The Chicago History Museum ( CHM ) hosted the last of this season's "Out at CHM" programs with a panel discussion, "Curators Bare All"about its "Out in Chicago" exhibit, which is set to close on March 26. The event took place at the museum March 8.
The exhibit's co-curators, Jill Austin and Jennifer Brier, worked on the exhibit for three years before its unveiling in May 2011. They discussed the many often difficult decisions they had to make about what materials to include in or exclude from the exhibit, and how and why they decided upon the various themes: individuals and their bodies, family and home, communities, and political action.
The discussion was moderated by Bill Savage, a senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University and a researcher of Chicago history. His brotherDan Savage, well-known syndicated sex columnistwas announced as a last-minute addition to the panel on the day of the event. The latter contributed some observations and several lively quips that kept the audience laughing, but the discussion focused mostly on the curators' work.
Austin and Brier discussed how they were able to "mine" the museum's own extensive archives and catalogs and discover items that had until then not been seen by the public or even by many researchers. Among the finds that emerged from their research were two photographic negatives of images of Evelyn "Jackie" Bross, who was charged with dressing as a man in 1943, and whose subsequent arrest and trial set off a firestorm of protest that caused an emendation in the cross-dressing law.
The discovery of these negatives would have been remarkable enough but it would then become part of an even more surprising discovery for some visitors to the museum. A female visitor to the exhibit who saw the photos of Bross recognized her as her husband's great-aunt, and came back with her third-grader daughter, telling her, "You need to see this. It's about your family." Brier said that while "we tend to think of cross-dressing as part of an identity," it was also, crucially, for many, a question of finding work: "It was easier to find a job as a man than as a woman." At the same time, added Austin, such moments also show that we might today consider transgender history "has always been part of this [ city's history ] from the beginning."
Class and race matters were central to how the curators conceived the telling of the story of Chicago's LGBTQ history. They sought to make the city's backdrop of widening racial segregation and gentrification over the course of its history integral to the narrative about the history of its LGBTQ community. As an example, Brier described how they integrated an image of a heterosexual family from an advertisement for the Carl Sandburg Village, an urban renewal project begun in the 1960s and located near the museum itself. It was, she said, "the moment when heterosexuality entered the exhibit ... showing that the way that housing gets built is a queer story." It was also a sign "that gay Chicago is not just Boystown."
Prompted by Bill Savage's question about what was left out, Austin and Brier put their responses in the context of what they described as a brave act on the part of the museum: to even support such an exhibit. They went on to speak about the exclusion of some of the more overtly sexual material they had hoped to include, such as a prop from the famous Capricorn Party ( an annual lesbian party ) . They had wanted to display the "Wheel of Debauchery," a handmade party game that included descriptions of sexual/erotic acts but, in the end, as Brier put it, "it did not pass curatorial review" [ by a larger committee ] . She said that those who opposed the display were afraid it would become the "Mapplethorpe of the exhibit," especially given the then-controversy around the 2010 David Wojnarowicz exhibit in the "Hide/Seek" exhibit at the Smithsonian.
The wheel was eventually replaced with a black bra from the Black Bra party, which has come to replace the Capricorn Party. For Brier, the wheel, with its very specific sexual instructions, had been a way to indicate how lesbians were creating their own sexual selves whereas a black bra is an object that conveys very specific meanings to a straight audience. The curators have written about this specific aspect of the exhibit in a jointly written article slated to appear in the journal Radical History Review.
The discussion also touched upon the issue of deciding what and/or who might be considered gay or lesbian enough to be included in the exhibit. The curators spoke of Jane Addams, and of being asked if their inclusion of her meant that they considered her a lesbian. Brier said her response was, "No, but she lived with other women" and that "she belongs here not because she's a lesbian, but because she belongs to our queer past."
With respect to Addams, they said they did not want to be overly celebratory and Austin pointed out she had been a woman of contradictions. While she stood up for their rights, Addams often told the young girls she worked with "not to have fun in the streets." About the larger impulse to sometimes declare something gay by association, Brier said that such an exhibit sought to reveal the complexity of identity and its relationship to matters like class and race: "Material culture doesn't become queer because it was touched by a gay. Queerness [ is ] an interpretive strategy."
Asked about what parts of putting together the exhibit were most fulfilling, Brier and Austin spoke of their surprise at "how many new audiences we reached out to," especially the many groups of youth from diverse communities in and around Chicago. They also said that while they had expected opposition, they were pleasantly surprised to not see any public displays of the same, such as protests.
Questions from the audience touched upon the issue of how people might make up their minds about whether to leave their materials to the Gerber/Hart or to the museum. The curators concurred that a lot would depend on which institution would be the best place for materials and how the public might gain the most access to and use from the materials. Austin pointed out that CHM's interest lay in what was best for materials, not in procuring them for the sake of doing so: "There's no rivalry that exists. We look at what's best for the collection." Brier added, "Nobody owns the gay past but we do all need to do our best to preserve it."