New Directions in Queer Oral History

Archives of Disruption

Clare Summerskill, Amy Tooth Murphy, Emma Vickers, Clare Summerskill, Amy Tooth Murphy, Emma Vickers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000569261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storiografia

This comprehensive international collection reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field.

Drawing on the roots of oral history's original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer studies. Expanding and extending the existing canon, this book offers up key observations about queer oral history as a methodology, and how it might be advanced through cutting edge approaches. The collection contains a mix of contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, archivists, and activists, ensuring its accessibility and wide appeal.

The go-to reference for queer oral history for scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and community-engaged practitioners, New Directions in Queer Oral History advances rigorous methodological and theoretical debates and constitutes a significant intervention in the world of oral history.

PART 1 Narrating LGBTQ histories: Presence, absence, and the space between

1(Un)speakable pasts Reflections on working at the edges of queer oral history

Geraldine Fela

DOI: 10.4324/9781003092032-3

Introduction

In September of 2019 I drove three hours south-east from my home in the queer neighbourhoods of Melbourne’s inner north, along the Victorian coast, and arrived in the small coastal city of Warrnambool. A tight-knit catholic town known for its whale watching and scenic beaches, I was there to conduct interviews for my PhD thesis looking at the role of nurses in responding to HIV and AIDS in Australia prior to 1996 and the introduction of effective treatment. The town of Warrnambool was of particular interest to me, because it was in this town that Australia’s “first” HIV positive nurse, Tom,¹ had been outed in the local newspaper, sparking an ugly moral panic that had forced the young man to relocate to Melbourne.² I was in Warrnambool to interview Sarah who had worked with Tom.³ Prior to my contacting Sarah, someone we knew mutually had asked her on my behalf if she was interested in being interviewed and if she remembered Tom. She had confirmed that yes, she remembered him. I wanted to know more about what had happened, and to find out about the handful of brave nurses who had stood by their colleague and defended him.

From Sarah I learnt very little about Tom. She was extremely reluctant to discuss him or indeed queer life and HIV/AIDS in Warrnambool at all. The following year, by happy accident, I interviewed another nurse with a connection to Warrnambool, John. John’s vivid, often joyous, account of his first gay love affair in the Warrnambool campground told a very different story about the place of queer life in the small city. My experiences in the interview with Sarah and the sharp contrast between these two accounts forced me to reckon with the challenges, and the surprising possibilities, of working at the edges of queer history with narrators whose stories intersect with the history of the queer community but who have diverse relationships to and understandings of queer life.

Sarah

Sarah is a Warrnambool local who started nursing at Warrnambool hospital at the age of eighteen in 1983. She was hospital trained, meaning she lived on-site in nurses’ accommodation and trained on the wards. Between 1988 and 1993 she moved to Melbourne with her husband and worked at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She then returned to Warrnambool Base hospital, where she was still working when I interviewed her in 2019. Whilst she found it at times difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell certain stories when it involved discussing sexuality, HIV, and AIDS in Warrnambool, it is important to note that Sarah herself made a point to express anti-homophobic sentiments and it was clear to me that her reluctance to discuss these topics was not borne of personal prejudice.

Regardless, Sarah’s reticence was challenging throughout the interview, and began before I even turned on the recorder. I raised Tom’s story, knowing that she had worked with him, and I felt the mood shift. It is possible that she was surprised; whilst the person who had introduced me to Sarah had raised Tom’s case with her, perhaps she had not expected my own interest in his story. She was immediately uncomfortable and concerned that discussing him would betray a confidence, citing concerns about what it might mean for his family. It is worth noting that Tom was an openly gay man whose HIV positive status had been cruelly splashed over the local newspaper: it was no secret.⁴ Sarah would go on to discuss some aspects of Tom’s story, but it was with some reluctance. Listening back, I can hear how this shaped my own conduct in the interview:

And [pause] just [pause] going [pause] back to um Tom if we can talk about that a little bit um so he, he had HIV and then it became AIDS um can you remember much about the reaction within the hospital?⁵

In oral form, the long pauses at the beginning of this question and the use of the filler word “um” are very pronounced, as though I am at each point reconsidering whether to ask the question. Then, halfway through, my rhythm shifted entirely as I rushed the question out. It is clear that I was keenly aware that by asking the question I was pushing at a boundary Sarah had already set. In his 2020 article “Reticence and the Queer Past”, George J. Severs notes that oral history, in particular queer oral history, “requires a larger arsenal of scholarship on the ways in which the issues of sex and sexuality engender moments of discomposure and reticence”.⁶ If Sarah was reticent, I was discomposed; I found myself embarrassed and uncomfortable to be asking about a story so intertwined with sex and (homo)sexuality, painfully aware of my own position in the interview as a queer woman, asking a straight woman to discuss a subject she was clearly reluctant to discuss. This initial interaction set the tone for a challenging interview, one in which I felt I was repeatedly asking Sarah to disclose information that she did not want to share.

