 I'm Dr. Michelle Villagran and want to welcome you to our third webinar from the Your Voices Project and just want to give about a minute about around what your voices is and we will put the link to our blog in the chat for you. So Your Voices is a one-year project that we've been working on around fostering conversation, dialogue, soliciting input from students within our college School of Information Applied Data Science around diversity, equity, inclusion and I would even expand that to belonging and really with a focus centered around your voices you as students and your experiences that we value appreciate and want to hear. So Your Voices Learning, Listening and Sharing encompasses four webinars. This is our third one, the e-newsletter as well as community learning spaces and thank you Cara has shared the blog link so you can learn more about our project there at your leisure and with that I'm going to turn it over to my assistant Cara to introduce the program today. Hello everyone I would like to introduce to you three members of the Central Coast Queer Archive Project also abbreviated as CCQAP. So we have three amazing people joining us Stephen Rzitzki, David Waysman and Rowan Waters. So for a little bit of background before I give it away move it on over to to Stephen. The Central Coast Queer Archive Project is a collaborative community-based effort that is tasked with documenting the history of queer and trans lives on the California Central Coast. The project values the specificity of individual lives and so they mean the terms queer and trans to encompass not only the recognized range of historically marginalized LGBTQ plus identities but also the lives of those that do not readily fit into intelligible categories of gender and sexuality. So I don't want to give away too much so I will hand it over to Stephen and once again thank you so much for being here this evening to to share a little bit more about the project the reason why you decided to take on this project and what it means to you along with what it means to those who have experiences who have these experiences and what it means to be able to preserve those experiences so thank you thank you so much. Yeah but thank you Kara and thank you Michelle for inviting us and allowing us to kind of talk about our project and we're very excited to work with and you know just chat about our work with all of you wonderful people coming from looks like a lot of people in California but lots of people from elsewhere too so welcome. I'm Dr. Stephen Ruzeski and I am a professor of English and women's gender and queer studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and I have a little dog and sometimes he is very quiet but sometimes he makes some noise so you may hear a little dog dog noise he just like get lawned yawned very loudly. And so I'm a part of the CCQAP I think maybe what we can do David and Rowan is just do kind of quick introductions for ourselves I say a little bit about ourselves and then I'll spend some time talking about just how the project got started and then Rowan and David you can talk maybe about how you got involved and we'll kind of work through the background from there. So David do you want to do your intro? Okay yeah David Weisman I'm coming to you from Morro Bay California at the moment though I'm originally from New York City and my background was is was as a filmmaker I went to the New York University film school in the 1980s and did mostly documentary work then I moved to California to be in show business I still ended up in documentary work and the big thing I did in LA was a 28 part series on the environment for PBS in the late midnight mid and late 90s and then I eventually came up to Morro Bay and found myself involved in anti-nuclear activism which is where I was most of today involved with as a consumer advocate but occasionally I like to pick up a camera and when paths crossed and the opportunity here oh I forgot yeah in between I spent eight years doing an oral history project I forgot about that for the Conservation History Association of Texas which comes from the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Texas in Austin and so that was kind of the nexus of the two interests coming together here. Rowan? And I am Rowan Waters I work in the office at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art I come originally from Ramona California which is down in San Diego County I'm more I'm on the student side of things I'm kind of learning how to do oral history projects and it's been an amazing experience so far to kind of learn how to do oral histories and how to do camera work and all of these amazing new things so. Thank you so I just to get talk a little bit about how the project got started so I completed my graduate work in English literature my PhD at the University of Buffalo New York I originally grew up in California but I did my graduate work back east and I moved back to San Luis Obispo for work I had a a lectureship at Cal Poly now I don't know if anybody here is familiar with Buffalo New York but it's actually a really nice size city it's a kind of a midsize I miss I actually like Buffalo it's a midsize city it's a city that can sustain has enough of a gay kind of queer population community that it can sustain something like five gay bars each one is a little bit different they have a pretty robust pride celebration that was actually really starting to get really interesting and big by the time I had to move back to California oh yeah so yeah some people are familiar with Buffalo that's great Rochester wonderful so but then I moved back to San Luis Obispo San Luis Obispo is a small city it's maybe San Luis Obispo itself is 45,000 people and so to go from Buffalo which had a kind of built-in queer community there to a city that felt like it didn't really have anything it started raising questions for me and so I thought it can't be that there aren't queer people here or trans people here so where where are they