Windy City Media Group Frontpage News

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

home search facebook twitter join
Gay News Sponsor Windy City Times 2023-12-13
DOWNLOAD ISSUE
Donate

Sponsor
Sponsor
Sponsor

  WINDY CITY TIMES

Queer Lexicon works to build an oral history
by Tom Wray
2013-04-17

This article shared 3552 times since Wed Apr 17, 2013
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email


QChicago has long been known as a city of stories. That reputation began with writers and commentators like Studs Terkel, but that same kind of oral history has been slow to grab hold in the city's LGBTQIA community—until now.

Joseph Varisco has been working on Queer Lexicon, a collection of interviews documenting the oral histories of creative individuals in the LGBTQIA communities. Varisco said the project started six months ago with KOKUMO, CEO of KOKUMOMEDIA Inc. and a musical artist. Other participants include AfroCubaRican performance artist Vajaqueque Brown, Uprising project performance director and educator Nicole Garneau, DJ and Chances Dances collective member Swaguerrilla, and international IMG model Darling Shear.

The interviews explore pressing issues facing queer community such as historical problems of segregation in Chicago, the vitality of recognizing intersectionality, survival and thriving in controversial queer economies, the collapse of not-for-profit and academic institutions servicing LGBTQIA and gender non-conforming folk through intimate accounts of personal lives and creative works.

The interviews will be released throughout the year, each one about 25 to 20 minutes and conducted by Varisco. New interviews will be available each month at soundcloud.com/joevarisco. Three have already been released with the next one being H. Melt, author of SIRvival in the Second City: Transqueer Chicago Poems, this week. Currently available interviews include Queer Choir director Jackie Boyd, drag diva Shea Couleé and multi-disciplinary artist Kiam Marcelo Junio.

In the past six months since the start of the project, Varisco has conducted almost 30 interviews with more already scheduled. And while the completed interviews will be released throughout 2013, he is working on making Queer Lexicon an ongoing project. One major goal is to have a fundraiser to help pay for the development of the production quality of the series. He's also hoping for the building of a website where the interviews and community resources can be located. The site would have biographies on artists, media coverage and access to an arts calendar. And while Chicago is its base and will remain the center of much of the project's activity, Varisco does hope to expand it across the country.

He said that it was actually very easy to get people to participate. "A lot of these people were people I had worked with different capacities already," Varisco stated. For example, he had met KOKUMO through his work with the Broadway Youth Center and he met others through performance work with organizations such as About Face Theatre.

"Many people were very excited about the idea of it, telling their own histories of who and what they are," he said. "It didn't take much convincing at all."

Varisco said that he was indeed inspired by Terkel's series documenting Chicago. "The idea of documenting the people's history has been something I've been really drawn to," he explained. "We often don't get the decision on how they're told." He started conducting the interviews when he was creative director of Chicago IRL, an arts and literary digest cataloging contemporary queer creative culture in Chicago, with KOKUMO and Vajaqueque Brown. When he started out on his own quest to get the stories preserved, he started sending out requests to colleagues, friends and coworkers.

"The people I interviewed I've found unbelievably remarkable and innovative," he said.

Varisco said the entire process is consent based. Each interview lasts about an hour and is edited down to 20 to 30 minutes for release. Each interview is sent back to the person to see if they're happy with the end result and to see if anything was missed. "I like the fact it's a mutual process, it's an archive, a biography, a documentation of personal history," he continues. "The work we're all trying to do as a community. Not just talk about an event that's coming up or a show they're going to do."

Many of the themes that have come up in Queer Lexicon include the historical segregation of Chicago, holding people accountable for their actions and exploring what intersectionality, the ways that the different parts of the community intersect with each other, means.

"Some of the most surprising is how people talk about queer economies," Varisco said. Many performers and artists consider alternatives, turning to friends and family or looking at other options as a way of getting by while creating. The changing demographics of the community and city also are recurrent themes, especially where the center of gay identity exists now as Lakeview and the traditionally gay Boystown area becomes less of a residence for much of the city's gay community while still being home to many of the businesses and institutions.

Interviews have already been sent to the Chicago History Museum and other archival institutions, but where the project goes from here depends on who picks it up. "Right now, I'm working on creating this as an oral history project," Varisco said. Expanding Queer Lexicon can come as more resources become available.

Varisco believes that community development sits at the core of much of what the community's artists and performers do, being much broader in scope than just personal projects. He's found that doing collaborative work is a good way to engage the community and that community development is a delicate and intentional process. It is especially important for a fragmented community that isn't seen in the mainstream or heteronormative media. The sharing of stories can be important and vital.

"We don't have a lot of 'elders' to look to and have for guidance," he said. "We have to build our own histories."


This article shared 3552 times since Wed Apr 17, 2013
facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email

Out and Aging
Presented By

  ARTICLES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Gay News

Kara Swisher talks truth, power in tech at Chicago Humanities event 2024-03-25
- Lesbian author, award-winning journalist and podcast host Kara Swisher spoke about truth and power in the tech industry through the lens of her most recent book, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, March 21 at First ...


Gay News

RuPaul finds 'Hidden Meanings' in new memoir 2024-03-18
- RuPaul Andre Charles made a rare Chicago appearance for a book tour on March 12 at The Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave. Presented by National Public Radio station WBEZ 91.5 FM, the talk coincided with ...


