#one archives

[garadinervi]

An Evening of Lesbian/Gay Culture with Pat Parker, Citizens Police Review Board Campaign, May 1980 [ONE Subject File Collection, Catch One, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles, CA]

[gomjjigae]

최정화 collages

[lalunafemme]

Personal Queer Archives + Mining The Archives A Workshop with Kimberly Drew at USC

Hey y’all! 2020 is here and one of my intentions is to WRITE MORE and document things more #onhere. I’ve had this site for a while and I’ve only averaged a post about 1-2 times a year. Pitiful..lol

Anyways, new year, new me amirite?

I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older (I’ll be 42 this year) or if it’s because of so many deaths lately that have hit close to home but I’ve really been thinking about the legacy that I’ll leave behind once I’ve transitioned into the ancestor realm. I think about how the story of legacy building for me feels a little complicated as someone who is currently not married and doesn’t have children and isn’t close to my bio family. Who will tell my stories, who will the stories of my life living as a free xicana fat femme matter to?

I listen to an amazing podcast (I listen to many, but that’s another post for another time) called /Queer and a few months ago, I was listening to the episode Visible Queerness: Queer Kinship & Chosen Family (which was amazing, you should go take a listen) and took the time to check out the multimedia gallery for the episode (HERE) and was just in awe of the beautiful pictures full of queer joy that accompanied the post. As I took the time to process the feelings, later that day I had a sadness wash over me. How much more impact would those pictures have had on me if they would have been of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)? The joy those pics brought me stayed in my soul and so did a little bit of emptiness. I’ve spoken to friends and online a bunch about leaving a legacy. It’s on my mind daily. I’m motivated by the words of Kim Katrin “We must leave evidence that we were here and we were loved” and use those words as a call to action to get my ass in GEAR. When I was setting my 2020 intentions, I put organizing my archive and figuring out what to do with it near the top of my list. Imagine my surprise when USC Visions and Voices announced a workshop WITH Kimberly Drew (aka museummammy) at the ONE Archives!!! I knew I had to be there. The workshop was billed for USC students and faculty only, however I sent an email to the organizers to see if they would allow me to attend as a community member (because in 2020 we’re not letting ourselves get in our way and we’re letting other people tell us no rather than us tell us no!) and they emailed me inviting me to the workshop (yay!).

in the workshop, we were able to go through some pre-selected items and it was such an amazing thing to be able to see these objects up close. As someone who just came out of a huge de-cluttering spree of my space, I understand that there’s such a thing line/space between hoarding and the importance of items being preserved for archival purposes. I believe it’s truly the intention. I learned lots at the workshop on how quotidian things can also tell so much of our stories after we’re no longer here. There was a collection where there was a box of things that wouldn’t necessarily be coded as “queer” by the outside world but if you knew, you knew. It gave me a cool peek into some of the things I should be saving for my own archive. It was such a nice morning filed with items from queer folks who are mostly no longer here. I’m thankful for their foresight in thinking of gifting the items from their life to the archive. Seeing these items up close really allowed me to face the reality that our lives matter. Kimberly mentioned at the workshop that she’s always excited and looking for “archives of the unremarkable” and that made me think of how the lives of those of us that aren’t '“queer famous” will be remembered and how it really is important to get items into the archives that depict our quotidian yet full and beautiful lives. Legacy building. We matter and some queer bb in the future will be able to connect with the life we lived and/or see it as a possibility model for their own future.

I’m excited to report that at the workshop, I met an archivist who offered some support in helping me get my archive together/organized. Looking forward to adding more fat femmes of color to the mix! If you’re queer, what is the legacy you’re hoping to leave behind? What actions are you taking now to ensure that legacy is preserved?

Check out some pics below from my time at ONE for the workshop. ONE Archives is open to the public, however it isn’t a lending institution. Check out more info on visiting the archive HERE.

