 I'm Andrew Dolecart, and I'm a professor of historic preservation here at Columbia, and I'm along with my colleagues whom you're going to meet later. I'm a co-founder and co-director of the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project, and this symposium is co-sponsored by the Sites Project and by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, that's known as GSAP, and the gay student group here, which is QSAP, and you'll hear a little bit more about them also. So just before we start, just what I really want to just not take a lot of time, but just acknowledge a couple of people who made this event possible. And first off, this wouldn't have been possible without the Dean of the Graduate School Amal Andras, who when we presented the idea to her was very enthusiastic and came up with the budget for this to bring people in from around the world to come in and speak. And also to Lyla Cattelier, who's in the back there, who is at the events office and really made this happen. And the students at QSAP also who helped with the planning of this, especially Gwen, who's right here. So, and also I just have to really compliment Lyla and for the poster, which we are really proud of. And it is, if you haven't seen it, it's a 1972 photograph for a gay dance here, where Alma Mater, the centerpiece of the campus, with a sign on it that says gay dance, which we then transposed into queer symposium here. So then they're available in unfolded version and the folded version as well. So make sure you take them as souvenirs of the event. Okay. So, so we are really lucky here in New York that we can have this symposium focusing on LGBTQ history and site preservation. Sadly, there are many places in the world where this event could not take place. And as I'm sure a lot of you know, just this week in the small nation of Brunei, the law was promulgated that calls for the stoning of homosexuals. So, you know, this is still going on in the world. So I think it's really important that as we celebrate Stonewall 50 this spring in New York, and we're expecting over a million people here to do that celebration, that, and as we examine LGBTQ preservation today, we do not forget that not many years ago we would not have been able to do this even here in New York. And there are many places around the world where we still could not have a symposium like this. The site project was founded, the site project was founded by my two colleagues and myself, all of whom were students at the Columbia Historic Preservation Program, and we believe really strongly in the power of places. And I think the tours this morning, for those of you who went on them, really expressed the power that place has to link us today to the past history, to past queer history issues. Our interest in this extends back over 25 years. In the 1990s, we helped to form the Preservation Committee of a group called OLGAD, the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers, a group that no longer exists. And for Stonewall 25, our team, which was larger than just the three of us, and in fact several of our colleagues are here today, who help with this, we compiled what we think is the first ever map and guide to LGBT sites in America. And we focused on three neighborhoods, Greenwich Village, Midtown and Harlem, with a few miscellaneous other sites like the Fountain in Central Park here. A few years later, in 1999, our group spearheaded the listing of Stonewall on the National Register, the first site ever recognized by the federal government for its LGBT history. And a year later, Stonewall became a national historic landmark, which is the highest level of this kind of recognition in the country. And of course now, President Obama declared it a national historic site. And the National Park Service has a docent there in the summer, and they do tours. And the map that you can take in the back, if you didn't get one this morning, that we have done was commissioned, actually my colleagues, Ken and Jay did, was commissioned as part of that. Still today, of the over 90,000 sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, only 21 of them mention LGBTQ issues at all. And some of these, it's quite tangential. So our history has been ignored for a really long time. And the irony of this is that from the very start of the modern preservation movement in the late 19th century, gay and lesbian people have been closely involved professionally in historic preservation, but not so much researching their own history. So we see this changing, I hope. The slow pace of recognition of LGBT sites led us to apply for an underrepresented communities grant from the National Park Service in 2015. We received this grant, and with these funds as seed money, we launched the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project. With our central focus, a growing interactive website, so visit us on our website. And the listing of local sites on the National Register, and we hope also as local New York City landmarks as well. We've also done a theme study that Jay mostly worked on of LGBT sites, and we're doing educational work as well. So why are we doing this? And what do we see as the purpose of this? For us, the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project is a pioneering cultural heritage initiative and educational resource that is comprehensively for the first time identifying and interpreting sites connected with LGBT history and culture in New York. We think this is the first time this kind of comprehensive work has ever been done in this country. Our aim is to make, as we say here, an invisible history visible, and to bring to the fore the contributions that LGBT people have made to local and national history and culture. It's also, we feel, a social justice initiative, since in spite of the enormous advances that LGBT rights over the past 50 years, there are still threats and there is limited awareness about LGBT history by the general public, and specifically by the queer community itself. We are always shocked to hear people say that there is no LGBTQ history before Stonewall. So we're very intent on making sure that people understand that there was. This lack of knowledge and threats against LGBT rights makes the need to document and recognize and interpret these sites more and more important. So here are a few examples of the breadth and diversity of sites that we have identified beyond the obvious places, such as Stonewall, that are all on our website. We have about 160 sites on the website now. We're hoping to have 200 by Stonewall 50, and we have a backlog of several hundred more. So we've looked at the places where people lived. So it was in this basement apartment of this Harlem row house that the great jazz musician Billy Strayhorn and his partner Aaron Bridges lived. In this apartment in Greenwich Village that was built in the 1920s, a number of women couples, a number of lesbian couples in the circle of Eleanor Roosevelt lived. As you can see here, I call this lesbian flats, this building. We're looking at art in New York, both the places where artists worked, like Jasper Johns's studio and the work by queer artists as well. In the 19th century, Emma Stebbins, who did the most famous sculpture probably in the city, the fountain in Central Park, or Scott Burton, a minimalist sculptor who sadly died of AIDS and worked at the juncture between public sculpture and furniture design. And we're looking at culture in general. We're looking at dance and fashion and opera and music and theater. And this is the Winter Garden Theater. This is one of my favorite sites. As somebody who lives up to the stereotype of gay men and Broadway musicals, I really love this site because this is where West Side Story had its premiere. And West Side Story was almost entirely a gay and lesbian project. The director and choreographer, Jerome Robbins, the composer, Leonard Bernstein, the lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, the librettist, Arthur Lawrence, the set designer, Oliver Smith, the costume designer, Irene Sheriff, the lighting designer, Gene Rosenthal, and the star, Larry Kurt. And so this sums up a kind of important aspect of culture in New York. We're looking at community sites, often vernacular buildings that have no intrinsic architectural interest, like this little two-story commercial building in Brooklyn, which was founded by a gay African-American entrepreneur who opened up a welcoming bar here before Stonewall in the 1960s. And it lasted until relatively recently when a new owner in about 2010 basically kicked the bar out. And this is just a spectacular sign. The oldest black-owned nondiscriminating club, as it says with the rainbow flag here. Or places that you would walk right by and not know had an important history. The Quaterroy Club, which was a social venue, an alternative to bars in the pre-Stonewall period where gay men and lesbians got together and had played cards, had lectures, had did theater. And basically was a relatively conservative place where people could just get together at a time when there were very few places. This project is responsible for the listing of five of the 21 new or expanded LGBT-related sites now on the National Register, including Julius's, which a lot of you saw this morning, rewriting the Alice Austin House. Alice Austin is a very prominent photographer and the house is architecturally distinguished. But the listing ignored the fact that Austin lived here for over 40 years with Gertrude Tate, her partner. And you can see the two of them together and one of her more transgressive photographs here. The Cafe Chino, the birthplace of Off Off Broadway and Gay Theater is now listed on the National Register. And Earl Hall, which we'll hear more about later today, where Columbia had the oldest gay collegiate group in America. And we're working on two others now, the home that James Baldwin purchased for his family in the 1960s. A few years after that white brick facade was put up, you wouldn't give a second glance to this building because architecturally it's so bland. But it was really crucial to Baldwin and his family. And we're redoing the nomination for the Church of the Holy Apostles, a major center for post Stonewall activist groups. So we hope to be a model for others. We'd love to see this kind of work going on everywhere. And this symposium is going to talk about the ways people are looking at queer sites. So check out our website and follow us on social media. As you can see in our social media person, Christiana is here today. So just let me tell you what we are planning on doing this afternoon. We're going to have three panels. And each panel will be moderated by one of my colleagues at the site's project. And there are three speakers in each panel. And the speakers, they'll be introduced, but their biographies are on here. So