component of writing, and somehow a multi-week blog post is no exception. In some ways, I feel I’ve said everything I wanted to say in the past nine weeks. In other ways, there are some concepts that I may not fully realize until I move on and work on other things. Whether I continue on with the Museum I’m not sure yet--my fall schedule will be the big determiner there--but either way I am grateful for the work I have done this summer and for the experiences I have earned.

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Week 10: Finalizing My Work

Only one week left! It’s crazy to think that this internship began only two months ago. With the state of the world lately, May feels like ages ago--not to mention the spring semester, which feels like it’s been eons since. Next week I will turn my focus to the paper due at the end of the semester and combine my thoughts on the readings I’ve been doing with the work I’ve completed, the obstacles I’ve come up against, and the rewards of a project like this. And then after, a bit of a (much needed) break until the fall semester begins and we adjust to life on campus, usually thronging with crowds, with social distancing and masks.

This week I have gone into the Museum’s Omeka database (seen below) to edit and update the metadata I included with the first set of images to be linked to the Central Florida timeline, written image captions and credits, and begun writing metadata for the new set of images.

I’m not sure yet, as of writing this, how many new images will be included, but I am excited nonetheless to get them up. Since there is another board meeting this Sunday, what I will do is make the collection public for a few days so that I can present what I’ve done to the board and show the progress I’ve made. What I think I may do for the presentation is to just quickly change the first few timeline events so that they are their original text, grab a screenshot, and change it back to its current form so that I have a before/after image sequence.

Another thing I still have to work on is putting together a process document. Basically, I need to write down all of the steps I’ve taken this summer to research, document, edit, and update the Central Florida timeline. This process includes not only where I looked for sources, but how I selected images for the timeline and wrote metadata for them, and how I edited the event entries for voice. As I explained it to Dr. Beiler, I’ve gotten to a point where the voice I use for this type of work--scholarly but for a general audience--as making it so that someone like my mom, who does not do history and does not follow our academic trends, can understand it without needing to ask for (much) clarification. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, voice is something that is tricky to nail, and this kind of voice has taken me two or three years to nail, but it can be done well if you know what you’re aiming for. I hope that whoever comes after me will be able to take what I’ve started and build upon it with ease.

Now that’s an exciting thought. Sometimes I forget that this is a collaborative effort, as I sit at home alone, unable to be around the very people with whom I collaborate. I can’t wait to see where this timeline ends up after I’ve moved to other projects. 

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Week 9: Diversity

In the past two weeks, I have completed fourteen more events in the LGBTQ History Museum’s Central Florida timeline, which puts me at a grand total of thirty-four events edited. Next week, I will be juggling multiple tasks of finding images for the newly edited events, creating metadata for them, updating the metadata for the previous images I found, and making sure everything is up to date in the Museum’s Omeka archive. Since the collection I’ve created on Omeka is currently listed as private, the links to all the images have already broken, so at some point that collection will be made public so that more stable links can be inputted into the timeline spreadsheet. This coming week will be the wrapping-up portion of the internship, as I will then turn to the writing of my final paper and preparing my final presentation. 

Alongside my editing duties, this week I started another reading for my paper and came across some interesting concepts that I’ve been thinking about on my own, but which the reading helped me connect to the work I’m doing with the Museum. These concepts are touched upon in the article “Ways of Interpreting Queer Pasts” by Susan Ferentinos. The first concept is this idea of LGBTQ+ communities, rather than a single cohesive community.1 While each group that the acronym represents has in common a history of persecution and discrimination for their sexual and gender identities, there are also differences between them in lifestyle, worldview, and dynamics. For instance, gay men love other men, and lesbian women love other women, and so the differences between these groups may be clear: a different appreciation of gender roles, of social norms in a patriarchal society, etc. But it is also different for bisexual individuals, who love more than one gender and who often experience prejudice from other LGBTQ+ communities. And it is further different for transgender individuals whose sexual attraction may be straight or gay, but who have been shunned for their gender identities. There is much in common, but the differences, tensions, and conflicts must also be highlighted, or we run the risk of homogenizing and universalizing a community with great diversity. In a museum setting, especially for the LGBTQ History Museum, it is doubly important to represent all groups fairly and equally for the history to be more fully interpreted. 

Which leads me to the other concepts I find important. Though the current acronym is “LGBTQ+”, this acronym has changed many times and the groups which it represents has also changed. For instance, the Museum used to be the GLBT History Museum of Central Florida, as “GLBT” was previously a dominant acronym before shifting to “LGBT.” And before that, often only the L and the G were talked about, and thus these two communities find more representation in the historical evidence than the B, T, Q, and other groups. Within the L and G, often it is cis gay white men who dominate the historic record.2 I’ve seen this in the timeline itself. Many of the bars and clubs established in the Central Florida region in the 1970s and 1980s were predominantly for gay men. The same can be said for many of the annual Pride month events, which is why many lesbian/gay women groups formed. The diversity within and between LGBTQ+ communities necessitates not only different organizations, but also different ways of thinking about them historically. While it can be useful to think of a single “LGBTQ+ community,” in other instances, multiple communities should be thought of instead. In my work with the Museum, it can be difficult to find even traces of LG individuals, much less BTQ persons, but that does not mean the effort should not be made as the Museum continues to grow and network.