[tristanaef]

ONE Institute and Archives of LGBTQ+ History

Just attended a talk given by the ONE Institute, which organizes events and exhibitions about queer history. One of their programs is creating lesson plans to help US-based educators teach queer history! www.oneinstitute.org They partner with ONE Archives at USC in Los Angeles, which focuses on LGBTQ+ history. The archive is open to researchers and gives tours to the public: one.usc.edu The ONE Institute organizes Circa, an annual festival that takes place in October during LGBTQ+ History Month - the only queer history festival in the US! How cool is that? circafestival.org

[in-a-denim-world]

Classic 👖jeans dance shot: 1984, Studio One club in West Hollywood, California. Spotted at least 11 pairs of 501 jeans in this photograph. Ah, the good ol' days when men wore 501s to go dancing (and everywhere). Needs to make a comeback (via One Archives at USC)

[glrw-glit]

Meet LA’s Art Community: Alexis Bard Johnson Is Versed in the Visual Culture of Lesbian Magazines

An interview series spotlighting some of the great work coming out of Los Angeles. Hear directly from artists, curators, and art workers about their current projects and personal quirks.

[longlistshort]

ONE Gallery in West Hollywood is currently showing The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s photographs by Greg Day. The artist died in his late 30s and would have remained virtually unknown if not for curator David Getsy researching, documenting, and collecting everything he could find on Varble.

His performance pieces were often both audacious and humorous and the exhibition details several of them. Varble popped open blood filled condom breasts in protest at a bank (proceeding to use the blood to sign a check for “zero million dollars”), crashed the Met Gala and the premiere of Tommy, and gave “costume tours” of big name art galleries in Soho, challenging the status quo. In our current world of corporate bailouts, rampant capitalism, and celebration of the rich, its fun to imagine what kind of work Varble might have created today in response.

From the press release-

In costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects, Stephen Varble (1946–1984) took to the streets of 1970s New York City to perform his “Gutter Art.” With disruption as his aim, he led uninvited costumed tours through the galleries of SoHo, occupied Fifth Avenue gutters, and burst into banks and boutiques in his gender-confounding ensembles. Varble made the recombination of signs for gender a central theme in his increasingly outrageous costumes and performances. While maintaining he/him as his pronouns, Varble performed gender as an open question in both his life and his work, sometimes identifying as a female persona, Marie Debris, and sometimes playing up his appearance as a gay man. Only later would the term “genderqueer” emerge to describe the kind of self-made, non-binary gender options that Varble adopted throughout his life and in his disruptions of the 1970s art world.

At the pinnacle moment of Varble’s public performances, the photographer Greg Day (b. 1944) captured the inventiveness and energy of his genderqueer costume confrontations. Trained as an artist and anthropologist and with a keen eye for documenting ephemeral culture as it flourished, Day took hundreds of photographs of Varble’s trash couture, public performances, and events in 1975 and 1976. Varble understood the importance of photographers, and Day was his most important photographic collaborator. This exhibition brings together a selection of Day’s photographs of Varble performing his costume works and also includes Day’s photographs of Varble’s friends and collaborators such as Peter Hujar, Jimmy DeSana, Shibata Atsuko, Agosto Machado, and Warhol stars Jackie Curtis, Taylor Mead, and Mario Montez.

Varble sought to make a place for himself outside of art’s institutions and mainstream cultures all the while critiquing them both. The story of Varble told through Day’s photographs is both about their synergistic artistic friendship and about the queer networks and communities that made such an anti-institutional and genderqueer practice imaginable. Together, Varble and Day worked to preserve the radical potential of Gutter Art for the future.

The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble builds upon the 2018 retrospective exhibition of Stephen Varble’s work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, titled Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, as featured in the New York Times on January 11, 2019.  The new ONE Gallery exhibition, with its focus on the collaboration of Varble with the photographer Greg Day, will explore the ways in which Varble’s disruptive guerilla performance art has lived on primarily through vibrant photographs that captured his inventive costumes, transformed trash, and public confrontations.

This exhibition closes 5/17/19.

*For an additional perspective on the artist- Stephen Varble was friends with a 14-year old girl in NYC named Fernanda Eberstadt who kept diaries detailing her time with him. She wrote an interesting piece for Granta about him, reproduced here.