right what is that story and so it became largely a selfish project of just wanting to learn about the place that I had arrived at and so you know the project went through multiple iterations I think Rowan you were kind of a part of it at the very start when we met in a bar that doesn't exist anymore and it kind of downed it wasn't a gay bar it was just a bar space that we met with a couple of other people who are kind of interested in doing some kind of community organizing work and so one of the ideas that we came up with was a group of people to just start doing research to see what we could find and so we started there and we made a number of different partnerships one of them being with the and I think this is like 2015 or 16 when this is kind of just getting off the ground so we contacted we had a contact at the Slow Historical Society which is this other little building in downtown San Luis Obispo as maybe partners to start working on this project and one of our other collaborators Zach McKiernan who's a professor of history public history at Cuesta College the local community college in the area so that's where we kind of connected with with him and then I think David that's how you kind of came on at that point right um it was well it bases on the politics of San Luis which of course becomes a subject summer of 2018 there was a pride festival in San Luis there was a pride flag hanging above the aforementioned museum uh San Luis Historical Society you mentioned and it was vandalized I had just gotten back from a trip to Mexico I opened the newspaper and there's a story about the pride flag being vandalized at the history center and then sub-paragraph buried down is well the history center was busy at work on an oral history project about queer lives in San Luis and I'm like well I just did this like eight-year oral history project in Texas gosh maybe I should go meet these folks but I think that's how that happened yeah and so we connected there um and then uh just started kind of talking and collaborating on our you know what we might do we have lots of different meetings and we went through multiple iterations met in a lot of different places um eventually I think about 2019 I there's a program here at Cal Poly that's called the beach beacon mentorship program and it's about providing mentors for students from underserved populations at Cal Poly to kind of give them a research experience so I started working with this young woman named Autumn Ford uh who was very interested in doing kind of an oral history project kind of helping out with this investigation and so in in collaboration with David and Rowan and Autumn we came up with the project of trying to we had learned that there was there had been a gay bar in San Luis Obispo we heard rumors about it we heard we heard bits and pieces and things but we couldn't quite figure out what the story was and so Autumn did the a lot of the footwork and actually tracking down Lisa Dean who was she wasn't initially an owner but she was kind of brought on as an employee at the bar and then began to work there as a manager and then I think she became a part owner at towards the end um and so Autumn found that Lisa was working works at like a local tax firm and kind of emailed Lisa at her work email address and Lisa said yes I am the Lisa Dean that you know worked at Rises but this is my work email don't contact me here here's the might write email that you can contact me at so we finally figured out how to talk to Lisa Dean and we managed to our first basically our first interview which was the Lisa Dean interview in which she she kind of gave us the history of the bar which is fascinating um and maybe this is a good time um David to talk about show that clip for the Lisa Dean interview do you do you want to queue that up and and let that go you're muted David got it the I will happily show the clip and everything in Rowan can then chime in is this is the first clip we used which is another part of the archive makes extensive use of Lisa Dean's scrapbooks of photos from the period which Rowan scanned because it's one thing to tell the stories but it's like there's a show and tell when someone has an album out that just invites people to oh yeah right and so I think you'll see both of those at work here let me um go to share screen and then let me call up the clip and then hit share screen and hopefully you'll get the sound and this will work do we have a screen yeah you're good all right then we'll click play and it runs uh three minutes for those watching at home oh sorry I'm sorry wrong wrong clip you're right I got it notes right here um there we go you know it really was a nice bar and Steve Steve wanted it to be a bar a restaurant a place where everybody of all ages could come because our community you know starts at the 21 up to the elders you know so you know folks that are over 60 they don't always go out and drink anymore so he thought well we'll do a nice restaurant with a Caribbean theme and so when they opened up we had like a 10 table area for the restaurant beautiful bar um the dance floor you know if you were to go into what it is now it is sushi which is the sushi place and you walk in the front door and you see the bar that is the actual bar that they I think it was actually the actual bar that was there that they refurbished and then around off to the side where they've got their their dining room tables was where our dining room was um I think they have a teppanyaki room that would be the DJ area and the dance floor so it was a very nice bar they put a lot of money into it and I don't know how much but it had carpeting the bathrooms were nice it it was upper scale and one of the things I remember from the few bars I'd gone to like even in um Santa Barbara all of those places seem to be in what I consider dark dank places you know we're going into the city or district and you know it was a dive bar there was smelly it was old it'd been here for forever and breezes was beautiful