Sarah went on to explain to me that her concern with discussing sexuality, HIV, and AIDS in Warrnambool was ingrained in her from her experience of working in a regional hospital, a setting in which confidentiality had to be carefully guarded:

[In regional hospitals] you’re bound to know people. I have conversations at work all the time “oh do you know so and so yes I do yes I do” but yeh and people probably say to you if they know your husband or your mother, “oh have you told your mother I’m here” and I say “no, we don’t do that remember it’s all confidential I’m not going to go and discuss your care with my mother” […] very rarely would you come across that in Melbourne […] you don’t run across people you know it’s a different kind of freedom really isn’t it.⁷

It is clear that, for Sarah working in the small regional centre, the boundaries between the hospital and the community could be uncomfortably porous, and in our interview this weighed very heavily on her. But there was another layer to her reticence that speaks to the kind of queer lives that are able to be spoken about and the closeting of queer life in areas outside the “gaybourhoods” of metropolitan cities.⁸

In Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that the “metaphor” of the closet creates a binary between “closetedness” and then “coming out” and this helps produce a rigid binary of what is public and private, what can be spoken about and what cannot.⁹ The effect of this is that those lives which do not fit so easily into this rigid binary, those lives lived inside the closet, or perhaps somewhere in between, can slip out of the knowable past. The ease with which these complex figures can slide behind the closet door was apparent in Sarah’s testimony. When I asked Sarah if there had been patients of hers in Warrnambool with AIDS she recalled that in the 1990s there had been:

There was probably a few people in Warrnambool and they’re probably identifiable to talk about because there wasn’t many and I think one man was gay and I think there was another man that was married yeh […] I don’t think he was openly gay certainly not to his family but he was gay yeh and the other man was he was married yeh.

I’d say yeh and the other fellow had pneumocystis pneumonia so was with us for a little while and it was obviously his diagnosis and um he was with us for a little while, but he was not a very happy camper hmmm there was a pretty fraught relationship with his relatives that were very distressed yeh.¹⁰

It is clear in Sarah’s testimony how difficult it is for her to negotiate these complicated lives. From the very outset she signals that they are “probably identifiable to talk about” flagging her discomfort with talking about these men, and suggesting that the line of questioning was pushing the boundary of what should be private and what could be public.

In Sarah’s testimony it is apparent that this binary of in/out, and even of homosexual/heterosexual, is inadequate to describe the reality of people’s complex sexual lives and that this makes these stories hard to narrate. She notes, “I think one man was gay and I think there was another man that was married yeh […] I don’t think he was openly gay certainly not to his family but he was gay yeh and the other man was he was married yeh.”¹¹ From Sarah’s pauses and use of the filler “yeh”, it seems that this topic was hard for her to articulate.

What we can glean from Sarah’s story is that, of the two men she cared for with AIDS in Warrnambool, one was married and the other was not “out” to his family. Because neither man fitted clearly in the category of “out” and publicly gay, Sarah found their stories difficult to tell. Sarah notes that the man she identified as gay was not out to his family, yet clearly his sexuality was no secret – there was friction in the family because he had AIDS, suggesting they understood he had contracted the virus through sex with men. Regardless, because Sarah believed that he had not “come out” his story was confined to the private sphere, equally untellable as that of the man who was married.

It is notable as well in this passage that Sarah does not actually use the diagnostic term AIDS, instead referring to PCP – Pneumocystis pneumonia – an AIDS defining illness. Her language here is significant. She doesn’t say “there were a few people” she says, “There was probably a few people […] And they’re probably identifiable”¹² even though it is clear that there were people in Warrnambool with AIDS defining illnesses. It is a strategy of skating, or hedging, around the reality of the situation, perhaps to alleviate her anxiety that she was breaching a confidence, but it also has the effect of making the existence of those queer lives, and the queer history they point to, feel tenuous and obscured.

The place of these men’s lives in her narrative became even more tenuous later on in the interview, when she appeared to have forgotten that she had mentioned them at all. I asked her about issues of confidentiality when treating men with HIV and AIDS in Warrnambool. I put to her, “I imagine that in regional hospitals once there were people with HIV and AIDS coming through it’s a very fraught thing to negotiate.” She responded definitively: “It would’ve been and there wasn’t. There wasn’t people coming through.”¹³ Here, those men that she had told me about earlier in the interview, the married man and the gay man, were completely absent. She did mention that maybe later on there had been a few men, whom she described as “people that were part of the community and didn’t go anywhere else but yeh. I’m assuming people went to Melbourne for their treatment”. Perhaps here she means “most people went to Melbourne” but the effect of her narration is to obscure the lives and choices of those men who did not.

This omission speaks to the unintelligibility of queer life outside metropolitan areas. Literary theorist Esther Saxey argues that the move from rural areas to the metropole in order to come out and experience gay life is central to the narrative of contemporary gay and lesbian identity, thus cementing the seeming impossibility of queerness outside of urban gay ghettos.¹⁴ Sarah’s unwillingness or inability to narrate the lives of HIV positive men in Warrnambool was perhaps also a reflection of the pervasive cultural narrative that associates coming out with leaving rural and regional areas behind, leaving queer lives outside the metropole in the closet. Certainly, it was notable that she was at ease speaking about the HIV positive men she encountered in Melbourne, a marked differen...