Processing the Mazer’s A/V holdings began when
Granholm and Williford unearthed many boxes filled with VHS tapes, with varying
degrees of labeling. Next, the graduate student researchers went through the
Mazer’s extensive list of recordings, and highlighted any materials that as far as they could tell, were unavailable elsewhere. Since then, they have spent
months reviewing video materials, checking for quality, and adding as much
identifying information as possible to the labels. In doing
this, they have processed a treasure trove of videotaped history,
which includes community meetings and conferences from the 1970s to 1990s,
self-produced lesbian history videos, memorial services, birthday parties,
films and videos that appeared in festivals, musical performances, footage from
a march on Washington from the late 1970s, a talent show from the Califia
lesbian retreat, educational videos, and rare lesbian pornography.
Because the videos offer them unique opportunities to watch activist histories that they’ve read about come, in a sense, to life, Granholm and Williford both admitted that they have
loved viewing the Archive’s A/V materials.
“I’ve been looking at footage produced by these
regional lesbian activist organizations of their own meetings, events, and
performances,” says Williford. “That’s been exciting to me, because I’m sort of
used to reading critical theory from certain time periods, say the 1970s and 1980s. To see the footage of the grassroots community-based events— the other
side of that feminist theory—has added that human dimension. It is exciting to
see all the work that people put into living out this political goal of
feminist theory.”
Granholm particularly
appreciates footage of activist meetings because they clearly demonstrate the
contradictions, complexities, and disagreements that make up lesbian history.
“It comes up very often,” says Granholm.
“This idea that an open discussion is not just intended to facilitate
everybody’s similar attitudes and ideas. In the good majority of these videos,
discussions always seem to be prefaced with a statement that this discussion
should be a zone for us to safely disagree with each other and to facilitate
our own opinions rather than just create a major backing.”
Williford has been impressed by the extent to
which the people documented in the Mazer Archive have used their various creative
talents in political advocacy. The subjects of the videos often
use the arts to circulate widely the tenets of academic queer theory and thereby to accessible them to audiences that might not otherwise have become aware of them.
“In a way I was surprised at how much art—and, in particular, theater—have been elements of this practice of political theory
and community organizing,” says Williford. “There’s a lot of performance art,
and there are many theatrical productions, shows, and things like that, which
allow people to bring their creative abilities to community events. It really
makes certain ideas and political notions a little more available to people
through art. That’s inspiring.”
Granholm and Williford both noted that the women
who took the videos in the collection clearly felt that they were in the
process of documenting important history.
“The other thing that has surprised me is just
how carefully and consistently these organizations have documented and
preserved their own activities, and their own people and figures who were
influential and involved along the way,” says Williford. “I’ve been impressed
at the extent to which these women working with these organizations were all so
aware of documenting themselves along the way, preserving the history of
activities even as they were doing them. Crucial to the project is their awareness at the time and that is coming through to
me as we process all these materials, butespecially the video material.”
The Mazer Archives are known for preserving
evidence of the lives of women that might otherwise go lost. Granholm was
impressed by the histories revealed by the self-made documentaries in the
collection. For example, Diane Germaine’s self-made documentary Lesbian
Decade, The San Diego ‘70s, which includes excerpts from many lengthy
interviews taken by the filmmaker, illuminates the otherwise undocumented
stories of a multi-faceted community.
“It consisted of a couple of hour-long
interviews with women talking about their own experiences, whether that was
coming out, meeting other women, bar culture, and how that’s changed from then
to now,” says Granholm. “A lot of these things were mind blowing to me because
I just didn’t know most of this stuff. It was really incredible.”
The collection contains generous documentation
of the work that lesbians did with gay men in order to fight AIDS. Popular
accounts of the epidemic often overlook this angle of its history in their
emphasis on the activism of gay males. It also includes meetings of OLOC (Old Lesbians
Organizing for Change), providing a welcome visual corrective to the majority
of LGBT visual media, which often focuses on the young.
“Hearing about OLOC, hearing the speeches, and
hearing older women argue about why they needed different attention than young
people is extremely important. Especially when you think about the fact that
this is a lesbian feminist group,” says Granholm. “Often times, older people
are forgotten about in general. But when you have this sect in society in which
young and old people have to look hard for small signs of
themselves in pop culture already, it becomes even less likely that older
lesbians will be considered. It is wonderful that there were so many attempts
at making these videos, at actually recording this for history.”
