In a conference room at The Ohio History Connection in Columbus, OHC interpretation and content specialist Wendy Korwin pulls up a clip from a 1969 Halloween drag ball and carnival. A jaunty voice sings over the crackling audio, welcoming guests to the ball.
“I feel like I could listen to that all day. It's so like life-affirming and fun and social,” Korwin said. “And then there are other parts that will just kind of destroy you.”
Until recently, Korwin wouldn’t have been able to play the audio on a computer, because it wasn’t digital. The cassette was one of 160 audio and visual tapes in an eclectic collection of analog media at Ohio History Connection chronicling LBGTQ history.
“Their origin stories are different, they were created by different folks for different purposes, and they had different lives before they came to the Ohio History Connection,” Korwin said.
A robust collection
The collection of VHS tapes, cassettes, and U-matic video master tapes includes copies of the decades-old LGB Report show by Stonewall Union, which is now called Stonewall Columbus.
It also has cassettes from an early 2000s conference about Christianity and homosexuality and early 90s public service announcement videos from the Cincinnati Human Rights Campaign, urging people to report harassment against the lesbian and gay community.
From famous Ohio drag queen Dolly Devine – also known as David Zimmer – singing in the late '60s, to documentation of William Anderson, the first person known to have died of complications of AIDS in Columbus, the tapes chronicle moments of LGBTQ history that were at risk of disappearing.
“The expected lifespans of those tapes is something like 10 to 30 years. So, a lot of the material in our collection is beyond that already,” Korwin said.
Now, all of that history has been saved in the form of digital files. Ohio History Connection, the state historical society, used a $21,000 Recordings at Risk grant from the Council for Library and Information Resources to send the media to be converted.
Dave Phillipi, a client manager for Scene Savers, said the Covington, Kentucky-based preservation company converted OHC’s collection in under 90 days. He said it was a smooth process.
“It's wonderful to work with archivists. And it's wonderful to work people who take great care of their collections,” Phillipi said.
OHC is in the process of making the digital files accessible through a searchable online database.
An elusive history
Daniel Rivers, an associate professor at Ohio State University who specializes in LGBTQ history, said it’s important to capture the community’s history because it’s “elusive.”
“I grew up in a radical lesbian feminist, family household community in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970s … and I really felt like our community and our families had no history,” Rivers said.
The generation before the LGBTQ liberation era was forced to stay hidden just to survive, he said.
“Because of that particular characteristic of the repression that LGBT communities faced, the history of those communities in a very singular way is in danger of being lost," Rivers said.
When the community became more visible around the '70s, they had to do their own archiving, with projects like the Lesbian Her Story Archives. Mainstream archives only began to see the importance of their history in the 21st century.
That’s when Ohio History Connection first launched its Gay Ohio History Initiative, also called GOHI. The newly digitized tapes are part of GOHI’s larger collection that also includes items like clothing and magazines.
Rivers said GOHI is important because it captures stories from Ohio. LGBTQ history has often focused on the coasts and major metros, overlooking the Midwest.
“When we give a people a history, then we give them validity, right? We say, look, we are here. And we are important and a part of American society,” Rivers said.
He said that as LGBTQ Americans once again struggle for civil rights, it’s critical to chronicle the depth of the community’s experiences.