• Undergraduate
  • Degree Requirements
  • Courses
  • Advising
  • Awards & Scholarships
  • Conference
  • Get Involved
  • Learning Abroad
  • Career Assistance
• Graduate
• Creative Writing
• Faculty
• Public Engagement
• Alumni
• Teaching Resources
• Contact
• Give to English

Read
English at Minnesota Newsletter online

Home > Undergraduate Studies > Get Involved : Student Stories : Danielle

Student Stories: Danielle

When my history professor mentioned that there were volunteer positions open that summer interviewing and transcribing for a small new University of Minnesota research collective called the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project (OHP), I had just finished my freshman year. I thought the job would be a good way to get involved and make a difference in the University academic community and the Twin Cities queer community. An English major, I was already planning on attending graduate school, and I figured volunteering for the OHP would look good on my resume. [Danielle began working with OHP through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP. She would go on to do a directed study concerning her OHP research.]

As the summer went on, I began to realize the importance of such a project in dispelling the assumed narrative of queer life in the Cities. My first foray into intellectual, academic theory was not reading the postmodern European theorists’ ideas of what makes a narrative and why narrative is just a construct. Rather I was actually hearing the discrepancies in the general narrative. Interviewing the participants brought personal meaning and unique slants to the stories that everyone hears about queer life in the 1950s and 1960s.

That first summer, only five people were involved in the project: the two graduate students who had created the project with their advisors, an undergraduate intern, a professor, and me. Throughout the summer and following years, more graduate students and professors were recruited to help interview participants (membership in the collective now stands at 20). Since I was only an undergrad (a young undergrad at that!), I sometimes felt uncomfortable working with such intellectual people. However, they never made me feel unwelcome, and they included me in all the decisionmaking processes with an equal voice. I was never forced to do the work no one wanted to do. Within a year of being involved, I was acting as lead interviewer during the interviews.

Since 2003, the OHP has collected approximately 100 oral histories,
amounting to over 300 hours of recorded interviews. Often absent from the usual archives and marginalized both in and outside the academy, these stories have become valuable resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and professors conducting research, as well as an innovative teaching tool for instruction at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The OHP has been a catalyst for interdisciplinary and intercommunity conversations on history, life narratives and oral histories, the meanings attached to sexual and gender identities, subjectivity, the Twin Cities, and Minnesota. The oral histories have also sprouted projects that engage communities outside the academy, including an exhibition, “Protest and Parade: GLBT Activism and ‘Pride’ in the Twin Cities.”

The book emerging from the conversations initiated by the OHP is designed to capture these conversations, yet it also utilizes ethnographic data as well as documents, ephemera, illustrations and other forms of archival materials from such collections as the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies (University of Minnesota) and the Quatrefoil Library (St. Paul). Thus, the book reflects and interprets research that extends far beyond the core interview collection.

After two years of interviewing, I was invited to co-author one of the chapters for the book. Knowing that the professors and graduate students trusted me that much was an incredible confidence boost. In fashioning the book’s essays, we have strived not to discuss GLBTQ life in Minneapolis and St. Paul as a transparent, linear history. Many local GLBTQ histories attempt to present a unified narrative of queer community formation, but we believe that such histories often elide the conflicting and contradictory experiences and interests of people and groups who don’t fit well into the dominant narrative. Instead, the essays offer a series of linked historical case studies that illustrate the multiple ways in which Twin Citians have lived queer lives and forged queer constituencies over time.

When I first came to the University, I had no idea what I wanted to do, other than pursue a degree in English. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as gender and sexuality studies, or even an inter-disciplinary way to approach American history. Now, I’m writing my honors senior thesis in English with the topic of lesbian separatism in the Twin Cities in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My focus is on the involvement of non-lesbian women (i.e. bisexual/straight women), lesbian mothers, and women of color. I have already analyzed some interviews from the OHP and noticed how these women’s identity as lesbian separatists were conflicted with their identities as mothers or bisexuals. My primary texts will be the oral histories collected from the OHP, as well as interviews gathered this year.

As a child and teenager, I enjoyed school and wished I could stay in it forever. Now I know that, indeed, I can work at a university as a professor and keep learning for the rest of my life.

Service learning classes inspired this English major to teach in Senegal

"With service learning classes, you're not just participating in the campus environment: You're a figure outside in the community. After awhile you realize that you're making an impact...You're connecting with different people: and having all these different relationships really changes your future." 

Lyncy Y.