1 Susan Ferentinos, “Ways of Interpreting Queer Pasts,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (May 2019): 21, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.19.

2 Ferentinos, “Ways of Interpreting Queer Pasts,” 22. 

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Week 7: Variability

A quick update: I’ve updated the first twenty or so events on the timeline so that their text reflects the edits I’ve made, sources are available, and images are present when possible. Though I still have a few images to go for this batch, I am overall happy with the progress I have made. Next week, I will continue moving forward through the timeline. My hope is to get through another fifteen to twenty events by the end of this internship, complete with media and sources. What I ended up being able to do was to upload the necessary files into the LGBTQ History Museum’s Omeka digital archive and using the image links to get them to appear on the timeline. It isn’t perfect, as I can’t decide how big or small the images appear on the timeline, but it is better than how it was.

In between my regular work, I’ve also been reading some more articles on virtual museums. Though most of what I’ve read so far deals with virtuality as a component of museums which initially had physical spaces, whereas this museum is almost completely virtual, there have been some intriguing ideas I’ve picked up on. On the one hand, there is not as much disconnect or difference between “reality” and “virtuality” as one might think at first. In this digital age, many people are just as accustomed to interacting with media on a screen as in person, and often consider things in the “virtual world” to be as real as the things in front of them.1 Another thing that comes up in these readings is the variability of virtual museums and artifacts. In a physical space, curators and exhibition designers display artifacts, media, and text in a particular order or arrangement to produce a desired effect (orders and arrangements that can be divisive and difficult, as with the Enola Gay controversy in the 1990s and early 2000s). Visitors are ushered through this order and the interpretations they come away with may be more similar to one another for that order. In virtual spaces, however, there is a greater ability to let the user/visitor choose the order, the connections, and the presentation. Each person can be allowed to bring their own interpretation--which can still be loosely guided, but the control is largely in the hands of the user. This is variability.2 This also removes some of the authority from the museum figure and invites users in as shared stakeholders in the process of history-making.

While at the present moment the Central Florida timeline is limited to a chronological order and a restricted grouping function, with no filter ability, hopefully at some point in the future, a different tool can be used to add these interactive, higher-functioning features to make the timeline less about a strict ordering of events from earliest to latest, but rather a user-friendly, interactive understanding of how events, people, and organizations evolve as multiple social and cultural processes interact. That is, at least, my own hope. 

1 There are boundaries between the two, but they are complementary rather than opposites. Michael Connor, “Curating Online Exhibitions: Part 1: Performance, variability, objecthood,” Rhizome, May 13, 2020, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2020/may/13/curating-online-exhibitions-part-1/.

2 Connor, “Curating Online Exhibitions: Part 1.” 

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Week 6: Musings

A little bit about me and how I ended up pursuing a career in history. I’ve been writing stories since at least the second grade. One of the earliest stories I remember writing (and illustrating) was a simple flash fiction piece about two of my stuffed animals on a high-priority stealth operation. By seventh grade, all of my classmates recognized my writing ability. I attended an arts high school where my main focus became creative writing--but when I initially applied to UCF and was accepted, it was for aerospace engineering. Before my first semester even started, however, I changed track and began pursuing a double degree in history and in creative writing. For a very long time, my dream goal was to become a notable speculative fiction author. I still want that. But why history? 

My favorite idea about this is that I watched the movie National Treasure a few too many times as a kid. (The more likely influence was my high school history teacher.) In the movie, right before Nic Cage’s character decides to steal the Declaration of Independence, he quotes a line from it--a line which, I might add, rings truer and truer these days: ”But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and provide new Guards for their future security.” That scene in particular really impacted me, I think. Part of it, too, I think stemmed from the fact that, as cheesy of a movie as it is, it made history feel immediate and necessary and meaningful. So when my cousin went on a school trip to D.C. and brought back a copy of the Declaration for me, a mere fourth-grader, I spent hours lying on my bedroom floor transcribing it by hand, trying my very best to make sense of the cramped, spidery eighteenth-century script. I’d forgotten all about this event until I took Dr. Beiler’s colonial American history class in the spring of 2017. Our class project had us transcribing eighteenth-century account ledger books. I can read those ledgers as easily as my own hand now. Who would have thought. 

All this to say: I have been experimenting with, working around, and editing through many different voices in many different capacities for the majority of my life. From reviewing classmates’ nonfiction pieces to revising students’ veteran biographies to reading voices of the past, I have come to appreciate just how useful a strong voice is in writing--and how difficult it can be to not leave your fingerprints all over someone else’s work. There is a fine, fine line between emulating a unique voice, and changing it to fit your needs. I have been walking this tightrope for the past six weeks now in the process of editing the LGBTQ History Museum’s Central Florida timeline. This timeline has had multiple contributors, all with their own sense of diction, grammar, and flow, and I have the task of bringing these wildly different voices together into a consistent form. In some places, I have only corrected a few mechanical errors. In other places, however, I have substantially edited or rewritten entire entries. After almost a decade of editing and proofing and revising, understanding voice has become almost intuitive. Not everything needs to read like a history book or a museum script. The collaborative nature of this timeline still needs to be subtly recognized, because this Museum itself is collaborative. I am not the sole authority on the events documented by this timeline; therefore I do not feel comfortable being the only voice to express those events.