we're not going to waste a lot of time with lengthy biographies. And each speaker will speak for about 15 or 20 minutes in the panel. There are three speakers per panel. And then they'll come up over here and we'll have some time for questions before we get to the next panel. So the first panel is going to be about the United States. The second panel is going to look at these issues internationally. We did have a very dynamic speaker that we hoped would be here today from India. But when he went to get his visa, he had a one and a half minute interview for his visa. They asked him what he was coming to speak on and how much money he made a year. And as soon as they found out what his salary was, they denied him a visa. So we will see him on video today. Unfortunately, he sent his regards to everybody today. But unfortunately, he won't be here. And then the third panel will be on House Museums. And then the next thing is that Gwen is going to talk a little bit about what QSAP has been doing or some of the people from QSAP are going to talk about their project. Good afternoon. As the co-organizers of QSAP, we wanted to welcome you again to this afternoon's events and just introduce ourselves and a little bit of the other work that we are engaged in. So I hope you can follow us after today's events. My name, as Andrew said, is Gwendolyn Stiegel. I'm a dual degree student in preservation and architecture. I'm graduating this year. I'm Ruben Gutierrez and I'm a third year graduating M.R.C. And I'm Dolan Baker. I'm a second year M.R.C. student. And just to introduce ourselves, QSAP is a student organization that seeks to foster both conversation and community among LGBTQ students, their allies, faculty, and alumni of G-SAP. And we've done a number of projects and lectures in the past, none quite at this scale. So we're very excited to be part of this today. And in fact, in 2015, we invited the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project to speak at Columbia. So we're very happy to be collaborating again today's events. We've also done a number of projects including coded plumbing, which examined building codes and their gendered implications. The major project that we've been working on for a couple of years now and will be culminating in our first publication this May is research on housing LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness in New York City. And this is a flyer from our major event last year, which brought together a number of speakers who worked on a specific project, a purpose-built space for LGBTQ youth. And Ruben will walk you through a little bit about what our research has been and where it's going. The project has really been a collaborative effort between architecture, urban planning, and real estate across the three M.R.C.E.R.'s, AAD, students, and alumni. Currently, 20% of homeless youth nationwide identify as LGBTQ, and the rate is much higher in NYC, up to 40% identifying as LGBTQ. The project has mostly consisted of compiling information from social services websites, organizations, and interviews, and making it accessible and legible to architects and designers. We've mostly been drawing plans and axonometric drawings to make the information legible to the design community, and also working through the different economic and social issues that arise when designing for LGBTQ youth. So, at the end of the semester, on May 23rd, we'll be having our publication party for this book that we're making, and we'd love to have your support to come see it, get a copy of the book, but also this is a great opportunity to meet the students and the alumni that worked on this publication. It's been a project that's gone on for several years now, so it's really exciting for all of us to come back and look at the amazing work that we've done, and we really love to have you all there. You can follow us on Instagram or Facebook by just looking up QSAP, and you can get information about this party. The second is tonight. We're having an after party. Just tend to celebrating today's events and the conversations that we're going. So, after the dedication at Earl Hall, we'll be heading to Sweep Bar, which is a local LGBTQ bar to celebrate that at 7 p.m., so join us there. Thank you. So, our first panel is recognizing LGBTQ sites in the United States, and it's going to be moderated by Amanda Davis, who's our project director at the New York City LGBT Historic Sites Project. Hi, everyone. I don't want to take too much time away from the speakers, so I'll be brief. We're really excited to have all three panels, but even us in New York, we can be a little insular, and we have a different way of preserving and recognizing historic sites and landmarks. So, I think you'll find it really interesting to see what's going on in San Francisco and in Louisville, how the preservationists work with their municipalities to protect and recognize structures. And really kind of learn from each other and how we can continue to advance this important preservation issue. So, without further ado, I just want to start with Kate Fossel, who's going to be talking to us about her work in Louisville. So, her bio is in your programs, but I'll just give you a snippet. Kate Fossel is founding director of the Ann Brayden Institute for Social Justice Research in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville, where she is also a professor of women's gender and sexuality studies. She was the principal author of the LGBTQ Historic Context Statement for the State of Kentucky through a national LGBTQ heritage initiative of the National Park Service. She has also written books and focused her research on such diverse topics as civil rights, housing segregation, and women's activism. Kate, if you'd like to come up here. Having worked on LGBTQ historic preservation projects in a very, very different context from the ones surrounding us in New York City, or the one we'll hear about shortly from San Francisco, I just want to begin with a point that may seem so obvious that it goes without saying, but it's a quality of place that very much framed my work on the Kentucky Queer Heritage Project. I'll discuss today. Historic sites have meaning because of the people who made them meaningful. Those places become important as living or gathering spots and preserving them signifies that we as larger contemporary publics care about those earlier people. So I want to emphasize the importance of living remembrance today to direct your attention away from any technical or built environment aspects of historic preservation and toward broader questions of process and relationships. From the earliest days of queer identity and community building, as we all know, there's been an emphasis on making public, at least among ourselves, our shared histories because they give people a sense of belonging. Ultimately, they give us something to celebrate like the Stonewall at 50, what we're celebrating today. Processes like that are a necessary prerequisite to preserving historic sites and sometimes as we found even to identify them. Historic preservation is important work, but in and of itself it doesn't necessarily make history visible to any beyond a limited number of scholars and other preservationists as we've discussed repeatedly already in the walking tour today. Creating visibility takes additional forms of creative activities like this wonderful digital history site like the walking tour and many other kinds of creative activities. In Kentucky, public awareness of our queer history is at a very different place from where it is here in New York City, though I would argue that it's a difference of degree and not of kind. That rather fledgling or embryonic state of the field made for a very different starting point for the project that I'm discussing today. In investigating and celebrating queer places and people in Kentucky, it quickly became apparent to me and my collaborators that a central problem we faced and a central objective we had to embrace was to give greater legitimacy to Kentucky queer history, which was not on any official radar before we landed this National Park Service grant, before we applied for it anyway. And yes, contrary to the presumption of many on the coast, Kentucky is home to vibrant and long-standing queer communities and queer culture. We knew that going in, although our project was really the first time that history had been approached on a statewide basis. Our charge from the National Park Service Subcontract grant we received in 2015 was to work in partnership with the Fairness Campaign, a Louisville-based LGBT equality advocacy organization. And you see this because this banner shows that it's the 20th anniversary of our queer anti-discrimination law or fairness ordinance here in Louisville. It was to work with the Fairness Campaign to produce, one, the nation's first statewide queer historic context narrative, and two, to amend and extend two national register nominations in Louisville by documenting their queer significance. And those are the two sites. The first is the first really gay-friendly bar in Louisville appears to have been established in 1947. The second is there was a tragic fire that destroyed this Whiskey Row historic district, right as we were starting our project, but it was already on the national register. And the downtown was the city's longest-running gay club from the 50s through the late, through, well, it morphed and became something else after the late 80s, but it was still going up until just a couple of years ago. And when I say we, I also want to reiterate, I didn't do this work alone. I had a project team that included a historic preservation and public history professor, two gay history writers and collectors, one in Lexington, one in Louisville, and two public history students, as well as our partners. And I've listed the names there in the interest of time. Let me begin this story with a little background on Kentucky beyond its well-known bourbon and race sources. It's a pretty small state that sits at the border of the south, north and midwest and lies just south and along the Ohio River and then the Mississippi River at its southwestern tip. As you probably know, Kentucky is largely but not entirely poor and mostly but not entirely rural. It's what many call a Bible Belt state. What that means is that queer life there is still very contested often on religious grounds. As in most of the nation, Kentucky's queer communities and in particular its social movement have taken shape most visibly in its two urban centers. Louisville, Kentucky's largest city of just over a million and Lexington, primarily a university town of about half a million. Now both those cities have one national recognition for being LGBTQ friendly and both have strong anti-discrimination laws with Louisville's having been among the early