it was to me amazing so um it was the highlight of um of San Luis I mean the first after journey's in the first of its kind something that big something open and that was one of the things that really scared some folks is that you know we're in a strip mall we're not hiding in the back where you know you've got to drive around the river under the bridge and then you park your car here and you walk two miles over here you can park and you walk right in the in the bar and so that um that had a big impact on people people were like well what if somebody sees me what if somebody sees my car what if you know what if we get harassed by the cops you know it was still scary scary times for some folks who legitimately could lose their jobs they could you know lose their families and friends so that's that's a clip from the first major interview that we we did and autumn who is the student that worked on one of the students that worked with us on the project we have a number of students who joined and not just students from Cal Poly but also students from Cuesta College to it was interesting as a community project in that way um autumn did the interview she wrote all the questions herself uh and conducted it um and so you don't hear autumn asking the questions in that clip but um she's there um and so this was and there's a lot that we can say about that clip um about kind of the bar and and all of that um but that gives you kind of an idea of what our early work was um doing um and then it was the kind of springboard that allowed us to do the bigger project um it's at that point we applied for a California humanities quick grant uh humanities for all quick grants um which is a small there's two levels of awards the smaller award um but we applied for that and david was the one who kind of spearheaded putting that application together um and um we got a uh grant award for about five thousand dollars to fund uh doing i think it was david remind me it was like ten interviews was it it was ten interviews so it it did they didn't require it of the grant but we we got a five thousand dollar grant and then we leveraged it here in the community and raised five thousand dollars from individual donors as well right and the deliverable was um ten transcribed uploaded video interviews and a public event yeah which was made a little more difficult because of course covid hit between that lisa dean interview and the um completion of our project as well and there was a period of time when it was questionable you know can you hold a public event we did interviews where we wore masks and the person on the far side of of the camera did not or we tried outdoor interviews for a while until the band was rehearsing at quest to college of all the afternoons to do with the jazz band rehearsal um but so those were some of the things we had to also deal with covid during this project um as well yeah and kind of what's interesting about some of those interviews where you can see or get a sense of how covid shaped the interview process at that time um you know those oral history interviews are incredibly valuable for the stories that uh our narrators and when we're doing oral history we refer to the the folks that were interviewing us narrators but the you know they're they're valuable for the stories that we're getting from the narrators um and what they're able to tell us about the kind of history of sand with sabispo but those videos are also really interesting as documents of like covid times too looking uh or that that particular moment in covid time uh because we are still in covid time um uh but yeah and so anyway we kind of did our we completed the project over the span of a year um doing those interviews um and the interview process is really kind of interesting of how we did it uh and then completed the project in uh 2000 the premiere event was december 15th of 2021 at the interviews yeah in which we had the uh displayed clips from a number of different interviews many of which we can you know show today to give you a sense of the range of the people we interviewed and the stories that we got um and then a lot of the our interview our narrators came to that event and kind of hung out so they could kind of see what the finished product looks like too uh and then we worked to kind of get everything uploaded and onto the website um and then well the finale of the december 15th event was what we learned from one of our interviews is not breezes may have been the first openly queer bar in san luis but we learned from the guy uh kelly kuros who had been a cal poly student in the 80s and he was the first second president of the um pride club at at cal poly at the time that the howard johnson's which is now a restaurant called taco temple which had been a place called margie's diners was apparently on thursday nights or whatever the unofficial gay meet-up place back in the 1980s and that if you did live here you knew that you went to the howard johnson's and so we let the owners of the place know that we were coming back they put aside the room in the back which is adjacent to and had been that exact bar and in fact i remember uh we all got there and kelly's remarked we looked around and goes wow it's it's a lot brighter now than i remember it uh on the other hand maybe the dim lighting wasn't such a bad idea at the time after all um and so uh we did that we also we might mention that when we celebrated after uh the first national coming out day after we'd done the lisa dean interview again with the cooperation of the owner of breezes today which is a japanese sushi restaurant we invited lisa's our guest of honor and lots of other people and i think oh gosh that night roan you were there was to be like 48 50 people the yeah was at least welled they were finding and pulling in chairs from anywhere there had not been that many queer people in that restaurant since it closed in 1997 yeah roan did you was something you wanted to add i'm sorry i think you i that was something