WELCOME!
This digital exhibit offers you more than 20 short composite videos that draw from the Eugene Lesbian Oral History Archive to tell fascinating stories about the Eugene lesbian community, the women who created and sustained it, and experiences of being lesbian over the past 75 years.
Oral history narrators, then and now
Visit each virtual room on the website to watch the videos, read the histories, browse the image galleries, and click through suggested links. This material is easily incorporated into college and secondary school classes, filling the gap of LGBTQ curricula.
Whatever brought you here, you are in for a treat. These stories and photographs are emotionally and intellectually powerful and will probably make you think about your own life a little differently.
background
In the 1960s-1990s, hundreds of young women who identified as lesbians came from across the United States and founded cornerstone organizations central to Eugene’s history. They worked in collective businesses that were typically considered part of the male domain, ran printing presses, provided leadership for Eugene community service agencies, worked in City and State government positions, and produced and disseminated lesbian magazines, photographs, music, films, dance performances, theater and art. Their work in Eugene influenced Oregon’s political landscape and contributed to the larger LGBTQ movement.
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
This digital exhibit was made by Judith Raiskin, Courtney Hermann, and Kerribeth Elliott.
The video sequences available in this exhibit, edited by Kerribeth Elliott and Courtney Hermann of Boxcar Assembly, are based on oral history interviews with 80+ narrators conducted in the summers of 2018 and 2019 at the University of Oregon by Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Linda Long, Curator of Manuscripts at the University of Oregon Special Collections and University Archives. The video recordings and full transcripts are available online and can be searched by subject. The documents, photographs, letters, journals and ephemera featured in this exhibit are housed in the University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives. We encourage those who were not interviewed to contact us with their written reminiscences and perspectives to add to the collection.
We are grateful for the assistance of the many people who helped us along the way and for funding from the University of Oregon Williams Fund for Undergraduate Studies.
FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH
Teachers will find that suggested assignments will stimulate class conversations about sexuality, feminism, alternative economies, civic engagement, art, politics, homophobia, and strategies for living fully and courageously. Professors can also use this exhibit to teach about historic preservation, ethnography, interviewing strategies, editing, storytelling, filmmaking, and archival research and access.
SPOTLIGHT: MAPPING THE EUGENE LESBIAN COMMUNITY
Click on this Storymap that interprets the lesbian history of Eugene by way of significant locations.
Storymap creator Molly McBride walks you through the spaces and places of lesbian Eugene.
Links
The Old Lesbian History Archives
Smith College Documenting Lesbian Lives Oral History Project
Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories – Book
Bodies of Evidence – Book of Oral Histories
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America – Book
Brown University LGBTQ Center’s List of Libraries, Archives, and Museums
Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest
GLBT Historical Center and Archives
Oregon State University Queer Archives
KEEP EXPLORING
