A public service announcement from Artists’ Television Access:
2014-15 GLBT History Museum Program Series
The GLBT History Museum’s 2014-15 Special Program Series, “The G Spot: Gentrification, Transformation and Queer San Francisco,” is co-sponsored by San Francisco State University. It tackles how the history of GLBT belonging and marginalization has been intertwined with the city’s processes of urban renovation.
From September 2014 through March 2015, the GLBT History Museum will host monthly programs to delve into this timely concern. Monthly “Community Seminars” on chosen themes will be paired with related cultural programs such as film screenings, artist talks, author readings, walking tours, and bar crawls.
Community Seminars will feature dialogues with experts on that month’s theme. The programs will be free and open to all. We want to foster a robust dialogue that goes beyond the “panelists talking to audience” format. Anyone can come and join the conversation.
Participants seeking a deeper engagement with Community Seminars are be encouraged to register for free at http://g-spot-series.eventbrite.com/ For those who register, the co-curators will pre-circulate accessible readings (primary sources, scholarship, journalism) online in the month prior to each seminar. All of the series readings are listed at the registration page.
Community Seminars will be paired with cultural programs that compliment the community seminars. Cultural programs will include artist talks, author readings, and film screenings, and more. They reflect the specific monthly topic and enhance the overall program series theme. Each cultural program will encourage interaction with all participants.
Community Seminars and most cultural programs will take place at the GLBT Historical Society’s museum at 4127 18th Street, San Francisco. The GLBT History Museum is a centrally-located space, at the heart of the Castro’s commercial district. While the museum stages historical interpretation through the display of archival objects and information, attracting approximately 15,000 visitors from around the world annually, it also functions as an aspect of the Castro’s ongoing uplift and gentrification. For this reason, the museum is a perfect place to engage community members in a dialogue about historical memory and urban transformation.
Nan Alamilla Boyd, Don Romesburg, and Raquel Gutiérrez, curators of the series, have actively engaged with San Francisco’s GLBT history and/or questions of gentrification and culture for many years.
September Programs: Homelands and Safe Space
Thurs Sept 11, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Nan Alamilla Boyd, Don Romesburg, Raquel Gutiérrez
Fri Sept 26, 7-9:00 PM
ARTS Program: “Going Down on Valencia” a reading by Michelle Tea with comment by Darius Bost, Assistant Professor SFSU, and Vero Majano, filmmaker
October Programs: Queers, Redevelopment, and Racial Displacement
Thurs Oct 2, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Marcia Ochoa, UC Santa Cruz; Mia Tu Mutch, LYRIC; Robbie Clark, Causa Justa
Thurs October 16, 7-9:00 PM
ARTS Program: “Take This Hammer” (45 mins) “Viva 16” (30 mins) with N’Tanya Lee, facilitator (pending)
November Programs: Gay Tourism, Urban Development
Thurs Nov 13, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Jon Ballesteros, SVP of Public Policy, San Francisco Travel Board; Brian Basinger, AIDS Housing Alliance
Thurs Nov 20, 7-9:00 PM
ARTS Program: Raquel Gutiérrez and Eric Stanley in Dialogue with Constance Hockaday
December Programs: GLBT People and the Machine
Thurs Dec 4, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Gabriel Haaland, SEIU Local 1021; Andrea Shorter, San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women
January 2015 Programs: Neighborhood Turf Wars and Questions of Territory
Thurs Jan 8, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Anna Conda, Harvey Milk Democratic Club; Maria Poblet, Causa Justa
Sat Jan 24, 3-5:00 PM
ARTS Program: Valencia Street Was Queer: An Interactive Walking Tour: Michelle Tea, Vero Majano, others TBA
February 2015 Programs: Queers Against Gentrification
Thurs, Feb 5, 7-9:00 PM
Community Seminar
IN CONVERSATION: Tommi Avicolli Mecca, San Francisco Housing Rights Committee; Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland
Saturday, February 28, 4-10 PM
ARTS Program: Pop-Up Gay Bar: Ghosts of Gentrification Pub Crawl
March 2015 Closing Event: Open Forum on the GLBT Historical Society’s Role in Gentrification Issues
Thurs Mar 12, 7-9:00 PM
IN CONVERSATION: Nan Alamilla Boyd, Raquel Gutiérrez, Don Romesburg
About the GLBT Historical Society
The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society collects, preserves and interprets the history of GLBT people and the communities that support them. Founded in 1985, the society is recognized internationally as a leader in the field of GLBT public history. Its GLBT History Museum in San Francisco’s Castro District is the only full-scale, stand-alone museum of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history and culture in the United States. The Society’s professionally staffed archives preserve one of the world’s largest collections of GLBT historical materials.
About the Co-Curators
Nan Alamilla Boyd earned a B.A. in history at UC Berkeley and a M.A. and Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University. She is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University where she teaches courses in the history of sexuality, queer theory, historical methodology, and urban studies. She has published reviews and articles in Journal of American History, Feminist Teacher, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, English Language Notes, Signs, Frontiers, Gender & Society, and Radical Philosophy Review. Her book, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003), charts the rise of gay and lesbian politics in San Francisco and draws from the 45 oral histories she conducted as part of her research. Her second book, Bodies of Evidence: the Practice of Queer Oral History (Oxford, 2012), co-edited with Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, pairs fourteen oral history excerpts alongside commentaries by oral historians. Nan has also been a long-time volunteer at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She founded the Historical Society’s oral history project in 1992, served as co-chair of the Archives Committee from 2004-2008, and served two terms on the Board of Directors. She is currently at work on a third book project, a history of tourism in San Francisco that explores the commodification of racialized and sexualized neighborhoods.
Don Romesburg is Associate Professor and Chair in Sonoma State University Women’s and Gender Studies Department. He founded SSU’s Queer Studies Minor. Trained as a historian with interdisciplinary gender/sexuality studies emphases, he earned his M.A. from the University of Colorado and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His scholarship appears in the Journal of History of Sexuality, Radical History Review, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Historical Sociology and anthologies such as the Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World and the Transgender Studies Reader 2. Don writes on the history of adolescence and sexuality, public queer history, and the social and cultural history of queer and trans performers. He also co-chairs the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, an affiliated society of the American Historical Association. Don cofounded and curates at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. In addition, he is one of the lead editors of Making the Framework FAIR: California History-Social Science Framework Proposed LGBT Revisions Related to the FAIR Education Act (2014), which calls upon California’s Department of Education to make comprehensive revisions across its framework in compliance with a law that mandates inclusion of LGBT people and people with disabilities in K-12 history and social science education.
Raquel Gutiérrez is a writer, live performer, film actor, curator, playwright, and cultural organizer. She writes on art, culture, music, film, performance and community building and creates original solo and ensemble performance compositions. Raquel earned her MA in Performance Studies from New York University in 2004. She is an expert in creating artist-community partnerships for a range of institutional and community-based organizations. Raquel is a co-founding member of the retired performance ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP), a community-based and activist-minded group aimed at creating a visual vernacular around queer Latinidad in Los Angeles. Raquel also co-founded other Los Angeles-specific art projects: Tongues, A Project of VIVA and Epicentro Poetry project. Raquel has published work, most recently in The Portland Review and Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano). Currently, Raquel is working on a few essays about her favorite performance and visual artists and the state of art and community-building as well as a novel.