that i remember being very struck by was how we oftentimes when we were having these celebrations after an event or because of an event we would have so much participation from our narrators and it was almost like a i don't know like a reunion where everybody really enjoyed it and i don't know it just a community bonding thing it really struck me as it wasn't just about the history it's about community bonding too yeah and i i think one of the things that you know we in one of the ways that we conceptualized the project when we were uh kind of pitching it to california humanity uh was that you know the standlice of bispo is this it's a and i don't know how familiar folks uh are with it but it's a small it's a college town it's a it's a kind of tourist town um that's about halfway between los angeles and san francisco on the coast um and you know california has a this reputation of being a haven for um kind of queer and trans people it's like if you are living in flyover country in the us you know pack your bags and get yourself to the coast to kind of a thing and this is actually and in that this is this is a story it's it it hides over a lot of complexity about what it's like to live in um uh you know what central parts of the united states like what it's like to be queer living in the midwest it also hides over a lot of the realities of what it's like to be queer trans living in the west coast but the other thing it it does is it it tends to associate kind of queer life with major urban centers so san francisco los angeles new york city chicago and um it uh makes it seem like even if you're living in a rural or semi-rural place in california what you really got to do is you got to get yourself up to san francisco or down to la and that's where you can build a life for yourself um and so that you know there there's something to that but it also i think hides a lot of complexity about people's lives uh and so we we we structured the the project itself about how can we understand what it's like to live to be queer and live in a place that maybe isn't recognized as being a kind of urban center and you know what we what we saw and i think what we experienced in having people come out to events is that there actually is actually a kind of queer life here uh and there are trans people living here and kind of living um building meaningful lives for themselves it's just harder to see and so the oral histories were a way of kind of bringing that out and being able to see that uh it changed a lot of how i think of the city in the area um and like yeah people do go up to san francisco in la but they like coming back here um um yeah i don't know if uh uh david or roan you wanted to add to that i'm wondering if a clip that might play to the rural nature would be how barton tony settled out in the countryside yeah you could do that yeah that's i mean now that we're talking about the you know here's here's a sophisticated right urban sophisticated kids from san francisco who end up homesteading on like a 700 acre ranch so um here why don't i dig up this uh this clip here oh wait at first i have to hit share screen got that and then i click on that and then i click share and let's let's give this one a try all i knew from the signing and even from his family uh at first is that uh that he was a good old homesteader and single all his life however uh i started wondering and so i looked in some of the records and i saw in the 1916 census that he was living here with another george our guy was george rushart and this other guy was george hoxie you'll see the log cabin a little later where george rushart first lived and then next door the mildwood house that he built and uh i didn't know anything about george hoxie and i really didn't until uh his great niece gladus who was in her 90s when she came along as i told you she was a real pit she brought her son and daughter-in-law with her remember the the couple that came with him because they drove she's the 90s and she didn't drive anymore and uh they were not they were as he talking about george but but she said oh no no question about it he lived here with his partner his his spouse a good-looking somewhat younger man she thought it was great so gladus was a lot of fun that's the kind of the kind of woman i loved and yeah they made it very clear and subsequently i discovered uh in the vockeville cemetery their graves are side by side george with a family plot and george hoxie uh george rushart and george hoxie right in the plot next door makes this that feel like we really belong here at this ranch and it is it's a it's a it's a sometimes a difficult place very hot and very cold as the interior tends to be a more so much more so than the coast but uh but as i say it has its tremendous advantages and uh i love the place we go outdoors every day almost uh jogging or or a plant as you know i'm planting acorns i got the set of acorns over there and i have already planted probably twice as many as you see there maybe three times as many already for this year and we've got new trees popping up and it's great great yeah so i guess that goes to what you were saying steven about a rural urban conundrum that you know there's a lot of emphasis in media and otherwise on the urban queer life but not necessarily as much on the the rural existence yeah and that's a it's an interesting clip to um you know i think for a lot of different reasons um one of which is that like it really does showcase that sense of like oh like kind of queerness and kind of a rural space and it's like tapping into a kind of complicated history because it's a history of settlement and uh kind of westward expansion and colonization too that you know see the kind of queerness like mixed up with that so it's a kind of complex but it makes an interesting history right is that there's a messiness to kind of history here but it's something that kind of Bart and his partner tonia have been able to kind of connect to and um the place uh so it's it was a