The Story Behind 'Sanctuary: A History of Queer Club Spaces in Newark'
What is the Queer Newark Oral History Project (QNOHP) and what are its goals?
The Queer Newark Oral History Project is a community-based and community- directed initiative dedicated to preserving the history of Queer Newark. We are committed to including the full breadth of the city’s very diverse LGBT community. We want to connect the young and the older members of this community, and we especially want to preserve memories and artifacts of the LBGT community, and make them easily accessible. We are seeking out members of the LGBT community in Newark, of all ages, so we can interview them, and copy and digitize their papers, photos and other archival information. These will then be available to all on the web, possibly through a platform hosted by the Rutgers University Library.
How did this collaboration between the Queer Newark Oral History Project and Yendor Productions come about?
This is our second successful collaboration, dating back to the 2011 program, Queer Newark: Our Voices, Our Histories. As part of our planning work on that program, QNOHP reached out to the city’s LGBT population through various meetings to get a feel for the types of topics that the community thought we should explore and publicly discuss. Rodney came and participated and the collaboration was a natural evolution. Rutgers University-Newark has resources that Yendor doesn’t, and Rodney has networks and insider knowledge that are invaluable to QNOHP’s mission and goals, so it’s a true collaboration that has and will continue to benefit the LGBT community in Newark.
How and why did you choose this aspect of LGBT life, club spaces in Newark, as the topic of this program?
It was a result of those outreach meetings we hold regularly. The Project wants to present programs that reflect the LGBT community’s interests and concerns, but we also have a goal of linking the generations and sharing knowledge among the age groups. Young people are interested in the club and ballroom scenes, and older residents know, from experience, the role that these institutions played in the history of the city’s LGBT culture. Newark activist James Credle has been involved in ballroom culture – performances where competitors, usually queer men of color, organize in “houses” or “families” often named after fashion designers, compete for best showing in special fashion or gender categories, and provide support and guidance for one another. He was able to connect us to the ballroom community in Newark.
We also had a great historical resource for the project in Newark writer Gary Jardim’s 1993 book Blue, which contained interviews with many of Newark’s most important gay club founders and promoters. We learned that for decades the city’s clubs – both gay and straight – were havens where the LGBT community could safely socialize. The clubs played house music that gays and straight people alike loved, and that had an encompassing and inclusive influence on listeners, encouraging understanding across differences. So the clubs were a place of sanctuary, for socializing and supporting one another. This was true during the height of the AIDS crisis, when the clubs and especially the ballroom families provided places to share resources and information about the crisis, to care for those who were sick, to mourn those we lost, and to rebuild relationships and communities.
What is mission of the month-long program -- what do you hope to accomplish?
Our long-term goal is to document and share the history of Queer Newark with both the LGBT community and those outside the LGBT community, who we would love to see at our October events. Once history is accessible, it becomes real to those too young to have lived it. We hope to accomplish this through an art exhibition, panel discussions, spoken-word performances, a tea party and film screenings, and the return of the legendary FireBall, which has not been held in Newark since 2002 (Full schedule at http://newarklgbtqcenter.org/).
Another goal is to make the LGBT community aware of the QNOHP so that they will want to share and preserve their stories, their histories, their photos and other pieces of Newark’s LGBT culture and history.
Are there more such collaborations in the future?
Definitely! We will continue to meet with each other and the LGBT community in Newark to develop and share ideas for promoting and saving Newark’s rich, proud LGBT history.