UNO Documentary: Lancaster LGBT Archives NOLA

What: Frank Perez, co-founder of the LGBT archives in New Orleans, LA

Film by: J. Lancaster

Editor’s Note: Film student J. Lancaster, a student of film at the University of New Orleans, interviews Frank Perez- a founder of the LGBT+ archives project of Louisiana. Mr. Perez speaks on the beginnings of the organization, its importance, and ways to get involved in this video.

Transcription:

[Music]

My name is Frank Perez. I’m the co-founder of the LGBT+ archives project of Louisiana.

[Music]

So the LGBT+ archives project of Louisiana really had its Genesis in 2012. In that year, three local gentlemen- Stuart Butler, Mark Gonzalez, and Otis Fennell- thought that it was important to start preserving local queer history; they formed what they called “The Legacy Project” which was going to be an oral history initiative. 

They only did one interview, and they realized they were really in over their heads: they didn’t have the equipment; they didn’t know what they were doing, and eventually the Legacy project kind of fell by the wayside. 

However, the desire to preserve local queer history persisted, and we thought it was important and something worth pursuing. A group of us- later came to be known as “The Steering Committee-” met once a month, at Stuart Butler’s home on Esplanade Avenue, just to kind of brainstorm and figure out what we could do to preserve local history.

During that year we actually did site visits and sent out surveys to libraries Museum

archival repositories, asking them basically, “Do you have any LGBT holdings, and if you don’t, would you like to?” They were all very much interested in increasing their LGBT holdings.

We would reach out to the community- the LGBT community- and say “Hey, if you’ve got anything- if you’ve got organizational records, minutes from board meetings, agendas, if you have artifacts, like maybe a costume from a gay Carnival ball if you got posters from drag shows, photographs, anything- let’s find a home for that.” 

What we do is we meet with potential donors, and we take a look at what they have, and then we suggest to them where the best fit for that would be. We are essentially a Statewide Collective that connects donors to institutions, and we facilitate those donations of

collections. Sometimes we send a check along with the donation to facilitate the process, but that’s how the project got started.

In the 1980s and early 90s, there was a lesbian who lived here in New Orleans named Valda Lewis who produced a TV show on Open Access cable called “Just For The Record”

[“Just For The Record” Theme]

It chronicled queer life in New Orleans; it was a weekly program, and we were able to digitize those and make those available to the public. They are currently at the Amistad Research Center.

I think another one of our successes is becoming a resource for institutions across the state; we have enabled donations to the Center for Louisiana studies in Lafayette, the LSU special collections in Baton Rouge, the historic New Orleans collection, the State Museum, the Newcomb Archives out at Tulane as well as Amistad Research Center, and others.

Mark Gonzalez,who I mentioned earlier, was walking in his neighborhood many years ago, and noticed a pile of trash outside of his friend Alan Robinson’s home. Alan Robinson was a long time LGBT activist in New Orleans; he was also the owner of the gay bookstore on Frenchman Street. Robinson had fallen ill and died, and Mark noticed that a lot of his material was in boxes waiting to be picked up by the garbage people, and that Alan’s family was in there cleaning out the house; he said “Hey can I take this,” and they said “sure we don’t care.” 

In these boxes were records of a lot of Alan’s activism, and that would include organizing the protest against Anita Bryant in 1972, and work with any number of organizations. All that would have been completely lost if Mark had not happened to be walking by his house that day, and there are a lot of other stories similar to that.

When you think about the historical context in which gay people live, until very recently, it was inconceivable to live “out and proud,” as they say. To be “out and proud” could get you arrested, fired from your job, or evicted from your place of residence. In some cases, it could put you in a mental institution, and in many many cases, unfortunately being outed led to people’s suicides.

 So, being gay or queer was not something people wanted to document- for obvious reasons, and so what little material there is we have to preserve, so recovering lost history is how I would I would answer that question.

 The benefit to the community of what we do is that we fill in gaps in the historical record.

[Music]