I came. I saw. I conquered. Now I am getting erased.

I have no idea what it is, but it seems to the present young generation that history only began 30 years ago, and this is a problem.

By way of illustration:

I have attended talks by people who were inside and out on the street the night of the Stonewall Inn Rebellion who, after speaking of their experience that night,  have been corrected on some details that did not match what an audience member had been sent by a peer of the same age in a text.

My own history was sanitized recently to a point to remove all possible triggers that would make certain facts uncomfortable for present day young readers who might be offended by the terms that were used and the attitudes expressed twenty years ago so that when I read my own history, I was a minor player in an event in which I was the main one. Restoration of facts and vocabulary, no matter how unpleasant to today’s sensibilities, restored me to my own story.

In my living room I have a framed t-shirt I designed for an AIDS Walk in Oklahoma City in 1994, some thirty years ago now, along with a button and key chain that were part of the fundraising, but read recently that this year will be the 25th annual AIDS Walk, according to a new committee, erasing the five walks that would make it actually the 30th and removing from the Community history the people who had faced the worst of the AIDS Pandemic’s early devastation in the 1980s, and had begun the Walks.

A simple inquiry on a visit to Long Beach California recently revealed that, although the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach had existed from 1984 through around 1994 and was very well known, the young people at the reception desk at the GLBT Community Center, which should have its finger on the pulse of the Community, past, present, and future, had no idea such a chorus existed showing that the men who had given their time to the Community during the early years of the AIDS Pandemic have been erased. Making it worse was this same lack of knowledge on the part of the person in charge of the Center at the time I visited who presented a bad example to those who have taken on caring for the Community in all its aspects. They only knew about the chorus begun in Orange County in 1992. 

To guarantee to myself and anyone who might assume I have reached that age where fantasy and reality blur their boundaries, although I could find no reviews of the GMCLB’s performances, I did find notices of its upcoming concert dates in the local paper, The Press-Telegram, for those years.

Although the Center would welcome anything I might have related to the chorus, there seemed to be little interest in correcting the history.

In looking for information online since anything I had was lost in 1992 with the Rodney King Riots reaching where I had materials stored, I wrote to the local newspaper in Long Beach and was referred to a local LGBT Community newspaper that might be useful to my research and found it had recently celebrated its anniversary, claiming to be the first LGBT Community paper in Long Beach.

I know this claim to be false because, among my involvements in the Long Beach Gay Community, I was the cartoonist for the original paper from 1985 to 1992. 

That was the year I spent the summer in Greenwich Village in New York having coffee occasionally with many people who were at the Stonewall Inn that night,  holding the Ashes of Marsha Johnson at coffee in Mr. Wicker’s antique shop the day before I attended both her funeral and the party after where the Drag Queens were fierce, and got to hear the stories of the behind the scenes that may shock those whose history is all lollipops and rainbows and which they would dismiss out of hand because truth triggers the easily offended.

I have spoken with many who did the heavy lifting since Stonewall, and what they have experienced in large numbers is seeing the history of which they were a part and a shaper being modified to taste like history is a recipe and themselves being written out of their own lives and replaced with tag-alongs.

Some of the saddest words I heard came from an older activist, “No one knows who I am anymore,” when many owe her a debt.

As a teacher, whenever an unpleasant historical event came up there were always the students in the class who boasted that had they been there, things would have been different, ignoring the reality that things in the past were not like they are now and could have been better or worse than they are presently. Whereas, now you might be able to storm into someplace and make your displeasure known because times allow for that, trying that in the past might have you shot just stepping in the door depending what part of the country you lived in and what color your skin was.

When a group of us elder Gays were discussing changes over time while sitting at a bar on Pride Day, we were admonished for expressing jealousy of the young kids who have the freedom to do what we only could dream of and worked for, with the reminder that if we had only worked harder we would have had our rights sooner  when this twenty something was born Years after the state had passed its equality law and might have some difficulties now, but not those as well as what had to be experienced before.

When things like marriage equality came along it was, to this young person and his friends, just part of the natural progression that went along with what we had been given in the past because, apparently, it was not through the hard work of the activists in the Community but because of the largesse of the greater society that extended our rights to us that we now have them.

A Transgender friend is given the cold shoulder by young Trans people who ignore what her transitioning entailed as a decorated cop in a red state capitol  and do not invite her to participate in things because they have decided that all cops, regardless of anything, are bad, and she is equally guilty of any police oppression regardless of her treatment by the police force post gender alignment.

If I have seen this much erasure in these many places in just those things with which I had a close relationship, it has to be happening in a lot of places and we need to stop this erosion of our history.

I saved my history as I wrote an important part of it in a book and that, my artwork, and legal papers from OKC are archived and, regardless of any future treatment, my truth is on file.

Although it has been 30 years and only one visit in that time, I am endeavoring to restore the GMCLB and the original Gay newspaper to the historic record.

I am proposing that anyone  who was a Gay activist, who gave their lives to the fight, who experienced any part of Gay History, write your personal experience down. Do not leave it to others. They will not be looking you up especially if your history goes back more than 30 years.

Write down your personal experience, the role you played, referring only to others as they play into your story. You are the star, they the extras and supporting cast. It will happen that way with their tellings so there will, in the end, be singular and group inter-twinings.

This is your official account of your story, the one that, regardless how anyone else might twist it, will exist as your truth.

There are various places archiving Gay History.

My Oklahoma History is at a university in that state and there are Gay History sites on the internet. You can write it up on a self publishing site so it is preserved.

It used to be that we were erased by those who did not want us in the histories because we were different. Histories were rewritten to credit others with our work and pronoun genders were changed to deny our love for each other. It was bad enough when we had to protect our history from others, it is horrendous that we have to save our history from self-revision from within.

“What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. ” Thomas Paine

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