it's a interesting find it was kind of cool to be able to see the cabin and um they're very kind of hospitable to us to kind of showcase that spaces um another another kind of important feature of the the project is that it um you know we were we were really wanted to make sure that we had young people so students um working with and interviewing um part of the way we pitched the project too is that this is a project about interviewing our queer and trans elders um because of um you know making sure we've you know to be more a bit about it but getting their stories before they go um and so uh we wanted to then have that dynamic between younger folks being able to connect with older folks um and I think I think it helped the quality of the interviews tremendously I think we got a lot of really kind of cool stuff and um in order to kind of facilitate those kinds of connections right and a lot of the narrator still asked after right it's like how is how is um autumn doing or one of our other interviewers was um dylan uh and how was you know asking after dylan and things like that um you know um sarah dorkin sent me like she still sends me like christmas cards in the mail from her her her um she has like a retirement community that she lives in with her wife and they send me and she wears her little Hanukkah sweater in the little christmas cards and it's just always so delightful and I think we also got a christmas card I shared from rick tibbon who we interviewed as well you know I think isn't at the end of the wh autumn pa autumn wh autumn palm nightmail who dasts can ever believe themselves or wish to believe themselves forgotten and I think a lot of these people that no one had ever especially with the case of peggy jones yeah yeah I asked their stories before yeah yeah and peggy peggy definitely has quite a story to tell should we share the three minutes of peggy's stories share that one let me make sure I click the right uh button and then okay and then I then I go here and then I uh I'm gonna share screen and there and share and I saw my endocrinologist again and he said well we'll put you back on testosterone and at that point I told him I think I'd rather die then go back on testosterone again and I said that off the cuff without thinking about it and even I was shocked by what I said because I really didn't know why I said it here you would rather die than take testosterone and be a man so that was the beginning of my transition at that point where I really realized now I didn't want to be a man and and when I look back in my life I really didn't ever think I was one all the things I did to hide it all the things I did to make people think I was something I wasn't because during my lifetime most of this was a conscious effort it wasn't something I suddenly realized when I was almost 50 years old it was something I decided I'm tired of doing I can't do it anymore and to accept myself for who I am well even at that point I didn't really know who I was uh I had some more tests done and that's when I discovered that I was uh Kleinsfelter 47 XXY I mean I had two X chromosomes uh that and the three sex chromosomes interfered with uh in utero development so nothing ever completely developed as it should uh and at that point I decided I'm not going to live my life as a man so I decided I think I'll see if I can transition it's I don't know if Rowan would like Rowan did the interview and the research and I think this is a point that we all discussed before the interviews which is it's not particularly it's okay technically or theoretically should be an objective experience right documentarians tend to be or think of themselves as objective but sometimes the emotions can flow very difficulty and their trauma can become your your trauma and I know I a lot of times for me I was behind the camera so that piece of glass really does act as a filter because I'm worried about making sure all that stuff and the dials and the gauges are right but I don't know Rowan if you if you only if you'll care to share your experience on the other side of that I I remember tearing up at Peggy's story um it was there was a lot to it that we uncovered and it was a very interesting perspective because of what we learned about um like medical attitudes towards intersex people and from the actual perspective of the intersex trans the intersex individual and having her experience of it kind of documented that meant a lot to me and I just I remember yeah it was it was it was difficult but I think very very worth the the what what it was um yeah yeah I remember that move was like so charged yeah yeah it was because it wasn't just it was it was the you know she had been basically forced into this identity for her entire life and she finally had that moment where she she realized that she didn't want that anymore which she thought she was supposed to be and that was a really really powerful story to capture one of those interviews after which there's nothing but continuing silence mm-hmm because there's nothing more that can be said yeah yeah yeah um yeah we have some questions um uh I I just it's so nice of folks to ask questions um so Lindsay asks is this project still ongoing and if yes is there a way to get involved um I think I think we're kind of in depth like we you know we keep we're kind of in a dormant phase at the moment because we're all swamped with our day jobs um but I would like to do more uh and um how to how to get involved I'd say shoot us an email we're not always so good about checking our email um but if you're persistent we will we will try to figure out a way to get you involved yeah at this phase I feel like we're doing a lot of kind of community educating um you know sometimes we'll do a panel like we did a panel for the local pride festival and we sometimes do those kinds of like educational events so there's still stuff that we're doing sometimes yeah and I think also um as we get pieces and bits more pictures to perhaps digitize and put up on the