Dan Sinykin
A few years ago, Stewart Van
Cleve took an elevator down to the depths of the Elmer L. Anderson Library at
the University of Minnesota and followed a curator into a distant corner of the
“Special Collections and Rare Books” archive. Here he found, in his words, that
“a lone quarter-sized rainbow sticker guards one of the world’s largest
repositories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer thought, art,
and history” (1). He also found the archive in disarray, with teetering stacks
of materials in need of organization. Thus began his involvement the
Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection, which would grow into a groundbreaking book,
Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer
Minnesota.
Van Cleve brings to the book the
tempered passion and perspective of an archivist. He acknowledges that
archives, as he writes, “are reflections of their founders and the people who
work within them. Not bound by professional standards that did not yet exist,
the early collectors of queer artifacts saved the things that they liked and
discarded the things that they did not. Even under the auspice of
professionalism, archivists and curators make innumerable daily decisions that
determine cultural memory. Historians, in turn, write histories that are based
on the decisions of those archivists” (3). Van Cleve’s recognition of the
limits of his work is generous and refreshing. And it’s good to know that his
book is only the tip of the iceberg. Yet anyone who ventures further into its
pages will find a wealth of material that has been kept largely underground,
missing from other histories of Minnesota, now bursting forth.
Some listeners might wonder why
the book uses the word queer in its
title. For much of the twentieth century, queer was a derogatory term for gays
and lesbians. But in recent years the word has been reappropriated by many
people who embrace non-normative gender and sexual identities. Van Cleve puts
it well when he writes that “queer efficiently
describes a host of identities that challenge the existence of sexual normalcy
and the dominance of the gender dichotomy. . . . The word provokes and
simultaneously defines the social order by calling its assumptions into
question. Queer,” he continues, “has come to describe many who are not
easily categorized using contemporary terms” (14).
Both Van Cleve’s origins in the
archives and his use of the word queer
influence the very structure of the book. He has loosely divided the book into
seven thematic sections, each of which contains a number of semi-autonomous
entries on everything from a visit Oscar Wilde made to the Twin Cities to
Minnesota AIDS activism. A few of the entries contain similar information,
though each time with a difference. The result is a text that need not be read
“straight” through but can be approached from a variety of directions.
That said, the book opens and
closes with entries on northern Minnesota. It begins with the story of
Ozaawindib, an Ojibwe two-spirt person who lived near Leech Lake in the early
1800s. As Van Cleve notes, “Among scores of tribes and nations, including the
Dakota and Ojibwe, certain individuals possessed a duality of spirit. Men who
behaved like women and women who behaved like men were mystics, matchmakers,
healers, leaders, truth sayers, and warriors” (15). At several points, Van
Cleve includes entries on more recent two-spirit gatherings in Minnesota.
The last entry in the book is
devoted to queer life on the Iron Range. Earlier, Van Cleve writes that,
“although it is less repressive than myths depict, northern Minnesota has been
a challenging place to lead a queer life” (154). Nevertheless – or for that
very reason – in 2009, Ashley Kay Rantala founded The Iron Range Gays,
Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transgenders, and their Allies and initiated biweekly
meetings in Hibbing and Virginia. By ending the book with the Iron Range, Van
Cleve points to the persistence of queer life across all of Minnesota.
He adds a final note in the form
of an epilogue, returning to where he began. One purpose of archives is to
store communal memories against an unpredictable future crisis, which is all
the more critical for marginalized populations. “As long as [the] archive
exists,”Van Cleve writes, “we will always have a community memory to guide us
if times change for the worse” (281). Let’s hope that’s unnecessary and that
these words from the book’s dedication prove prophetic:
“For those who will remember us.
May their genders be irrelevant,
may their sexualities be respected,
and may oppression rest,
finally and forever,
in their very old books.”
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