crop to include gender identity protections. And there you see the two main cities Louisville on the left and Lexington a little further east. This is the beginning of a student project to document LGBT sites that come out of the narrative and maybe and a few more actually that we're finding. So thank you Emma Johansson for that. Outside of those two urban areas, about three quarters, almost three quarters of Kentuckians are still not covered by anti-discrimination protections or fairness laws as they are known there. Yet queer rural life has also flourished. It's done so more quietly whether it be on lesbian communes or in more conventional partnerships of friends. Much of what you know about very recent Kentucky queer history might be related to the uproar over gay marriage that one right wing county clerk provoked a few years ago by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in the wake of Oberginfell in mid-2015. And that was right as our project was starting by the way so that was like a little bit. But there are many equally compelling stories on the other side. Probably not everybody in this room knows for example that we also have the smallest municipality in the United States to enact queer anti-discrimination laws. The tiny Appalachian town of Vico population 334 which passed its law in 2013 with leadership from its gay mayor Johnny Cummings also the town hairdresser. It was plucky people like those and their predecessors that we most wanted to engage in this research project. Well if a historic context statement is the basis for evaluating the significance of properties for some sort of historic designation it can also become the basis for giving them more credibility in the eyes of both preservationists and larger publics that range from unaware to downright hostile. So I came to see this historic context as an important symbolic tool through which to celebrate Kentucky's queer history. I'm not a preservationist if you read my bio by training. I'm an oral and social historian and that disciplinary frame was how the research team and I approached our work. We used archival sources and there are rich sizable LGBT archival collections in both Louisville and Lexington and we use traditional site locators like city directories. But we also talked to many many people on social media or face to face conducting or accessing several dozen oral history interviews and talking to many more. The project timetable didn't give us a lot of time so working with fairness campaign local affiliates. We held five gatherings across the state that we call history harvest over a two month period whereby we traveled to preplanned programs in these five communities with recorders and portable scanners and invited people to come share stories and let us make copies of their artifacts and there's a the one on the left is the one in Louisville the one on the right is the one in Lexington. Far more than most historic context even queer focused projects our end result is an introductory and somewhat partial social history of the state's queer experience over several centuries. It profiles people and events as much as or even more so than places and it does so within a synopsis of US queer history that highlights where Kentucky people and events figure prominently. If you read the narrative you'll also learn far more about Lexington and especially Louisville than you will about other parts of the state. And both oral and written sources reminded me constantly that those two cities queer histories have never even been examined collectively with each other never mind the rest of the state. We obtain lots of rich oral history material but nearly all of it was on the post Stonewall era which by the way for students especially I think underscores the need to talk to elders while we can. Discussions of Kentucky queer history prior to the 20th century relied heavily on historiographical sources and necessarily included some informed conjecture about for example cross-dressing practices in frontier Kentucky and about the romantic lives of 19th century settlement house women reformers. Due to the patchwork of the findings the narrative relies heavily on vignettes or profiles of intriguing or significant queer Kentuckians as well as historical flash points like for instance the first gay marriage trial in US history which took place with two lesbian protagonists in Louisville in mid 1970. These profiles situate Kentucky's queer history through the end of the 20th century in relation to larger developments and violated not only the 50 year rule informal rule in historic preservation as we had planned to do but also our own initial plan to end in 1980 we just couldn't do it. Alongside every person profiled in the narrative are suggested sites associated with their importance. And so the narrative is sort of like an encyclopedia except that it's organized largely chronologically. Its introduction outlines four major themes in Kentucky's queer history that aren't specifically tied to its historic sites but that infuse the state's queer life more broadly. These themes recurred in our primary research in ways largely consistent with regional historiography of the south and you see them there. I adapted the first three race, religion and rurality regionalism and from John Howard's foundational work in southern queer history but amended what he called rurality to add regionalism because there's such a historic rivalry in Kentucky between Louisville and Lexington. And it's not just basketball but also the constant circulation of queer people and queer ideas back and forth between the city and the countryside. Privacy emerged as the fourth thing because it kept surfacing in everything from a southwestern Kentucky court strict interpretation of sodomy in a 1909 legal appeal that freed two gay men from prosecution to the reserve with which many Kentuckians interviewed for this project continued. To discuss issues of sexuality. At the end of the context narrative is an appendix of nine historic sites in or near Louisville and Lexington. We deemed worthy of further investigation. We were not able to give it that investigation in the confines of the project for their LGBTQ significance. While a second appendix identifies a typology of five property types that arose repeatedly as common locations of queer activity to offer some guidance for those wishing to extend the number of sites we had identified. The stories that the Kentucky queer historic context statement presents are especially valuable so I'd like to devote the remainder of my time to introducing you to three of our major figures. The first is probably Kentucky's most iconic queer historical figure an African American born James Herndon in about 1893 who went most often by the nicknames seen there sweet evening breeze or sweets for short. Sweets life could be a whole book and there is a whole play about it. So I'll just say this sweets often stroll the streets of his hometown of Lexington in full or partial drag from about the 1930s through the late 70s. He may have identified as a very well in fact have identified as a trans woman had he lived at a later time but he reportedly never claimed the title drag queen. Nor did he use she pronouns to my knowledge so I'm not going to either. Sweets who worked as a decently paid hospital orderly for decades was infamous for running onto the field with University of Kentucky cheerleaders at the start of each football game. In matching attire and for holding after hours parties at his home shown there with the male players all through the typically segregated and repressive 1950 and that home pictured here is one of those nine properties we identified as historically significant. Sweets also performed as the bride in at least three events known as womanless weddings which were rural folk cultural events in the mid 20th century. These were held as fundraisers for his Baptist Church and reported on without comment in the local papers with him dressed in a beautiful white gown as the bride. He was involved in the local gay scene and once the gay liberation movement burst forth in the 70s he became politically active. He must have endured a lot of harassment in his day maybe worse but on the other hand his eccentricity was widely tolerated and he's remembered by many 20th century Lexingtonians queer and not as a beloved local figure. Only a handful of years younger but in some ways a world apart from Sweet Evening Breeze is the white Louisville heiress and bisexual rebel Henrietta Bingham of Kentucky's Bingham newspaper empire. Henrietta is pictured here at Harmony Landing Horse Farm in her her farm circa 1940s and that site now a country club but having maintained that distinctive structure is another of the nine properties we think need further research. She lived there with her lover tennis pro Helen Jacobs Henrietta's tale is a dashing but ultimately tragic one including travels back and forth to London and New York love affairs with several of the Bloomsbury group male and female. Psychoanalysis to cure her of her lesbianism isolation and a death by probable overdose here in Manhattan only a year before the Stonewall uprisings. And there's a wonderful biography of her shown there that was also an incredibly valuable source for my research. Finally meet Elijah Lige Clark a native of the tiny Appalachian town of Heinemann Kentucky who became involved in gay politics in the mid 1960s through the Madison society first in Washington where he worked for the military and then here in New York City. You scholars of queer New York may know Lige Clark as an outspoken proponent of what we would today call sex positivity. And it's one of the first out gay journalists involved along with his longtime partner Jack Nichols in the emergence of gay liberation here in the city. And his founder in 1970 of the weekly gay magazine called Simply Gay. Lige Clark's life is a literal point of connection between queer histories of Kentucky and New York because although he never lived in Kentucky again after college he remained attached to his hometown and family and visited there with Jack often. Shown here on the left about the same time this same time 50 years ago shown on the right on the cover of one of his lover's books. And in the middle there is a very special photo that's lunch Clark died tragically young under very mysterious circumstances and his family members traveled to Heinemann with me. That's his sister Shelby Anna Clark Ryan on the left his niece Jamie Ryan on the right and his nephew Eric Ryan whom I'm very very glad to recognize here today. Give us a wave. Thank you so much. They were very valuable sources as the first statewide project of its kind. The Kentucky queer heritage context study was a sort of milestone in explorations of US queer history to focus on contrasts and connections between urban rural and small town settings and therefore under illuminating important under recognized dimensions of queer experiences. Yet it was only a start. There were a lot of lessons learned and I'm out of time so I'm not going to mention except just that last one because I think it really informs the organ of you know what Andrew and others have done today. We need these these national register nominations are important but that's a very high standard of structural integrity. And as one of the guys I met on the tour said there's so much of queer history that is invisible because the places are gone. So we need to recognize those places and those people too. Thank you so much for letting me join you today. So next up is Shane Watson who's actually a former colleague of mine when we both worked in Los Angeles but today she has her San Francisco head on. Shane is an architectural historian and preservation planner based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She co authored the award winning citywide historic context statement for LGBTQ history in San Francisco which was completed in 2016. She is a founding board member of the Rainbow Heritage Network a national organization for the recognition and preservation of LGBTQ sites and heritage. Founding chair of the GLBT historical societies historic places working group and a committee co chair for the city of San Francisco's citywide LGBTQ cultural heritage strategy. Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Hi. I first want to thank Columbia University for inviting me to be here. I haven't been in New York since I was 12 and so I've been just spinning around in circles since Wednesday so excited to be here. I also want to thank Jay and Ken and Andrew for being really like the pioneers of LGBTQ heritage preservation in the country. We wouldn't be here without the efforts of those people and types of people. So just quickly I want to say that I got started in LGBTQ heritage preservation about 10 years ago when I devoted my master's thesis to developing a preservation plan for North Beach which is San Francisco's first lesbian neighborhood. As Andrew mentioned earlier back then really nothing was being done to preserve LGBTQ heritage nationally let alone in San Francisco. The Stonewall Inn of course was the only LGBTQ site listed in the National Register then which I think had about 50,000 listings and I wanted to help do something about that. So in 2013 my colleague Donna Graves who's a public historian based in the Bay Area and I applied for and we're awarded a grant from the San Francisco Historic Preservation Fund which is through the office of mayor's office of economic and workforce development. And we received this grant to write the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco which I'll talk about today. And I was going to say how many people here know what a context statement is but I don't need to do that anymore. But who didn't know what a context statement is before today? Okay so everyone knows. Okay. Okay good all right so very quickly context statements or I don't like the word statement but that's what we call them in California. Context reports really are these place based research documents that identify historic places within a specific theme or geographical area. These reports are used by city planners for guidance on how to make decisions about these properties especially when they have been proposed for demolition or substantive alteration. Generally up until recently context reports were focused on things like architecture so architectural themes for example like a neighborhood in Pasadena like craftsmen bungalows. What started to change within the last decade or so is context statements started to focus more on social and cultural history like Kate talked about just now. And of course this is very different from focusing on architecture because so much of this cultural social history is intangible. It's not tangible it can't be touched. So San Francisco now has four city wide historic context statements that are social cultural histories and those are the Japanese American context. African American context Latino context which is underway right now and of course LGBTQ also our state office of historic preservation commissions statewide historic context statements. We don't have an LGBTQ one so it's exciting to hear about that. Today I'm going to give a brief overview of what we covered in the report for San Francisco and talk a little bit about how it's being used by the city and community members. So the overarching of our overarching theme of this report is the development of LGBTQ communities in the city. How did these how did relationships form how did communities form neighborhoods form. Our narrative starts in the Native American period. We were I mean really able to go back that far to talk about this history and we went all the way up until the 90s to capture San Francisco and the AIDS epidemic. So the geographical geographical scope of this report is city wide. We found sites in every single neighborhood. I mean San Francisco is not that big but still. And I just also want to point out that we always say that this report you know wall pretty long and with a lot of information is never intended to be comprehensive or all inclusive. We it's a starting point really. So the history section of our context statement which we started with first context statements often start with very jargony preservation language. And we wanted it to start with just the history so that community members could read this report and you know really feel like it's it's you know it's a better read than the jargon up front I think. Quickly I will run through these themes. I'm not going to read off the screen so I'll let you read through but these are the different chapters we focused on. We looked at nine different themes and these are more or less organized chronologically. I focused on history up to 1965. Donna focused on post 1965 history. 65 was a big turning point in San Francisco's queer history. Nick will talk about why after me. Very similar headlines to Kentucky. Ninety three nineteen sixty five history is hard. It's a really hard history to research. Difficult emotionally as well as you know finding archival material and we end with AIDS. So the history chapters are followed by guidance on how to evaluate sites associated with these themes. This is really prepared for planners at the planning department. But you know also property owners can use it community members. It's really laid out in a reader friendly way which was intentional. And as you can see by this slide our history goes up to the 90s and that's that's tricky in historic preservation because the 90s are part of the recent past. And the 50 year rule with the National Register were supposed to allow enough time to pass to be able to look at these sites objectively. So we talk a lot about how do we look at sites for example from the 90s. How do we evaluate them for their significance. So one of the most critical components of historic context statements and surveys is community outreach. It's really important to reach out and engage with these communities so that they can feel like they're a part of this process. We really felt like we were working on behalf of an alongside queer communities in San Francisco. We had an advisory committee that we assembled right away of people who specialize in this history or and who are members of these communities. We also hosted a couple workshops and events. I'll just kind of go through this. One of the things that's great about San Francisco is we have two huge archives of LGBTQ history the GLBT Historical Society and the San Francisco Public Library. But even with the richness of these archives the material is really focused on the experiences of white gay men, middle class men. So we reached out to specific underrepresented minority communities to make sure that those voices were heard. And those communities are lesbians, bisexuals, trans folks and LGBTQ people of color. We also teamed up with a youth group called Lyric in San Francisco to do oral history interviews with LGBTQ elders, which was just a really special, wonderful event. And then we conducted oral histories, which you can see are listed on the left, and teamed with StoryCorps to record some of these histories. So they came to the San Francisco Public Library. We went into the booth with them. And a lot of these, you know, we take direct quotes from these oral history interviews and weave them throughout the narrative history, which really makes it come alive. And people are, you know, happy to see their names in the report and it makes them really understand their contributions are important. One other thing we did was with a small grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation we developed a statewide crowd sourcing map called California Pride. And we had a couple of pinning parties in LA in San Francisco and invited people, taught them how to do their own pinning sites associated with this history that are important to them, you know, both personally or sort of like neighborhood or citywide. I don't think this map is actually up anymore. I was not able to find it when I was preparing for this presentation. I'm not sure what's going on. It was part, all of our pins are incorporated into a national map now that was done by the Park Service for the LGBTQ theme study. So how is the context statement really being used? And so we've had it in use now for about four years, three or four years. And one of the primary goals, as I mentioned, is to make it easier for city planners and consultants to evaluate these sites in light of development projects that really, you know, like proposals to demolish them or alter them. California's Environmental Quality Act. Anyone, has anyone heard about that? Okay, good. Okay. In the back. So CEQA for short, this is our statewide, the statewide laws that require all buildings over 50 years old to be evaluated as potential historic resources if they've been proposed for demolition or substantive alteration. So a context statement really helps streamline these CEQA reviews for city because, you know, you're not looking at a site in the vacuum, you're now looking at a site in light of this broader history in the city. So Donna and I documented a little over 300 sites in San Francisco associated with this history. That all went into an Excel spreadsheet. That data was loaded into the city's GIS based San Francisco property information map. So if you go on their website, and I've entered 440 Broadway, which was the first lesbian nightclub in San Francisco, on the right pops up under the preservation tab, all pops up all of this information about the building. And it says, as you can see here, that this has been mentioned in the historic context statement. So