This is the halfway point. From here, I plan to continue moving through the timeline, bringing it into a consistent format, falling down research rabbit holes, and searching for proper images. In short, I will continue to do what I can for grammar and mechanics, but sometimes, voice takes precedence. 

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Week 5: New Progress!

This week I continued to research and make edits to the LGBTQ History Museum’s Central Florida Timeline. I have been making these edits on a personal file, to be able to revisit entries and keep track of the changes I’ve made to the original events, so until this week I have not made any updates to the actual timeline itself. With another Museum board meeting just around the corner, however, I felt it was time to start making visible changes. I also made this decision partly because the research process is rather slow, and I wanted to see some actual, tangible steps forward. With that in mind, I began moving my personal-file edits to the official timeline. 

So far I have only updated the timeline’s introductory entry, but I am already extremely excited to keep moving forward and to watch it come together. The Central Florida Timeline was originally made using the open-source TimelineJS spreadsheet developed by Knight Lab, which means that, while the main features can be expanded upon using Java programming, its base functionality allows for a timeline that users can click or swipe through. However, in my explorations of the Museum’s spreadsheet, from which our timeline is created, I made an exciting discovery: entries can be grouped. This will be an exceptionally useful feature moving forward, because being able to group events means that they will appear together on the timeline. In my edits, I have created a sort of tagging system where I categorize an entry based on its location (often, city and county) and the main content component (politics, events, organizations, etc.). I am not yet sure if an entry can be assigned to more than one group, or how it would look, but in the coming weeks I will begin playing around with this useful tool and determine how best to group the entries. Will I be able to use both location and category groups? Or will I have to find a way to combine these two: “Orlando, Orange County politics” or “Tampa, Hillsborough County bars and clubs”? 

The other exciting part about the TimelineJS tool is that you can include different forms of media within the entries: images, videos, audio. I have mostly been working with images, but over the next few weeks I will begin diving into the Museum’s oral histories (interviews with individuals about their memories and experiences of past events) and other audio-visual resources to link to the timeline. For now, though, I will have to find ways to make these images appear on the timeline in a visually interesting and useful way. For introduction entry, for instance, I am using a public domain image of the rainbow flag in a map of Florida.

The only two options are to have the image appear to the side of the text, like this: 

or to set it as the background, like this: 

I will have to play around with it more, but it does not seem like you can change the image size within the timeline. Dr. Beiler, my supervisor, and I agree that having it as the background would make more sense for this slide, but that I should try to manipulate the photo on my own software to see if I can get the entire state of Florida to show behind the text, rather than it being cut off like it is now. 

It’s hard to believe that we are almost halfway through the summer semester! So much left to do, and so little time to do it. Until next week! 

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Week 4: State of the World

In the spirit of full disclosure: this week has been difficult. Watching the protests going on around the country (and the world), struggling to find a part to play in elevating the voices of persons of color, and fighting to stay focused on my work, I have had a rough time even writing this post this week. As a historian of colonial America, I feel I have a certain kind of intimate knowledge of the deepest roots of systemic racism in this country, but I am also aware of the many privileges I have: I am cisgender, I am white, and I am middle class. I cannot say that I understand the experiences of Black trans women, of Black persons, or any similar groups; but I can listen, and I can continue to educate myself. I can continue to remind others that, in the fight for civil rights, it was Black trans women who fought against police brutality at Stonewall. In the protests against the same brutality today, intersectionality should be at the forefront. I cannot speak for my siblings of color, but I can support them in helping others understand the oppression they face. 

I do not know how the events of the past week, and the events still to come, will be remembered. I do not know what will come of this. The most I do know is that I have to find ways to continue with the work I am doing with the Museum and in my master’s program. The past and our individual memory of it is increasingly important and indispensable, especially in the face of the lies and coverups put forth by our government. I have to keep reminding myself that even though things are really, really bleak right now, the past of our entire community--white, Black, Latinx; gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight; cisgender, transgender, gender non-conforming--is what will inform our present decisions and our future outlook. I posted earlier this week on the Museum’s Facebook page about the first Pride Picnic that took place in Orlando, hoping to get some more details about when it happened, what events people participated in, and other memories of it, but as yet, there have been no replies. But the important thing is, I was reminded by my supervisors, is that the event happened. In our meetings this week, Dr. Beiler, one of my supervisors, suggested that I use the timeline as a way to educate users about what historians do and how we make interpretations based on historical memory. Maybe it matters less that the first Pride Picnic occured in 1979 or in 1980, and more that a community came together at a time when it was difficult to do so in a public space, and that they celebrated that sense of community. I had to be reminded to take off my researcher hat, and to put on both my interpreter hat and my activist hat. Contextualization of these moments--whether a gathering of sexual and gender minority individuals, or a protest against a system that privileges whiteness and condemns blackness--is what will help educate others not only about the event, but also about how historians work, how we have to move past our contemporary lenses and look at the past on its own terms to understand why bricks were thrown at Stonewall and why this country seems to be reaching its boiling point now.