Gay News

Without compromise: Holly Baggett explores lives of iconoclasts Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap 2024-03-04
- Jane Heap (1883-1964) and Margaret Anderson (1886-1973), each of them a native Midwesterner, woman of letters and iconoclast, had a profound influence on literary culture in both America and Europe in the early 20th Century. Heap ...


Gay News

There she goes again: Author Alison Cochrun discusses writing journey 2024-02-27
- By Carrie Maxwell When Alison Cochrun began writing her first queer romance novel in 2019, she had no idea it would change the course of her entire life. Cochrun, who spent 11 years as a high ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Women's college, banned books, military initiative, Oregon 2023-12-29
- After backlash regarding a decision to update its anti-discrimination policy and open enrollment to some transgender applicants, a Catholic women's college in Indiana will return to its previous admission policy, per The National Catholic Reporter. In ...


Gay News

NATIONAL School items, Miami attack, Elliot Page, Fire Island 2023-12-22
- In Virginia, new and returning members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and Fairfax County School Board were inaugurated—with some school board members opting to use banned books on the topics of slavery and LGBTQ+ ...


Gay News

Chicago author's new guide leads lesbian fiction authors toward inspiration and publication 2023-12-07
- From a press release: Award-winning and bestselling lesbian fiction author Elizabeth Andre—the pen name for a Chicago-based interracial lesbian couple—has published her latest book, titled Self-Publishing Lesbian Fiction, Write Your ...


Gay News

NATIONAL Tenn. law, banned books, rainbow complex, journalists quit 2023-12-01
- Under pressure from a lawsuit over an anti-LGBTQ+ city ordinance, officials in Murfreesboro, Tennessee removed language that banned homosexuality in public, MSNBC noted. Passed in June, Murfreesboro's "public decency" ordinance ...


Gay News

BOOKS Lucas Hilderbrand reflects on gay history in 'The Bars Are Ours' 2023-11-29
- In The Bars Are Ours (via Duke University Press), Lucas Hilderbrand, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine, takes readers on a historical journey of gay bars, showing how the venues ...


Gay News

BOOKS Owen Keehnen takes readers to an 'oasis of pleasure' in 'Man's Country' 2023-11-27
- In the book Man's Country: More Than a Bathhouse, Chicago historian Owen Keehnen takes a literary microscope to the venue that the late local icon Chuck Renslow opened in 1973. Over decades, until it was demolished ...


Gay News

Photographer Irene Young launches book with stellar concerts 2023-11-20
- "Something About the Women" was appropriately the closing song for two sold-out, stellar concerts at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage November 19, in celebration of the new book of the same name by Irene Young, the legendary ...


Gay News

Rustin film puts a gay pioneer into the spotlight 2023-11-16
- The story of activist Bayard Rustin is one that should be told in classrooms everywhere. Instead, because Rustin was an openly same-gender-loving man, his legacy has gone relatively unnoticed outside of LGBTQ+-focused history books. Netflix hopes ...


Gay News

Billy Masters: The times Streisand failed to make a splash 2023-11-13
- "Fame is a hollow trophy. No matter who you are, you can only eat one pastrami sandwich at a time."—Wise words from Barbra Streisand. You all know that Barbra Streisand's book is out. And I ...


Gay News

Charles Busch dishes on life as a storyteller 2023-11-09
- Performer/writer Charles Busch, who recently penned his autobiography, Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy, said that collecting his most precious and salient memories in a book felt "inevitable." "Storytelling is such an essential ...


Gay News

LGBT HISTORY PROJECT: Exploring 70 years of lesbian publications, from 1940s zines to modern glossy magazines 2023-11-02
- Since the '40s, lesbians have created a vibrant history of publications. From the exploration of daily lesbian life to literary and feminist pursuits, to the modern age of glossy magazines, for over 70 years, lesbians have ...


 


Copyright © 2024 Windy City Media Group. All rights reserved.
Reprint by permission only. PDFs for back issues are downloadable from
our online archives.

Return postage must accompany all manuscripts, drawings, and
photographs submitted if they are to be returned, and no
responsibility may be assumed for unsolicited materials.

All rights to letters, art and photos sent to Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago
Gay and Lesbian News and Feature Publication) will be treated
as unconditionally assigned for publication purposes and as such,
subject to editing and comment. The opinions expressed by the
columnists, cartoonists, letter writers, and commentators are
their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature Publication).

The appearance of a name, image or photo of a person or group in
Nightspots (Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times
(a Chicago Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature
Publication) does not indicate the sexual orientation of such
individuals or groups. While we encourage readers to support the
advertisers who make this newspaper possible, Nightspots (Chicago
GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay, Lesbian
News and Feature Publication) cannot accept responsibility for
any advertising claims or promotions.

 
 

TRENDINGBREAKINGPHOTOS







Sponsor


 



Donate


About WCMG      Contact Us      Online Front  Page      Windy City  Times      Nightspots
Identity      BLACKlines      En La Vida      Archives      Advanced Search     
Windy City Queercast      Queercast Archives     
Press  Releases      Join WCMG  Email List      Email Blast      Blogs     
Upcoming Events      Todays Events      Ongoing Events      Bar Guide      Community Groups      In Memoriam     
Privacy Policy     

Windy City Media Group publishes Windy City Times,
The Bi-Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community.
5315 N. Clark St. #192, Chicago, IL 60640-2113 • PH (773) 871-7610 • FAX (773) 871-7609.