what that does is it sends up a red flag to the city planners. If someone says, hey, I want to demolish 440 Broadway, red flag goes up. And they say, well, you know, we need to slow down, we need to look at, we really need to take this history into consideration when we're doing the environmental review. So this is kind of the GIS guy shaded everything in rainbow, which is great. So if you zoom out, you can see, this is not like the greatest, but I just wanted you to see Golden Gate Park is all rainbow. But there's, you know, scattered all across the city. Yes. So through the CEQA process and using the context report as a foundation, the planning department has officially identified four potential LGBTQ historic districts in San Francisco. And those are not officially designated districts. That's just a CEQA law where, you know, if you say it's a potential district under CEQA, it's just as important as an actual district in terms of evaluating resources in those districts. So we have the Castro, the south of Market Area, the Tenderloin and Polk Street. So this means that any building that's listed as a contributor to one of these districts is considered to be a historic resource under CEQA unless someone can prove it otherwise. So this is actually where preservation gets some teeth. A proposal to demolish one of these contributors in a district could potentially result in the developer having to prepare an environmental impact report, which can be hugely costly and take forever. It's a big pain for developers, but it will slow down the process a lot. So just want to point out that all of the CEQA stuff I talked about is very reactive. We're responding to a project proposal. What we're also wanting to do and what we're seeing is more proactive efforts to preserve our LGBTQ heritage. And the City of San Francisco Planning Department has already started to do this. They took about a dozen sites that we talked about in our report and they're going to landmark them in-house. They're just like, you know, okay, we're going to assign these to a planner and they're going to landmark these sites, which is really cool. And then we had one property owner come to us. Somehow they read this report and they said, we are the owners of San Francisco's first queer restaurant, the Paper Doll. And we want to landmark our building because we feel like this history is important and that it went through the process. I think it still needs to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, but it's been approved by everybody up to that point and it should be approved. So that's pretty neat. And this is my last piece here. How am I doing on time? Okay. So perhaps the most significant effort to preserve our heritage is the Citywide LGBTQ Cultural Heritage Strategy. This project was started in 2017 as response to legislation proposed by one of our City Supervisors. He felt that, it's named Supervisor Wiener. Scott Wiener. He felt that somebody had to do something to preserve what's left of our LGBTQ cultural heritage, especially in light of skyrocketing rints and rapid gentrification. Lots of development projects. The City of San Francisco defines cultural heritage as this. The expression of a community's ways of living through beliefs, customs, practices, artistic expression and significant places. Cultural heritage inspires community pride and awareness of local historic resources, emboldening a sense of identity and responsibility to society at large. Cultural heritage includes both tangible, such as building our work of art, and intangible, such as a dance or a ritual. One example of San Francisco's tangible cultural heritage is Harvey Milk's residence and Castro Camera Shop in the ground floor. An intangible example is the annual Pride March or the Dyke March. So to kick off this project, the San Francisco Planning Department, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the Entertainment Commission organized a large working group of about 50 people. Those 50 people eventually branched into three committees, Economic Opportunity and Equity, which is focused on business mostly. Arts and Culture and Community Services and Education. I'm the co-chair of the Arts and Cultural Committee with Terry Bezwick, who's Executive Director of the GLPT Historical Society. The Cultural Heritage Strategy is a plan to preserve not only our history but our living history, which Nick will talk about, right? So after about a year of community outreach and engagement, we're hosting tons of workshops, working with people one-on-one. We did a city-wide survey. I think there were almost 2,000 people responded to it. We prepared a draft document with these goals. We have a vision, these goals, and then objectives. And at the next level, we have strategies. So historic preservation falls under the middle one, culture, and historic preservation actions fall under, really fall under C3. So the other ones are more focused on, well, number one is focused on cultural districts. We also want to establish a permanent museum of LGBTQ history. And then the other ones are about affordable housing for artists and art programming. So I have two minutes. I'm sorry. So let's see. So we decided that in order to give our plan, C3, some teeth, we would need to create a formal advisory group to the Historic Preservation Commission and Planning Department. So we're proposing that. So this advisory group would work with the Planning Department and the commissioners on any issues that come up related to LGBTQ sites. So once that advisory group is established, we've proposed about eight actions that fall under that heading. I won't read through these, but I have it here. So I think the big ones are we want to develop a proactive notification system. So the advisory group would be alerted of any projects that propose to demolish a site associated with this history. And then we as a community advisory group would kind of get to weigh in on that. We want to follow the model of the New York City Historic Sites Project and do something that's more publicly accessible. We have all of this amazing history and information, but really, unless you get a copy of the PDF of a report, no one is looking at it. We want to establish heritage trails to honor these historic parade routes through the city. So San Francisco Pride Parade has gone down Market Street throughout history. And the Dyke march has become controversial in the last couple of years because the parade route is being changed by various stakeholders and community people are upset about that. So we really want to lock these routes into, you know, formally recognize them somehow so they don't change. And then finally my favorite proposal is I want to see a mitigation banking program that would, money would be funded through developers in California when they prepare these environmental impact reports. The project is going to demolish a building. They have to do all these mitigation measures to mitigate, try to mitigate the demolition. And historically that's been, someone goes out and takes black and white photographs. It costs a lot of money. So we're saying let's take the money that that would cost, you know, that money and put it into a mitigation banking program that then would support more preservation projects like the one you've just seen. So we brought the strategy to the Historic Preservation Commission last fall. They're very supportive. The next step is the Planning Commission and then finally the Board of Supervisors. And we're shooting for June of 2019 to go to the supervisors and they will have the final say on whether or not all of the stuff goes into effect. So that's it for me. Thank you very much. Okay. Our final speaker for this panel is Nick Large. Nick is a current board member of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and member of the Bay Area's premier ANPI drag troop, the Rice Rockettes. Nick has been involved with several Japanese American ANPI and LGBT causes and groups and has most recently worked with the Fred T. Korematsu Institute and the city of San Francisco's LGBTQ cultural heritage strategy on its advisory council. Nick's thesis on San Francisco's emerging cultural districts and the movement behind the current Compton's transgender cultural district. Hello everyone. My name is Nick. I use he they pronouns and I'm going to talk to you today about some of my thesis project, some of which I actually interviewed some people in this room with hey, hey Ken. So here we go. So first I'm going to start off. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the topics I'm going to cover and I'm going to tell you also right off the back that I am not a historic preservationist. So I'm not a planner. I'm not an architect. I'm not even necessarily historian. I'm kind of like a pseudo historian maybe. But my background is in psychology and gender and sexuality and then also in public affairs. So that kind of ladder area is really where I see a lot of the work and a lot of my interests intersecting with this field of preservation and also where this field of preservation where we can take it. So I'm going to start off by telling you a little bit about San Francisco while we kind of already had like a little welcome to San Francisco kind of intro. But I'm going to cover some of the history of competence cafeteria. So the screaming Queens. And then I'm going to talk to you about what our current city climate is like current inequality in the city. And then from there I'm going to go on to what are people doing right now in terms of inequality. How are people responding to some of the same kinds of things that they were responding to during the conference cafeteria. Then I'm going to talk about the history. It's kind of been referenced a little bit this tension almost between history and heritage and what is what is history and then what is living heritage. So history is something maybe in the past and heritage is something that's current and that is alive. And then I'm going to talk about how all of that goes into the current competence transgender cultural district. I'm going to give you all of the updates I know about it. So here we go. So a lot of people know Harvey Milk from San Francisco. So this little kind of snippet here. This is from the 1978 Pride Program. So this is the welcome message from the Gay Freedom Day Committee in 1978. So that was right after Harvey Milk was elected. So it says come out with joy for our birth as a people newly awakened to our potential for liberation. Speak out for justice to confront the violence and lies of those who would make us scapegoats. To be free to learn and free to teach free to raise children and control our own bodies free to find fulfilling work and spaces to in which to live and grow. Come out with joy. Speak out for justice that we may bring our special insights and unique