I anticipate that I will still have issues focusing and wanting to do this work, as the protest situation unfolds and the aftermath develops. But this is the job I signed up for when I went into the master’s program: education and empowerment. If the way that I achieve these objectives right now is through keeping alive a history that has been so hard to track down and document as LGBTQ+ history, then that will be enough for me this summer. 

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Week 3: Community Involvement

Much like last week, this week I spent my time reading and editing events on the Central Florida timeline. While the first batch seems to be in a final stage of edits, this next batch has proven itself to be a little more difficult. Inconsistencies of information between events related to the same topic, questions about historical memory, and the usual problems of trying to research histories that are largely held by individuals rather than large institutions, all have contributed to a sense of slow progress this week. I have decided, rather than trying to edit these events one by one as I have been, to instead mass-copy these events, to take real time to read them, and to sort them by topic so that I am not forced to re-edit a previous event because new information surfaced. While less progress may be made initially, in the long run I believe this will be most efficient and beneficial. 

This week I also had the pleasure of reading about another LGBTQ+ digital archive project, in the efforts of the Front Runners New York club to digitize and archive their paper, photograph, and born-digital items (where born-digital items are those, such as websites, social media posts, digital fliers, etc. which were created in a digital format rather than being digitized from a physical copy). Digital archivist Anthony Cocciolo helped the Front Runners to set up this archive through the creation of open-source software and by helping organize crowdsourcing efforts.[1] While the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida already has digitized much of its physical collections and has less of a focus (at present) on born-digital items, many of the points made by Cocciolo raise intriguing and possibly challenging questions for the Museum. For instance, when crowdsourcing metadata efforts, how do you balance your organization’s needs for accurate and complete metadata with the community’s probable desire for engagement and interactivity (and not just tedious processes of plugging-in information or doing research)? How do you get people to understand copyright and ownership in an era where so many digital items appear to have no clear creator?[2] Further, and of particular interest to me, how do you utilize these two tools, crowdsourcing and copyright, create a sense of stakeholding in your end-users or volunteers for your organization?

I believe I may start to get some answers firsthand in the coming weeks. While I was editing the events this week, I came across the entry for the first Pride Picnic held in Orlando as a precursor to the parade and other events we have today. The event’s description lists three competing narratives about when this first picnic was actually held: some maintain that the first was in June of 1979, while others say 1980, and others still state that it was held in June of 1984.[3] Since Pride Month begins this coming Monday on June 1, I plan to take that opportunity to begin to crowdsource on the Museum’s Facebook page. I hope to gain a few things out of asking for help from the central Florida LGBTQ community. First, some clarity on when the event was first held, what happened during the event, and who was there will directly benefit the timeline. Second, I also hope to find out if or when the Pride Picnics ended, as the Museum has images of picnics for later years (see below image). Lastly, I also anticipate that the responses to such a call for information could help us think about the role of memory in history. While our primary sources may tell us what happened to a certain extent, individuals’ memories and personal identifications with past events can also shed light on what it meant to be alive at a given time and other similar factors. History isn’t just dusty books and dark-lit archives; history is in every one of us. It is active and fluid. The more that people understand what history is and how we do it, the greater sense of shareholding and community there could be between trained and non-trained historians.

What was the “tradition” referenced in the caption? What other formations did picnic-goers make? From the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida.

Happy (early) Pride!

 1 Anthony Cocciolo, “Community Archives in the Digital Era: A Case from the LGBT Community,” Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture 45, no. 4 (Jan. 2017): 157-65, https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2016-0018.

2 Cocciolo, “Community Archives,” 159, 162.

3 LGBTQ Museum of Central Florida, “Orlando Gays Celebrate First Pride Picnic,” event in the Central Florida Timeline, accessed May 29, 2020, http://www.floridalgbtqmuseum.org/central-florida-timeline.html.

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Week 2: Early Thoughts

This week I divided my time between two main focuses: for part of my time, I explored different open-source timeline tools, while for the rest of my time I edited a handful of our existing timeline events, and I must admit that the latter ended up taking most of my time. The tools question is tricky because there are a variety of factors which will influence which tool ultimately becomes the one used by the LGBTQ History Museum. Though there are many timeline tools that are open source (meaning that their original codes are free for use and manipulation), the problem comes from the level of design. Something simple--like what we have right now--is great for getting all our events organized and to pair multimedia with those events; but at the end of the day, it is not the most interactive or useful. On the other end of the spectrum, however, are tools that do exactly what we need in terms of tagging, sorting, and other functionality, but these tools most often run on JavaScript. While I have read that it is not necessarily difficult to learn Java, it can be time-consuming, and because my defined goal is to produce an updated version of the timeline before my internship is over, I unfortunately do not feel that learning Java at this time is in my best use of time. Only more searching around will determine if there is a perfect tool out there. 

