A Beautiful Day in the 'Gayborhood'

these presentations put the "power" in Powerpoint!

 Natalie may have seemed like the most studious and reserved person in her study group, but after spending time in Langsdale Special Collections, she was dishing the dirt like a millennial-age Hedda Hopper.

"Tea" being spilled.

Her presentation on gossip in the Baltimore Gay Life Newspapers (Natalie perused issues dating from 1979 to about 1990, although the archives extend to 2015) included a talk about the importance of discreetly disseminating information in the LGBT community, and was focused on the history of formal gossip columns in the tabloid. Journalists with pseudonyms-- blasts from the past-- like gossip columnists Alexander St. John and Mother Margaret were name-checked. But best of all, Natalie and her classmates had, through their visits with Special Collections, had been among the first folks to unlock this trove of newspapers in their entirety, unearthing stories of Baltimore’s past through the lens of the gay community.

During January, Natalie was among 25 Johns Hopkins University students who got a closer look at one of Baltimore’s (velvet?) gold-mines, the collection the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland (GLCCB) records donated to University of Baltimore in 2013. Langsdale Special Collections hosted this large group-study project for students taking an intersession class taught by JHU instructor Mo Speller. These students--mostly undergraduates-- were tasked with poring through roughly 23 boxes of Gay Life newspapers for their examination of “Gayborhood” Histories. 

Students engaged in fact-finding

Among the other presentations given by Mr. Speller’s students: a statistical analyses of back-page personal ads; a discussion of major activist movements in the 1970s; AIDS and its reportage in the local press; and insights on how sexual mores have changed and how lawmakers systematically targeted the LGBT community. Discrimination against women, people of color, and transgendered folks-- from outside of and even within the Baltimore scene-- was a common thread that ran throughout the students’ discoveries in working with the source materials.  

Mo Speller instructing his 'Baltimore Gayborhoods' class

Not only was this the inaugural outing for this collection since it was acquired by UB, but it was also the first time Special Collections has hosted an enormous group in our Learning Commons space. Our hope is that UB students and faculty will utilize this invaluable repository of the region’s gay / cultural history as source materials in their own research. In addition to newspapers, 
the scope and breadth of this collection is amazing: photographs, organizational records, and memorabilia (click here for details-- worth it, I promise.)  In the meantime, we were overjoyed that through archival research, these January-term scholars caught a glimpse of Baltimore's fabulous past.

Recording History

The majority of my job is taking recorded history and preserving it and making it available for all to use. But more and more I feel a responsibility to get more involved in the recording of history via audiovisual means to ensure accessibility, and frankly to make less work for the archivists of the future (trust me, there will still be plenty of things to do). UBalt and Langsdale Library have been doing this together for quite some time in their creation and collection of oral histories. An oral history is "a method of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events" as it is defined by the Oral History Association. 

Eleven oral history collections are housed in the Langsdale Library Special Collections Department--six of which were organized and recorded by UBalt students and faculty. In addition to recorded interviews, the oral history collections sometimes include typewritten transcriptions, biographical summaries of interviewees, interview time tables, and photographs donated by interviewees. All of these document Baltimore City communities and organizations and many can be accessed online.

You have an amazing capacity for recording history literally in your pocket: your mobile smart phone. Much recent attention has been brought to utilizing your smart phone as a tool for citizen journalism with the documentation of events following the shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. To take that one step further: not only can a citizen with a smart phone become a journalist, but they can also be a historical documentarian and archivist at the same time. As is described by the group Activist Archivists, "Media is used to inform and inspire people to action, record the history of social movements and positive change, document abuses of power, and enables the eyes of the world to help protect activists on the ground." This group worked in collaboration with Witness, an international organization that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights, to create seven tips for making your videos discoverable and usable in the long term.

Check out those tips and contact me if you would like more information on this topic at shagan@ubalt.edu. And one tip from an Audiovisual Archivist: try to remember to flip your phone to the "widescreen", horizontal position--you will capture more visual information that way and it will look a lot better on the Internet. Take for example this recent cell phone video of new University of Baltimore President Kurt Schmoke and students Michelle Richardson, Nyshe Green and Jasmine Gibson's #IceBucketChallenge.

Post by University of Baltimore.

 

Happy documenting!

<<Siobhan Hagan, Audiovisual Archivist