experiences to the universal struggle for human rights. So it's a lovely welcome message isn't it. And a lot of people think of San Francisco as it's kind of this colloquial queer Mecca. Right. So it's kind of the gay capital of the nation. A lot of people have that kind of like message or that kind of aura about it. It's a place where you can maybe go to be free to express yourself. I saw this on a shirt actually like yesterday as I was walking around the airport. You move to New York to be somebody you move to LA to be somebody else but you move to San Francisco to be yourself. I thought it was funny because I'm like from LA but I live in San Francisco and I'm here in New York. So. But anyway the San Francisco context right it's kind of this almost colloquial Mecca has that kind of aura. And kind of out of that aura what did we have well we had something that happened in 1966 at this place here Gene Compton's cafeteria. So how many of you here just quick hands have heard of the Compton's cafeteria rights are kind of like a little bit familiar with the history. Okay well this is the site you could see that I did a screenshot from a video which is why it's the best quality ever. But Gene Compton's cafeteria was a 24 hour diner. And it was opened. And it was a place where people could go where they would not be welcomed in other parts of the city. So it kind of became a hangout spot. And this here how many of you have seen the Screaming Queens documentary that Susan Stryker did on YouTube the documentary about the Compton's cafeteria riot. And in it Susan Stryker talks about how she first discovered the story if you will. So she was going through some of the archives in the historical society and she pulled out this pride program. So this is from 1972 this is the pride program. This is the centerfold and this is probably the exact same one that Susan Stryker touched with her legendary hands because I just picked the one that was on the top of the box. So in it I know it's I wasn't sure how this would translate but it's really small. But basically in it. It's talking about the history of the Compton's cafeteria riots and how in the early hours of one August morning in 1966 police entered Compton's cafeteria at the intersection of Turk and Taylor streets in the Tenderloin. As a police officer grabbed the arm of one of the Queens she threw her coffee in his face. According to firsthand accounts a riot immediately ensued. Sissies, hustlers, cruisers, runaway teens, slumbers, hair fairies and drag queens fought back. So a lot of those terms we may not recognize them now but those were terms of the time. The cafeteria was in an all out brawl between police officers and patrons. Dishware flew across the room, tables were turned over and stilettos and purses were used as weapons to fight against police brutality. The restaurant's plate glass windows were smashed in the process. The police retreated out of the restaurant to call for backup and the riot spread to the out nearby street. So there were there was a cop car that was set on fire. There was a newspaper stand that was burned down to the ground. And one of the patrons Amanda St. James said there was a lot of joy after it happened. And gay liberation activist Raymond brochure so it's here that's him right there in the middle. So he was a reverend somewhat loosely maybe affiliated with Glide Church. But he was very instrumental actually in organizing the first kind of large scale pride program that San Francisco had in 1972. So the big parade and the big festival and stuff like that. Fun fact it was organized at a church Glide Memorial Church and Shane Watson is doing the nomination for it. So it has a pretty cool history there. So some key facts about the riots at content some things I just want to try and convey to you. So first it occurred in 1966. A lot of people like to play the oh we had this first or we had this first game. But I'm just giving you the date for context right. But some things that happened after the riot were very interesting. So you had this creation of a center for special problems. So that was a a center under the public health department. It might not be the most exciting name that we would want for a center for ourselves now. But at the time in 1966 it was something that was very radical and very revolutionary. So when I was doing my thesis I interviewed some people who kind of frequent in captains and stuff like that. And they went to this center for special problems and one of them Felicia. She was actually in one of the pictures that Shane had up there. I'll show you some pictures of her later. But she said that that was the first place where she went to talk to some kind of medical professional that told her it was OK to be who she was. That was the first time she ever heard it. And it meant the world to her. And out of that center for special problems they also issued this interesting kind of thing. It was a special ID. It's kind of like like a city ID. So what would happen is you could go to the center for special problems. You can get this little idea to have your name on it and it would say this person is like a patient of blah blah blah for the center for special problems. And you can use that say if my name did not match the name I go by in everyday life did not match the name on my birth certificate. I could use this special ID out of participating business or bank or something if I wanted to open say a bank account. Because otherwise if I didn't have official documentation if my government ID didn't match what I look like what I go by in everyday life how would I open up a bank account. Another interesting thing that kind of happened around after was the establishment of a police liaison. So SFPD had a police liaison and the police liaison would kind of advocate for the LGBT community. Apparently there were some things that came out of it that were kind of beneficial go figure who would have thought. But these are some key things so and for all of these two it's it's hard to say necessarily whether the riot at Compton's cafeteria directly led to the creation of these or directly led to all of these. But the circumstantial timing is kind of like maybe it did. You know there's no official kind of government records or documents that we know of that exist kind of detailing Compton's even. So inequality in the city so many of the same kind of inequalities that were occurring at the city or in the city at that time right. You have similar things that are happening today. You know people are having difficulties finding housing people are having difficulties finding jobs income. You know it's it's hard for you to make enough income to afford your housing. I think all of you here in New York New York you all know that right. But here but this is a quote from supervisor Jane Kim it was at one of the one of the hearings where they were I think establishing the Compton's cultural district where she said it doesn't matter if we are a sanctuary city if no one can afford to be here. If no one has safe spaces to go to and if there aren't community spaces that serve all aspects of our community. So some key facts. So the Bay Area is the third highest number of billionaires on the planet and that's probably going to get a lot higher with all of the IPOs we got going on. So we got Lyft we got Uber we got a million others that are about to I think we'll lift just IPO right. It's going to have and those kinds of things have consequences those kinds of things have effects. So these top three here these top three figures are from the Horizons Foundation Community Needs Assessment. So the Horizons Foundation they fund LGBT kind of programs projects whatever all LGBT funding related but they just finished this needs assessment and these are fresh Bay Area specific ones. This bottom one. So I work in homelessness policy. So something in San Francisco that's kind of interesting actually should talk to some people who are talking earlier is that so every community that gets federal funding for homelessness has to do what's called a point in time count. So they have to go out and try and estimate you know how many people do we have in our community that are experiencing homelessness and a lot of local communities collect specific data. So San Francisco for example tries to see well how many of these people do we have here in the city that are experiencing homelessness identify as LGBT. In San Francisco for the past two pit counts it has been you know very disproportionate especially for youth. So for youth you know this past one it was 49 percent the one before that was 51 percent. So we got some wild statistics going on in San Francisco in a city that's known for being the gay Mecca the queer Mecca right. And then how do we take all of that information. How do we take those statistics and then how do we react to them with the context of the history. How do we learn the lessons from the history from Compton's from Compton's cafeteria from the organizing surrounding that and how do we inform how we can better our circumstances now in the present. So I am going to talk about one of those fun developments Shane was referencing. I'm going to talk about a little bit of the sequel process and stuff like that. But starting in 2016 the site the old site of Compton's cafeteria became the site of a lot of new activism. A lot of new landmark activism specifically and then also what turned into cultural district activism. In the face of booming development concerns of gentrification and rumors of secret underground tunnels between the intersections of Turk Taylor and market streets. A controversial development at nine fifty nine seventy four market street has led or led to various people fighting to preserve the area's history occasionally with each other. Located across from the old location of Compton's cafeteria the development itself previously did contain several historic sites. So for example it contained the old crow the silver rail the landmark room and a cruising area popular for gay and trans sex workers colloquially known as the meat market. So here in this timeline just a few things I try when I was doing this for my thesis I tried to put it into context with things that were happening at the time right. So we have the citywide the San Francisco historic context statement we have Stonewall being declared a national historic monument we have sequel appeals. So kind of going back to that whole environmental impact review sequel thing it's a very very powerful tool it can like completely halted development. And with that kind of power comes a lot of bargaining power too. So you know whether or not people should be using sequel or environmental impacts to try and get all of these different kinds of community benefits or something. You know you can argue is that the intention of it but that's what's