What has been a good use of time, though, is the research I have fallen into while working on editing some of our events in a two-part process. The first part involves researching the background of a particular event to make sure that the date we have for it is correct, to verify the information about it (or to flesh out that information), and to provide citations to outside sources where possible. The second part deals with the images in the Museum’s image archive; many of the timeline events have images associated with them, but locating them within the archive to make sure that both the quality and content are what we need, can take time. There are many dead ends, as LGBTQ+ history often was not preserved by “traditional” institutions like museums and archives during the time period I am currently working with, the 1960s and 70s. Even through the research I have done just this week, I have come to appreciate just how vibrant underground gay culture was, and how dangerous. For instance, in November 1977, less than two years after opening, the El Goya lounge in Ybor City, Tampa burned down under suspicious circumstances, only one of several gay spaces targeted at the time.[1] But the gay bar scene was a keystone of gay life in Central Florida. In Orlando alone there were dozens of these safe spaces, and some of them--like the Parliament House--still stand today. (Check out a great documentary).about the Parliament House.) This has been a difficult process, however, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, I have to be creative about how and where I search for information, because so much of it remains publicly undocumented or unavailable. The sites that I seem to find my best information from are informal, individual sites put up by members of the community, rather than the journals and publishers I have been trained to look for. I am having to change my definition of what makes a good source, because the alternative is to find nothing. Emotionally, some of the information that is available from the 60s and 70s was written by homophobic individuals in a homophobic society. It is jarring to look at the world we live in today (by no means perfect or safe for all of us in the community), and to look at what used to be. But in some ways it is also strengthening: the community lived through that. It has survived the AIDS crisis. And it will survive all of the rest of the bad things. It may not look or act the same way or hold the same beliefs, but it will persist. We will persist. 

[1] Paul Guzzo, “Code words, hiding in plain sight helped gay bars in Tampa endure history of harassment,” The Tampa Bay Times, June 19, 2019, accessed May 19, 2020, https://www.tampabay.com/hillsborough/code-words-hiding-in-plain-sight-helped-gay-bars-in-tampa-endure-history-of-harassment-20190619/.

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Week 1: Groundwork

Hello all! My name is Rhiannon O’Neil (she/her), and I am in my third semester in UCF’s Public History master’s track. For my thesis I have been examining gender and sexuality in colonial America. In some ways this research helped me make the decision to return to the LGBTQ History Museum of Central Florida for a graduate internship. I worked with the museum in the spring of 2018 to write metadata for their collection of The Watermark, a gay publication for Central Florida, but this summer I will be focusing on updating, revising, and adding to the museum’s Central Florida timeline. This post finds me at the end of my first week of this internship and I could not be more excited to again work with the LGBTQ History Museum, to continue to expand my knowledge of the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning) community’s history in Orlando and Central Florida, and to acquire new skills in public history. 

The LGBTQ History Museum is a small organization with no physical, permanent space to house its collections. Rather, it hosts its many, many digital collections online where it is accessible to everyone. While digital exhibits and virtual museums pose unique challenges of their own, in this time of stay at home orders and social distancing, these spaces are increasingly important for their role in continuing to connect us both to other people in virtual discussions and to our pasts--especially those pasts which may be difficult to research and document. Many organizations in the past twenty to thirty years (and longer) increasingly turned to the documentation and interpretation of LGBTQ history alongside other projects,[1] in some ways preceding, in some ways paralleling, the major political and cultural achievements the community has gained over the years. Part of the LGBTQ History Museum’s goal is to preserve this very history for Central Florida. The timeline therefore will serve as a place for this history to be documented in an easily accessible, easily usable format whether for academic or personal interest. 

In my early explorations this week of the Central Florida timeline, it has become apparent that this is going to be an extensive project. With over 200 events (and more to come), there is a lot to digest. The interface is simple--one only has to swipe or click through to move between events--but it is not currently searchable or sortable. Public historian Tim Grove stresses the importance of interactivity in timelines, and this interactivity includes text searchability, sortability, and, ideally, customizability.[2] In my beginning view, there will likely be a few major challenges to grapple with in this project. First will be finding an appropriate digital tool to input these events, but I am looking forward to gaining new skills in design, coding, and editing where applicable. Though I have much experience in editing, having worked on other history projects as well as creative writing workshops, the process of editing will likely be the second big challenge, as there is much to update and to make consistent. Third, finding and documenting images to go along with many of these events may prove a unique challenge. The museum has its own extensive collection, but it is unclear how much of it will apply or be usable. Further, grouping this large timeline into smaller ones is a high priority. Identifying themes or topics by which this timeline can be sorted will be in some ways limited (or enhanced) by what tool I end up using, but breaking a 200+ event timeline into smaller, more manageable ones will ultimately prove beneficial both for the museum and for users. Lastly, LGBTQ history is not always easy to research, and there will be roadblocks, but community involvement and interaction will assist this process.

In the coming weeks, I know I will only begin to scratch the surface of some of these goals, but I am ever grateful to have this opportunity and to work with the community. Until next week!

[1] Susan Ferentinos, public historian of women’s and LGBTQ history, points out many major exhibits in a 2019 article. Susan Ferentinos, “Ways of Interpreting Queer Pasts,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (May 2019): 19-43, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.19. 

[2] Tim Grove, “History Bytes: Online Timelines,” History News 67, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 5, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43503059.

