Courtesy of Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project
Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project members marching in the Roanoke Pride Parade, 2016
The Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project at Roanoke College debuted a new online exhibit last month. BLT: Bisexual, Lesbian, and Transgender Inclusion and Exclusion in Southwest Virginia, 1990-1995 includes research and images from various gay and lesbian newsletters from the 1990s, as well as excerpts from the project’s oral history collection.
The exhibit was spearheaded by Roanoke College sophomore and undergraduate research fellow Megan Reynolds at the direction of Dr. Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, an assistant professor of history. She started work on it last spring while a freshman.
“Most people don’t know about the people and places that are included in the exhibit,” Reynolds, a native of Maine, says. “Letting people read about other people fighting for their rights is really important, especially considering the times we live in right now.”
The decision to focus on lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities in this exhibit was made because of the fact that their narratives have largely been overlooked by the public.
“Even today you still hear most stories about gay men. The goal was to provide a different perspective from what is normally talked about,” she explains.
Throughout her work on the exhibit, Reynolds says that the idea of inclusion and exclusion within the LGBTQ community deeply fascinated her. “We’re a lot better about including lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people now,” she adds.
Two local gay and lesbian newsletters are heavily featured in the exhibit. The “Blue Ridge Lambda Press” and “Skip Two Periods” both started publishing in 1983. “These newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s were the way the gay community received information on what was happening in the bigger picture for their representation and rights,” Reynolds writes at the beginning of the exhibit. Links to the newsletter archives are included in the exhibit.
Courtesy of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project
The image was featured in the May/June 1991 edition of the "Blue Ridge Lambda Press" newsletter.
Rosenthal explains that the focus between 1990 and 1995 is timely for the project given that it just recently digitized all of the newsletters it has from that time period. Efforts to digitize local gay and lesbian newsletters have gone in chronological order, starting with the 1970s.
“One of the things we noticed in the newsletters about the time period was that it was a time of new conflict, division and unity within the community,” she explains.
Some of the language used in the newsletters, Reynolds notes, is different from the language used by the modern LGBTQ community. “Lesbians would change the word history to ‘herstory’ and women ‘womyn’ to get rid of men because they wanted to remove themselves from men,” she says.
The exhibit includes four oral histories each related to lesbian, bisexual and transgender inclusion and exclusion.
“Many people included spoke about their own experiences, while others spoke about the community as a whole,” Reynolds explains.
In providing a backstory on how lesbians were partially excluded from the larger gay community, the exhibit says, “brave women stepped out of the closet and demanded that their rights be recognized as well.”
In one of the lesbian oral histories, Nancy Kelly discusses other members of the local LGBTQ community during the two final decades of the 20th century. She explains that the majority of the involvement in the community came from gay men and lesbians, with few bisexual and transgender individuals affiliating with the various groups.
Floyd resident Edna Whittier is featured in the bisexual portion of the archive echoing what Kelly said by explaining how it was easier for her to navigate the LGBTQ community by identifying as a lesbian instead of bisexual despite the fact she had relationships with both men and women.
The exhibit notes that newsletters from the time rarely included information on the local transgender community. The first time the word “transgender” was mentioned in the “Blue Ridge Lambda Press” newsletter was in the March/April 1993 edition.
Trish Valentine, one of three individuals included in the section on transgender inclusion and exclusion, discusses the difficulty the local transgender community faced related to public facilities. She specifically references a friend who was required to use a single-use restroom that was located on a different floor than the one she worked on.
Reynolds says she hopes those who view the exhibit will come away from it with an understanding that the history of the LGBTQ community is more expansive than just what is included in history books. “Providing this history that has been hidden up until now for the most part helps people to view LGBTQ people with a different perspective and be more accepting,” she notes.
Rosenthal explains that this exhibit fits into the project’s larger mission of preserving local LGBTQ history. “We know that history related to these communities has long been ignored or even erased in the past,” she says. “We’re the first project in this region to do the work of trying to bring about real documentation and recognition of the rich history that Roanoke has had over the last 50 years.”
The project was started in 2015 by a group of individuals who gathered at the Roanoke Diversity Center for a workshop on LGBTQ history conducted by Rosenthal. The following year, an oral history collective and walking tours were launched. Since then, the project has launched two other walking tours, several exhibits, interactive theatre workshops and a podcast.
The exhibit can be found online at lgbthistory.pages.roanoke.edu.
About the Author:
Aila Boyd is an educator and journalist who resides in Roanoke. She holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University.