happening. So here I'm going to skip to one of these fun little stories right in the early and before one of the planning commission hearings there was a story that was leaked that there were secret. Underground tunnels. Yeah. Shane laughs. But it's a great story. It's a great story. So what are my professors actually he knew that I was in I was exploring the idea of trying to see if I could do a historic landmark in San Francisco. So he kind of he told me this he's like hey come here like see these pictures I got blah blah blah. So I was looking at him and I was like oh these are under this location. This is like in this place and this is the time frame. So having like a vague understanding of the national context history I was like wow these would be extremely significant if this is something that proves to be true. Right. Because this let's see. You can see the headline there were secret tunnels below tenderloin gay bars. Should they be preserved as part of an LGBT historic district. The vote is Thursday which was the day right after this was published. So the article went on to claim that tunnels still preserved were used by patrons to escape police harassment and more importantly suggest a relatively organized gay resistance pre Stonewall. If true the existence of these tunnels connected the connecting these businesses would radically rewrite LGBT history as we knew it on the West Coast. And then this is one of the photos of the underground kind of basement area. I'll spoil the story for you long story short where there are tunnels underneath this place. There's a large basement was there. This is the basement. You know where was there evidence of tunnels. Not really according to one of the was an historic evaluations. Could there have been at one point. Maybe. It's hard to say. You know but one of the bigger lessons out of that right is like why why did that story resonate so much with people. You know why was there such a yearning for this kind of story. Why is there such a yearning for this kind of history and why do people attach themselves to it so much. So going off into the next day later in the day was the planning commission hearing where they were hearing the environmental impact kind of a report or where they were hearing the the sequel appeal. So packed into a crowded room LGBT community leaders developers affordable housing advocates and union workers donning yes on 950 stickers all voice their opinions on the controversial project. LGBT community leaders were urging for a delay on the project to both research the tunnels to see. Hey are there tunnels under these streets under these buildings and to push for additional benefits from the developers. And one of the kind of research pushes also was that the National Themes Park National Themes study had just had just come out. And a lot of the researchers are saying well we need time to digest this 1200 page document because it lays out step by step how you can do a nomination for an LGBT historic site. So they wanted time to go through it. And that's what they were saying at the planning commission hearing. So affordable housing advocates were praising the creation of this 14.8 million fund that we create about 60 to 70 units of 100 percent affordable housing. And union workers were strongly supporting the project on the basis of the jobs that it would create. So you had this interesting mix of people who were coming to testify on this project and to speak on it for different reasons. And then here this is one of the groups who was organizing. They were organizing people to go to the planning commission meeting and to give public comment. And you can see here this is one of the messages they posted on Facebook trying to get this from like the event description I think. But what's interesting is they want to have Compton's cafeteria and sites like it in the public trust. Right kind of an interesting an interesting kind of goal. And then also a sustainable nightlife for all of our LGBTQ communities. So sustainable is in something that's sustained right. So as in almost this idea of heritage is this idea of living history is this idea of things that people are continuously contributing to and interacting with. And so here this is Jeanette Johnson. So she is the executive another beautiful quality photo that you can tell I screenshot it from a video. I did like five times and every time she was like closing her eyes or her mouth was like this. So this is the best I could get. But Jeanette Johnson I love her. She's great. She is the executive director of the transgender justice intersex project. So they do a lot of work with incarcerated trans women and I have a lot of respect for their organization. And they are also one of the kind of or she's also her and her organization are some of the founding members of the Compton's transgender cultural district. So activists like Jeanette were calling not only for the site of the old Compton's cafeteria to be placed in the public trust but also the creation of the LGBTQ historic district in the surrounding area. It's a bold and radical idea but also one showing that this upcoming planning commission meeting. It was not just about the development and nine fifty nine seventy four market. Right. It was also a cry from a community that had felt neglected for decades and wants a voice and developments throughout the area. Aside from the specific community benefit agreements related to the project. There was a larger community need that was not being met. And what happened after this hearing while you had a lot of back and forth. You had a lot of while we want more benefit. Okay my time is up. So I talked too much so I will skip to this last part about the company's transgender cultural district. And these are some of the things that are in it. And if you have questions that I could answer those after because I'm out of time. But quick highlights. Now there is a sustainable source of funding for cultural districts in San Francisco. The company's cultural district has you know a bunch of funding from developers. Potential integration with the cultural heritage strategy. And one of their lofty goals is to acquire real estate and keep it permanently affordable for the community. So all kind of and with that we can talk about that a little bit later I guess and then I'll throw you some fun pictures. This was from the last the last was the anniversary of the the competence thing. We had it in the old side of Compton's that's Felicia. So here we go. And what she does is every year for the anniversary she puts up all the names and places of people that she remembers. Maybe how they identified or what they did and she puts that all over the space. It's kind of a it's a beautiful little display. So there we go. It's her talking about it. Or with her cake in her photo. Yeah. She's gonna love I use that one. Okay. But that's it. We're running a bit behind but I think we're going to have about 15 minutes for Q&A with the panelists. And so I'm going to start with a question and then we're going to open it up to the audience. So think of some questions. I guess I thought I would start with Kate in Louisville with the interesting work that you're doing there. I'm wondering after the context statement what are you doing if anything to get this history out to the public or to connect them with it. How have they been responding to it and so on like that. Well I we do not have these mechanisms in place. I mean one of you know I was running out like everybody else running out of time so I didn't really get to talk about the lessons learned. But I think we do we the next step is really either a Louisville Louisville based or perhaps a state based. You know public like queer public history advisory committee. And so there's several of us that are advancing those conversations. But one of our problems was the partnership with the partnerships that we had were important and vibrant. But the fairness campaign is really much more focused on social movement organizing than historic preservation. And it's been a very very reactionary climate as we all know. But perhaps especially in Kentucky since this. I mean even the and talk about this but even the release of the amendments and the context statement by the time that we that they were accepted by this. The State Historic Preservation Board then the the SHPO didn't want to publicize it anymore because now we had a Tea Party government a governor. And it was right around the time that Trump had been elected. So we're trying to move it forward. We have I showed that digital map in progress but all these things remain more embryonic. I think then I would like that I've got some great ideas from these presentations. That's great. I think I guess at this point you have a question. Yeah sure. Yeah yeah yeah one question. I did have Kate and your lessons learned there was something along the lines of kind of the plan for the project versus like a passion project. Which I perhaps was projecting to mean that you know when you're doing a labor of love things can quickly grow beyond what has been budgeted say or planned for. And then that related to Shane it was fascinating. All the different aspects that you were talking about in your talk like the oral history project with youth and all of these follow up things that have happened since the context statement was released. And so I'm curious if that was all part of the original vision or how that if that was labor of love stuff or if it actually like you were able to have different building blocks. And if if any of you want to speak on that tension that is there when we're doing LGBTQ history work. I would love to hear your comments. Sure. Can you hear me. This is on. Yeah. Anyone hear me. Okay. So for the context statement in San Francisco we had yeah we had a scope of work and a budget and Donna and I. I think went into a lot of debt to work on that project but it was a labor of love. And but for the most part we knew so the city we proposed a grant and they said we don't think that's enough. We want you to propose more for more robust robust community engagement program which is you know that never happens. And and so we we had that initially in the scope but of course all of these other things like the oral history interviews and the story core collaboration that wasn't that all just sort of unfolded as we went along. But yeah it's a labor of love which means you know what that means. Yes. Yeah I think so being on the board of the Historical Society one of the things we're trying to do now is we're trying to open a large scale museum. That's very difficult in a city with very expensive land prices. So that has kind of been our lofty goal. But we've been expanding pretty significantly in the past few years we've had we've like doubled the amount of staff members we've had. You know our