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VLP Post 2: Early Thoughts

This past Thursday I was assigned to Group 2 for this class, which means that the oral history I will be working with was conducted with Vietnam veteran Wayne Clifford Smith. Though Wayne spent only three months in Vietnam, he was nominated for a Bronze Star for his bravery in protecting his men, and also received numerous other medals, including the Purple Heart. What affected me most about this oral history was Wayne’s description of returning to civilian life and to his job at NASA, how those who hadn’t been involved in the military would cruelly tease him about his jumpy reactions to loud noises. The Vietnam was by no means a popular conflict, which was very different from World War II, but to conflate the actions of an individual (who was drafted) with the actions of the state seems cruel and unusual. To act upon that conflation by purposely triggering someone seems inhuman. 

And this is partly what I hope to focus on using Wayne’s oral history. He states in the interview that when he returned home, there was no fanfare or parade, and no one really even wanted to acknowledge where he’d been or what he’d done. Americans’ negative perception of the war shaped how they viewed the war’s veterans, and ultimately how they integrated themselves back into civilian life. The main theme that my group and I have currently decided on for our script based on Wayne’s oral history is one of the contradiction between societal stigma surrounding the war and the individual’s actions. We hope to use Wayne’s actions, which arguably saved dozens of lives, as a jumping-off point to talk about the dissonance between what men like him were doing in Vietnam to stay alive, and the ways in which American society perceived those survival actions once the veteran returned home. Something to bear in mind, however, moving forward, is that not all the scholarship agrees with the statement that Vietnam veterans were “troubled and scorned.”[1] Yet other sources, such as the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War, will continue to shape how we want to present such different interpretations. While Wayne’s story may be our starting point, we aim to broaden out to the larger trends of Vietnam veterans returning from war, whether they were troubled and scorned or well-adjusted and accepted. Just because our intended audience with this deliverable is K-12 students does not mean we should shy away from competing narratives. We just have to find a way to convey this information in a way that is digestible for many age groups, which is a unique challenge in itself.

Another challenge we may face in this project stems from the fact that Wayne passed just recently, on December 11, 2019. One of my group members has reached out to those who work in the Veterans History Project to get a better sense of protocol about possibly contacting Wayne’s widow and/or his church congregation to get a better sense of who he was as a person outside of his service. If we are able to contact them, the worry among the group is that his death is still so recent that his widow may not want us to talk to her or to use his oral history in any way that negatively portrays either his service or his life. While we do not intend to do so, our current thematic angle may appear to her as insensitive, depending on her own views and on the relationship she had with Wayne. If this is the case, however, we could instead focus on more positive aspects of Wayne’s story: the fact that he, like many veterans, had only a high school diploma when drafted and yet still managed to be nominated for a Bronze Star; a larger lesson surrounding Wayne’s torment at the hands of his coworkers; or other, smaller themes like this to showcase the individual in the war, rather than state machinations. 

In all, I am looking forward to the opportunity to expand my research skills into mid- and late-twentieth century sources, and with the unique challenge of presenting a cohesive narrative around such a moving individual as Wayne Smith. 

[1] Eric T. Dean Jr., “The Myth of the Troubled and Scorned Vietnam Veteran,” Journal of American Studies 26, no. 1 (April 1992): 59-74, accessed February 25, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27555590. 

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Veterans Legacy Program (VLP) Post 1: Beginnings

I have worked for the VLP for the past two summers, but this is the first time that I will be working on the project in a classroom setting, so I am excited to see how the process is different and how it is the same. I have worked on metadata creation, on biography editing, and, significantly for this class, script writing. I also have an undergraduate background in screenplays (for films and TV shows, but similar principles apply), so for this class I hope to be able to put those skills to use once more.

Though at this point in the project little is known about which veterans’ oral histories we will be using to frame our videos about the Vietnam War, one of the key things that stood out to me in both the Ken Burns documentary and Tim O’Brien’s book is the deft utilization of the small to communicate the large. The opening chapter of The Things They Carried illustrates this point best, listing the different things that each of the men carried: photographs and letters, ammunition and rations, playing cards and comic books, each dependent on use and necessity (1-25). As a storytelling device, the use of small, concrete objects can help project ideas about larger, more abstract concepts. Without knowing the veterans’ stories we will work with, my hope is that each of them talks about the particulars, the smaller, finer details. It is easier to build upon such details, rather than reduce from the big picture.

Another thing I found striking from the second episode of the documentary was the use of multiple perspectives. US veterans were interviewed the same as both North and South Vietnamese, and I found it particularly striking that the Vietnamese men’s voices were not translated and dubbed over. Rather, their words were provided in subtitles. Though we may not be able to achieve the exact same effect, I do like the idea of multiple perspectives or multiple voices. This, of course, will depend on how many veterans’ histories we can use, but if there are enough, I think trying to bring two different perspectives together in the same video could offer an interesting result. 