web extra bits that you know will will come in that can feed uh into the project I think Steve another dimension is we inherited some material too that we were not the first to attempt this that the uh Gala Center that was the original pride center in San Luis which now actually has the name the Gala Pride and Diversity Center of San Luis Obispo they had attempted a project like this in 2005 and 2006 using a much more antiquated system of video tapes and um their best efforts at the time they the audio and the video quality vary greatly but we finally have helped they helped us or we helped them locate those tapes and because I happened to keep every kind of video deck made since 1976 in my storage of ancient media because this is a digital this is a problem we extinct our modes of digital recording and you know even some stuff that we have on uh on my 256 uh chip uh gigabyte flash drive you know I've gone to places and I've shown younger uh students five inch floppy disks and the idea being that if we don't continually migrate or move the data it will be lost and so someone has to keep all those old errors probably someone who has those drives that still work in a computer to pick up those things that are lost and this will become for the IT professionals this is going to be an ongoing issue of of concerns so luckily I had an old eight millimeter video deck that could play those tapes and then we fixed the color and fixed the sound as best as we could and had them transcribe so um interestingly enough only one person from those original interviews was still alive yeah yeah um I I think that that speaks really to the importance of like continuing work like this that it's not something that you can ever really put down because there's always going to be new historical sources that you can interview and you have to find them yeah and I think that speaks to your question a little bit uh Jacqueline about um challenges trying to preserve and document um so we one of the things that we did with our project is um we are we're kind of an independent group like we have our I have an affiliation with Cal Poly um it was important for me I think to want to have the group be outside of Cal Poly not be uh working under Cal Poly but we we established a relationship with the archivist there uh and so they are serving as our repository so we have our stuff up on our website but Cal Poly special archives and special collections is serving as our base to put the materials because they have they they specialize they are archivist I'm very thankful for them and we work with Laura Servetti there who's been amazing in Jessica Holada um they have the equipment there to do the kind of migrations that Dave is talking about but also equipment that can read older forms of information storage so floppy disks and things like that so being able to work with them has been crucial for having access to the ability to preserve things and they just have access to resources that we don't you know it like we had to kind of scrounge to get our grant uh grants um and Dave did a wonderful job going out and fundraising which I'm terrible at doing um uh you know so having that partnership was crucial um a lot of the you know a lot of the big wave in kind of gay and lesbian LGBT plus uh history projects were really in the 70s this was when they kind of started and so a lot of those folks are working independently outside of universities and they've kind of built themselves up so the one archives in Los Angeles the archives in Toronto the gay and lesbian historical society in San Francisco they kind of have their own pool resources they've gotten big enough to do that but it was important for us to have some kind of partnership with the university to do that um uh yeah I see a question from Lucas Moore that reminds me of one of our first experiences together on this I love that you involve the younger queer and trans people in the creation what has been feedback to the project been like from a queer communities in the area not directly a part of the project it reminds me that evening we spent with the queer crowd and the others in San Luis maybe you could recall sharing that yeah so there's there's been a number of small kind of community groups that have formed to kind of little ragtag things and one of them invited us over to their meeting where they and so we screened some of their clips and when they saw the in its younger people it was people in their 20s and when they saw the clips they were so deeply moved by the the fact that there had been a bar and there was this you could hear the intake of breath as once you know they saw the photographs themselves the photographs in particular were quite powerful for them um we so we've got a lot of positive responses we've had some um of our our queer elders who are kind of like well why didn't you interview me it's like we we you know we tried to be representative we tried to get a diverse sampling of people we only had the the time and funding to do 10 and so we tried to get as much of a kind of cross-section as we could and part of it is sometimes we reach out to people that would get back to us so it's like we uh it's funny I see one further down Maria asks have there been any interviews from Lompoc, Santa Maria and Napomo what would be interesting well you you bring up we did have a Napomo interview and maybe we could run that because it is a South County story of the Southern San Luis Obispo County um Rick Tibin was a person we found because I think I had seen he had written a very striking letter to the editor in the New Times the alternative weekly paper in San Luis Obispo now I'm trying to remember the story but it definitely had to do with it was an activist letter and it was it was an angry letter as I recall so I contacted the newspaper and said can you tell him we'd like to speak to him because it was he had a history going back to LA in in the day um and so uh we that would I guess be the furthest we traveled in the south