budget has increased significantly. We're pursuing funding from different sources and stuff like that. But right now I think honestly that's the big thing for us that keeps us working towards something. So even you know if if you say that this is my goal we're going to have this like large museum right. If it doesn't end up being the Smithsonian and you land somewhere else you still get something. And I have to say that as you both of you were talking but especially you I was like well where did they get the money to do that. And where did they get the money to do that. And I want to do that but you know we went so far because of those passionate commitments in in implementing what we did implement. And the partnership has been you know in a kind of stasis for various reasons that I alluded to. But we need to do a lot of those things. And I said this to someone earlier I wasn't involved in in writing the proposal that resulted in it being a statewide project. But if I had been involved from the very beginning I think it would have made frankly a lot more sense to have a Louisville based project. And and then have a corresponding Lexington based project. I mean I wouldn't trade the experiences that I had in Appalachian Kentucky and you know Bowling Green and all over the state for anything. But they were so extremely embryonic. And and we need more queer public history people in those communities to take up those those initiatives. I mean just to refer back to Lige Clark I would love nothing more than to see a historical marker in his hometown of Heinemann Kentucky. But four hours is not local in Kentucky especially when you're talking about Appalachian Kentucky. We would need local people to take up those initiatives. So I think we do need to break it down to the local level again too. How is public engagement in those more rural areas as opposed to Louisville and Lexington? I mean what was that like? Well I'll just say to go back to the history harvest we did a history harvest in Heinemann with tiny eastern Kentucky town. And Eric was there with me so he could speak to that. I was blown away by the presence of these fascinating gay youth in Heinemann Kentucky when I met with Kate. There was a group called the Gays for Patsy the singing group of these really adorable charming young men. And people with your colored hair from hazard and I just was like where do they come from? So for me it was extremely rich experience. So it's a vibrant queer thank you. In Heinemann itself looks dead. I mean it's a town that was always a whisper but you know there are law offices and a jail and the Appalachian folk. But otherwise so like where do they come from? Well he's of the next town over. I mean Heinemann she was just asking me is that where they have the gay mayor. Well the gay mayor is about excuse me Johnny Cummings is about 20 miles down the road. But 20 miles down the road with those hollers is a long way. So I guess just to finish up about your question I think that we met an extraordinary number of queer and trans youth. We got publicity for the history harvest over their positive publicity to talk about the problems of violence against queer youth. But very few of the people there are involved in queer historic preservation and really could not be involved at this juncture because the economic situation is so bad and they're fighting for you know other forms of visibility and other forms of rights. I mean they told us repeatedly at that history harvest that there just aren't enough opportunities to talk about queer experience in Appalachia. So I think there's a lot of steps that need to happen but it doesn't mean that they're not there. But what I think again to the other point is we need more local people. In rural communities you really need an insider to take the lead. And I coming from Louisville and Eric who I was it threw me off when she showed the out of time. So I was who is a New York City based visual artist who traveled a lot and has family ties in Kentucky. We couldn't do that work. Neither of us could do it have to be someone headed there. And that's why this statewide advisory committee is such an important step in San Francisco. Does the local landmarks law allow for protection of sites with cultural and or historical significance but lack architectural significance. And if so are are they actually designating such sites. Yes. So yes they do. And like I think you might have mentioned this in your talk so many of the buildings that we looked at associated with this history or Andrew mentioned this lack architectural significance. I mean they're very utilitarian. There's you know if it's a commercial building their storefronts have been messed up over decades. And we built in some guidance at the back of our report that talks about how to address that lack of physical integrity. And the city has really listened. So the planning department is now working on actually changing evaluation criteria or adding new criteria to evaluate sites of social cultural interest. So they're looking at them as cultural assets. And rather than looking at integrity of the building they are looking at things like longevity. How long has you know how long was the business that was there in place. Things like that. How important it is to these communities. So that's also factor in the evaluation which is really interesting. That's all underway right now. Yeah so that's kind of what the cultural districts are responding to in a way because when you look at Compton's you know the exterior. There's no really there's no sign that you could tell that it was a restaurant at some point right. So like kind of like you know Stonewall where it was divided into two different buildings and stuff like that. But you know Stonewall got lucky in that one of the bars was renamed Stonewall and became bar. But Compton's doesn't exist in the same way at all. So it's purely the cultural district kind of relies on a lot of that that symbolic value that cultural value if you will. Nick has anyone ever figured out what the date of the Compton's cafeteria right it was. No. So it's supposed to be sometime in August and it's supposed to be like a warm early August morning. But that's historically not something that we have in San Francisco so it's just so no one really knows. No so there was no police report. There were no kind of like records. There was nothing in the press or anything like that really. There was nothing even in the gay press. So you guys spoke about trying to make it the process as inclusive as possible to traditionally marginalized groups. So I was just wondering how are you centering you know the priorities when it comes to preservation of those marginalized groups so that we don't fall into the same traps that we have historically. So who's to say or how do you decide that a museum is the way to go versus. I don't know. Let's say a gathering at a place that historically housed a lot of homeless people or LGBTQ homeless people or that sex workers who you know had a place to frequent a certain area. Don't get a voice. Like how do they get a voice and to say and saying what's what the methodology is to deciding what the places are. I know you said you had a flyer go out and called for people to have put their pins in the places that are significant to them. But even one step further in the planning process in the higher up process. How are you doing that and if not what are the challenges that are keeping you. Keeping you from doing that. If that makes I'm not sure that was. So just just to just want to say at the planning level so the San Francisco planning department. Those landmarks I mentioned that they're taking taking in house to produce those dozen or so landmark nominations. They're basically their criteria was which of these most reflect underrepresented minority communities which is good. And then also the Historic Preservation Commission when they are about to look at a landmark. If when a landmark comes to them they have like I think it's three criteria. Do they meet these criteria and one of them is does this landmark in any way reflect these these underrepresented communities. So I think people are are trying at least. Yeah I think a lot of it. So for example for the Historical Society for the museum and stuff the way you deal with that is understanding that there are differences in the way different communities maybe keep their history or the way they catalog it or something like that. So if there's not maybe necessarily a site or something like that right it means collecting oral histories for a lot of communities that's one way. It also means prioritizing funding for things. So if we're having like you know an event where we're having someone speak on like the intersection of Asian and Pacific Islander activism and LGBT activism. It means that you like pay your panelists and stuff too. So you prioritize them and then you prioritize their stories in a way and then and then another kind of way from that the cultural districts are doing it in a little bit. So the first cultural district in San Francisco was was the Japan Town Cultural District. And within the legislation there was there was a portion that said that a lot of the businesses are the businesses in the neighborhood had to be reflective of the heritage and history of the neighborhood. So that's also another way. So there are kind of like nuances in different kind of ways I guess to address that if that answers your question. So you mean so I don't know if this answers your question but when we were preparing the context statement of San Francisco. Most so so we did a lot of outreach. We did you know like a Facebook blasts and flyers and certain neighborhoods. And then we hosted a workshop that really targeted these underrepresented minority groups and not a lot of people showed up. You know it was enough to kind of to matter at least to us. But like I said when I was talking Donna and I both when we look back like what what could have what we could we have done better. What what should the next step be. It's really how do we get these voices from these communities more woven into these narratives. Because when we look at the archives a lot of the oral histories that were done for these people back in the 80s who lived in these earlier periods. They're all they're all white all white. Most of them are white. So what are we doing now the GLBT historical society is really reaching out to conduct oral history interviews that really really focus on LGBTQ people of color women. Trans folks. So yeah at least now we're sort of trying to get up to speed but I have to say that still probably not enough it's just harder harder to find these voices. And I think that also kind of gets to it's harder sometimes for the people in these communities to speak out you know it's or come forward. It's very brave still.