What I think is going to be a unique challenge in producing a video for this project with the use of oral history is the utilization of outside materials such as photographs and news reels. Part of the storyboarding process will likely need to account for how much screen time our veterans will have and how much their voices are heard versus how many photographs and videos are shown with outside narration. I am admittedly unfamiliar at this point with the particular media sources available for the Vietnam War, but I know from working on previous VLP scripts that we’ll need more media than we think we do. Depending on the rate of narration, anywhere from one to three images per sentence will be needed, though of course the use of video will help stretch those numbers. Another thing to consider with narration and images, too, is our audience. VLP resources are K-12 and we have to be mindful of that. What may be suitable to show high schoolers may not also pass for first or second graders.

However, overall, I think once we know better what veterans’ histories we are working with, we will be able to get a better sense of what stories we want to highlight, what our perspective(s) will be, and how best to go about it. Personally, I like the idea of keeping things personal and in the fine details, but perhaps not every group can or should focus on their veteran in that way. Maybe, in working on separate videos, we work to create an overarching narrative, where one video provides the intimate personal perspective, and another pulls in the bigger framework of the war in a larger way, but having both will enhance the quality of the other.

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Closing Thoughts: Week 15

This was the last week of my internship. It’s amazing how fast time goes by. I’ve learned so much and strengthened so many other skills over the course of this semester - though I know I still have a lot that I could learn or improve upon. But for now, I am happy with the work I’ve done for this internship.

I’ve completed metadata for 13 issues of The Watermark, almost one a week. In doing that, I’ve learned how to determine what information is necessary or important and what is not - for keywords, coverage/GeoChrons, and most importantly (and most difficult) descriptions. I’ve learned some minor coding skills - how to make italics and links without just hitting ctrl + i or copying and pasting a url. I’ve figured out how to find the addresses of businesses that are no longer in existence, and how to mourn the loss of an establishment I’ve never been to.

Most importantly, though, I feel I’ve learned more about the LGBTQ+ community. Most people are never taught about the Stonewall riots, the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, the struggle for gay rights even as we are taught about the 1960s civil rights movement. We are not taught the history of our entire country’s - indeed, our entire world’s groups. These are significant historical events, yet hardly anyone is taught them in schools. There is too much prejudice and discrimination, even within the LGBTQ+ community itself: bi erasure, transphobia, erasure of ace/aro individuals. Too many people do not know the history of the community, its struggles, its triumphs and setbacks, even as recently as 2005.

Overall the biggest takeaway from my time as intern for the GLBT History Museum of Central Florida is that we need more queer education. Of course the skills I’ve gained from working on The Watermark metadata are ones I’ll be using in the future, and hopefully in my intended field. But it is the fact that the world at large is un- or undereducated about its LGBTQ+ communities that strikes me the most. Ignorance breeds fear breeds hate. We can stop that cycle.

We have to stop that cycle, for all minority groups.

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Looking Back: Week 14

It’s hard to believe that this time next week I’ll be writing my last blog post for this internship. I know I talked about it last week but it is still a little crazy to me. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around it.

Aside from my usual process this week, I decided to spend a little time going back to the very first issues of the paper I read and wrote metadata for. It surprised me a little how different those older issues look compared to the more recent ones. When I was working through them, from issue 4.17 to 8.20 to now 12.7, I didn’t really notice how drastic the changes were, but looking back, it’s hard not to notice. The paper transitions from the kind of look one expects from a newspaper, aka newsprint, to a sleek, almost magazine-style look, but in between those phases is something that seems to try to hang on to the newsprint feel while still looking more like a magazine. For example,

This is from August 21-September 3, 1997. It’s completely newsprint and looks (and probably feels) like newspapers generally do.

This is from September 27-October 10, 2001 and is the strange in between phase where it still retains that newsprint look, but the addition of color is pushing it towards a magazine style.

This last is from April 7-20, 2005 and is a much more sleek design than the other two with a lot more going on.

I’m not saying that one is better than the other - it just struck me how much the design had changed in the course of less than 10 years. Of course, it doesn’t help that I don’t have all the issues start to finish. I jump ahead a lot with no way to know what I missed in the intervening time and space.

I guess in a way that might be a good thing. This issue that I am currently in the process of reading, 12.7, has a lot of brief coverages about same-sex marriage bans in various states. The reasoning behind all of these bans - the reasoning behind a lot of discrimination based on sexual orientation, really - is at once frustrating and dumbfounding. For example, Arkansas in 2005 tried to add “sexual orientation” to its list of protections under its civil rights law, yet the amendment was struck down because “Opponents...said they wondered if civil rights legislation should be passed to protect fat and bald people as well.” First of all, what? Second of all, even though 2005 was 13 years ago, this kind of bigotry and discrimination is still way too familiar on way too many fronts.

But we have to believe that the world will become a better, safer place for all people, regardless of age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or ability.

Until next week.

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Memory: Week 13

This week I finally realized just how little time I have left to work on new metadata. The semester ends in just about three weeks. It’s kind of amazing to look back to when I first started, to see how far I’ve come. In the past 13 or so weeks, I’ve read, re-read, and written metadata for 11 issues of The Watermark spanning from 1997 to 2004.