In addition to preserving the materials of
lesbian lives, The Mazer Archive (like many queer archives) has encouraged the
expansion of definitions regarding what constitutes historically valuable
archival materials. As a result, some of its holdings are startlingly intimate.
“The memorial services are so incredible,” says
Granholm. “During one of them I cried because it was so touching, the ways in
which these women are remembered.”
Williford points out that the lo-fi quality of
many of the recordings, many taken on home camcorders, gives them an unusually
candid quality that makes the spectator feel as though he is peering in at past
events as they happened.
“There’s a certain aesthetic in the format and
lo-fi quality of these video clips that I really like,” says Williford. “You
feel like you’re just sort of peaking at some kind of documentation that is
removed from the original, that maybe has a somewhat amateur quality, and the
nature of the equipment just makes it feel a little more like the people are
familiar. Through that technology, you feel that you can re-experience what
they were documenting through real time.”
The Mazer Archives provide an opportunity to put
under-seen footage, like talent shows and conferences, in conversation with
mainstream representations of queerness that took place concurrently. Williford
and Granholm are in the middle of processing a series of videotapes, recorded
off of television using home VCRs, which include footage of lesbians in popular
culture and on news programs.
“There are lots of TV clips, things that a
general audience would probably have missed,” says Granholm. “They have a
recording of Northern Exposure in which a character references
the town being named after a lesbian. It’s just a small passing moment that a
lot of people probably wouldn’t think twice about, but it was something that
was referenced in popular culture, and the person recording wanted to note that
‘it referenced us!’"
“I think that the ephemeral television
programming will be fun to sift through,” says Williford. “Because things like
that might be archived somewhere, but not in connection to a lesbian archive. I
think that through those videotaped, miscellaneous collections you end up
getting this sort of timeline of the lived experience of going through the
popular mainstream media discussion of some of these issues related to queer
identity.”
The tapes are almost like collages of found
footage, re-presenting a version of mainstream popular culture of the 1980s and
1990s in which LGBT characters (who were often the exception, rather than the
rule) become constantly and repetitively present, even leading to the erasure
of more common, heteronormative representations that were ever-present on the
airwaves at the time. The footage offers valuable evidence not only of the
period’s pop culture representations of queerness, but of certain
manifestations of active lesbian spectatorship which became allowed by the
invention of the VCR.
Viewing the Mazer's abundance of
audiovisual materials has emphasized all that could have been lost. It further
illuminates the profundity of what the Mazer’s archivists have done over the
years in order to keep such a huge loss from happening.
“I consider myself somebody who seems to be
informed. I want to be accepting, and make sure that I’m viewing diverse
things,” says Granholm. “But going through and digitizing this has shown me how
little is actually available. So I am glad to have this collection, which
completes that history within a larger institution, and represents the walk or
paths taken by West coast feminist lesbians going from the 1970s into the
future. It would be inaccurate, at the very base of things, not to include [the
A/V materials]. More than just the political importance of these materials, it
would be a lie not to have them as part of the historical archive. It’s also inspiring,
I think, for somebody who is trying to be a better feminist, to see how much
these women had to fight. This collection is more than just a historical
component, but a cultural one. It’s heritage. To be able to share that with
UCLA is really the most important thing. It can be inspiring to a larger group
of women and men.”
“I believe in the work of the lesbian archive,”
says Williford. “The motto of the Mazer is ‘Where lesbians live forever,’
and there’s something really powerful about that. When you are part of a
community, an identity, and a subculture that is always under the threat of
erasure and invisibility, to say ‘This is an archive in which lesbians live
forever’ kind of ties together life and the preservation of life, which is
actually a real concern in a community that is always under the threat of not
just symbolic erasure, but also bodily violence and death.”
— Ben Raphael Sher
Ben Raphael Sher is a doctoral student in the Department
of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher at CSW.
The finding aids for the audiovisual materials will soon be
available at the Online Archive of California(http://www.oac.cdlib.org). Digitized
materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing
on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an
ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving
the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with
Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the
Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary
Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the
project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make
physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer
Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and
writing since the 1930s.
For more information on this project,
visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible. For
more information on the activities of the Mazer, visit http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org
No comments:
Post a Comment