| OCR Text |
Show 10 discourse with gay perspectives made oral history compelling. twofold: My objectives were representing Salt Lake's postwar gay life with the authenticity of first-person accounts and organizing a queer oral history archive. I advertised the project on e-mail lists serving the local gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities. I also ran ads in two local gay periodicals and discussed the project at the 2003 Affirmation International Conference." All but one of the respondents were white men from middleor working-class backgrounds, and their ages ranged from 53 to 83 years." Most interviewees also came from LDS families, but reported varying levels of observance. The twenty-five subjects included twenty-two who currently self-identify as gay, one who participated in the gay subculture during the 1950s but claims no sexual identity, one who renounced his gay identity, and a heterosexual woman who socialized with gays in the 1960s. Men who experienced gay life in the 1950s and 1960s are often guarded, yet several narrators felt they had reached an age where disclosure brought fewer risks such 1948-1972. Records usually included copies of the complaint, arrest warrant, jury instructions, psychiatric evaluations, and signed verdict. Obtaining evidence for misdemeanor charges was more challenging. While newspaper accounts of such arrests occurred police usually charged gays with disorderly conduct or "lewdness" periodically, which, in theory, had broader applications. However, annual reports available at the Salt Lake City Police Records Division contained aggregate data on homosexual arrests in the 1960s. 19E-mail lists included Kathy's List, the Utah Stonewall Historical Society, Wasatch Affirmation, Gamofites (an organization serving gay fathers from Mormon backgrounds), and Family Fellowship (a support network of parents and friends of gays and lesbians from Mormon backgrounds). The periodicals were The Pillar and the Salt Lake Metro. 201 recruited five subjects bye-mail, two through print ads, four by referral from other interviewees, and fourteen by referral from personal contacts not involved in the study. Two were born in the 1920s, eight in the 1930s, fourteen in the 1940s, and one in 1951. |