But there are still so many issues to go. I have only scratched the surface, and in the next three weeks I am going to try my best to do as many more as possible. Chances are, the further down the list I go, the more the news covered in the paper will intersect with my own memory. The most recent issue I worked on, 11.20, was published in late September 2004, right after Hurricanes Charley and Frances rolled through the state. I don’t remember much of Charley, but I remember Frances vividly because she stuck around for days and knocked down my neighbor’s big banyan tree. I remember having to take all my school books home with me, the lights being shut off in the classroom, the power going out at home.

So it was more than a little incredible to read about the impact that those two storms had in Central Florida and to know, for instance, that many Orlando businesses lost revenue (such as clubs Parliament House and Savoy) while the St. Pete-based Suncoast Resort was actually booked to capacity, all while my neighbor’s tree was being uprooted. There’s just something about that that gives me pause.

Aside from these realizations, this week was much the same as always. I again had to track down a closed business for my coverage and GeoChrons elements - this time Rainbow City, a pride merch shop. This time was a little different, though, because in searching for the address I came across the owner’s obituary in the Orlando Sentinel. The Watermark covered the closing of his store in late 2004, and in the same time next year, he passed away.

A lot of things to think about.

But as always, until next week.

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Vanished History: Week 12

This week I had to jump from 2002 to 2003, from issue 9 number 22 to 10.14, so of course there were some major changes that had taken place in the nine or so months that I missed. Besides all the events going on in the LGBTQ+ community during that time span, there were other, more noticeable changes from 9 to 10. For starters, the editor changed, as did the writer of a column. Additionally, other contributing writers appear to have left and new ones took their place. I was strangely upset by this. I had become accustomed to the usual lineup of writers, and once they were gone or shifted around, it felt odd. Not a bad kind of odd, just the sense that you blink and suddenly things have changed. I wonder in which particular issue those people left.

(Above from 9.22 of The Watermark - These were the contributing writers I had gotten used to over the span of 4 or 5 issues. Below from 10.14 - With some new writers and others completely gone, this issue was something of a surprise.)

Another thing this week that got to me was because of a location I included in the coverage metadata element. 10.14 provided a spotlight on a gay-owned and gay-centric hot spot in St. Petersburg, the Suncoast Resort, so in my mind it was worthy of being included in coverage and GeoChrons. The thing with GeoChrons, as you may (or may not) know, is that they require latitude and longitude coordinates, which means you have to look them up on Google Maps. The thing is, sometimes when businesses are no longer in the same building or have disappeared completely, simply searching for, in this instance, “Suncoast Resort” isn’t going to give the results you’re looking for. So I had to do some digging.

Turns out, the Suncoast Resort, which was established in 1998, was done away with by “voluntary dissolution“ in 2007. When I looked up the address that was listed on the site, it gave me this:

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across LGBTQ+ businesses that have gone away. Out & About Books, Tomes & Treasures - a number of late 1990s-early 2000s queer businesses are no longer around. No doubt new ones have replaced them, but it’s still a little upsetting. These were physical places where the people being talked about in The Watermark frequented, where they gathered, talked, met new friends, caught up with old ones. It happens all the time, small or individually-owned businesses going out, without question. It’s just not something you really think about. And when you do, there’s an inexplicable feeling of loss, even (or, perhaps, especially) for places you’ve never been.

Until next week.

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Back to It: Week 11

This week I finished up the issue I had started before break. Surprisingly, I didn’t forget most of what I’d already read, so I was able to get through everything without having to reread everything. The metadata for this particular issue, 9.22, took me longer to write down and compile, because even though the issue itself was not the longest I’ve worked on at only 72 pages, it had a lot of information. Names, places, organizations: in all, I filled two pages in my notebook front and back with just keywords. Thankfully, the rest of the metadata only required another page, but I was astonished at how much information was packed into this issue of the paper. It makes sense: 9.22 included three or four pages about the impending 2002 midterm elections, as well as a 20 page pullout section about the paper’s awards for dozens of categories, from best music store to gayest grocery store.

What made this issue slightly more difficult was that some of the places I wanted to include in the coverage metadata element are no longer in existence. The buildings still stand, but the businesses housed in them are not there anymore. I had to do some digging to find the addresses of three different places, because a quick Google Maps search would return no results at all or ones in completely different states than Florida. Luckily, I was able to find a brochure from Gay Days 2006 that had the address of one place, the Lava Lounge. I’m not sure when they closed up shop, but thankfully between 2002, when the issue of the paper was published, and 2006, the address hadn’t changed. For the other two locations, which were sister stores for Urban Body Clothing, Google Maps was a bit more helpful, but unless I searched the Tampa store specifically or the Orlando store, it would give me the wrong coordinates, which would mess up my GeoChrons. I could have just excluded them from the coverage element, but I felt they were important enough to be included. Both establishments won in multiple categories for the awards, and they also had spotlight articles written on them. Besides, they were obviously important in some way to the LGBTQ+ community at the time, and it was fun trying to find more information on them.

This past Sunday I also attended my second GLBT History Museum board meeting to give a progress report. I think they were glad to hear that I’ve been making good progress and that the work is being done. They are in the process of rebranding the museum and creating a new website, so perhaps the work I’ve done so far will be included, at some point, on the new site as well as on the RICHES MI.

Overall, this week has been, as they all have, productive.

Until next week.