part of the of the county and it happens to be I think one of the amusing stories so it's not as dark as as some of them if you'd like I can run the three minutes of of that yeah well why not that's a it's a good story okay Rick Rick Tibin and uh let's see if we can dig it up here we'll do the Tibin and Tibin here we go and then I go to uh share the screen that should be it when the california age ride came through I made over 10 000 chocolate chip cookies for those guys and um this was the original booth and there was Ricky Valdez memorial cookie booth I made over 660 cookies in my double ovens and there's a lot of people that didn't get some and so many people were disappointed because I think there were 2,500 riders I started with the Pismo Beach business improvement group and we were able to get the old Marie calendars in Pismo Beach to loan us the bake shop at night and so we would sit there all night long and we'd make 3 000 cookies for the for the um uh for the age ride as they came into Oceano Airport they used to they used to stay there they don't anymore but um a funny story is the one time all the cameras showed up I don't know how they learned about it but all the TV stations had their cables running everywhere and they wanted to see me you know make some cookies so I put in five pounds of butter into the big hopper not realizing somebody had already done that and we ended up with um double butter cookies which were like thin little nothings right but the people the riders loved them um one year I had um I don't know where the pictures are but I had the kids at the local data elementary school make um make uh um posters for the for the guys and we put it up on the fence on Oceano Airport and it actually brought tears to the eyes of some of the riders because the little kids making those posters it was just amazing one of them I remember said be like the energizer bunny keep going and going and going and uh and they were just it was great I'm surprised the school let me do that but and one of the things I did let's see if I can find it go here I uh wanted to do a Burma Shave sign one of the years so this is what I did I said bicyclist who ride for health and pride chocolate chip cookies await at Oceano gate so but unfortunately some of those signs were torn down before before most of the riders came in from some idiot but um at least I tried yeah it's our we that's about as far south as the county as we went but we made it we made it pretty far actually made it into Monterey County with Barton Tony um there's a question about um in the use of the term narrator instead of subject what was there anything else you did to help make sure the narrators felt empowered when telling their stories I think you know we did a try to do a couple different things one of which is we gave the uh our narrators you know were deeply involved in the process like they got the questions ahead of time and we asked them if you don't want us to ask any particular kind of question they won't ask it we we didn't approach them as as like hard-hitting investigative interviews but a chance for a kind of connection between um I mean in uh Rowan you did that process if you wanted to talk about what it was like working with Peggy to get that set up yeah a lot of it it was just about and I just I admire her so much just everything that she's been through in her life and how strong she's been through all of it and it was a lot of it was just about building that relationship between me and her like I already knew her I knew of her from the thing she was doing with trans groups in San Luis Obispo County and so I just you know I I talked to her I had I even did I called her up on the phone I did a little pre-interview even where I asked her you know what kinds of stuff would you want me to ask questions about and I formed my questions based on what you know it seemed like she wanted to talk about and a lot of the time if you if you spend that time building that relationship it becomes very clear very quickly what things they do and do not want to talk about and it's a lot of it is just um listening yeah it's just some other technical things too we produce transcripts all of our interviews um uh and so we you know gave each of our narrators a chance to review their transcripts and they had the the capacity to embargo things so they could say we don't want this to appear in the interview or we you know or we you know we don't want this in the interview but it's okay to release it after say we've died or and so we we let them know that that was a possibility I don't think anybody wanted anything embargoed in it thankfully um but if that was about again giving them some control over uh you know giving them control over the process and we said even after we did the interviews in the transcripts that if they didn't want us to make it to to publish it we wouldn't do it um and so and I think like even if if somebody came up to me now and said you know we don't want it to the public I would have no problem taking it down um for them but it doesn't seem to be case I think they're all pretty happy with what happened with Helen I think as as as Rowan said I think also Dylan did this too it's the pre-interview with them although I I do caution when we do get on the set right and we and we um film in their home and we allow them to decorate too right what knickknacks what things represent what your life's about what would you like to put on on the shelf right as a little decorating instinct for setting the place and and the setting is while you're busy setting up don't start talking to them about the subject right talk about the weather talk about what you did last weekend because a lot of times what'll happen is if you get them engaged while you're preparing or setting up then when you ask them the question even if they don't say it out loud it's like I told you this already and it's not as fresh as it would be the first time the first time around and I think there was a lot of that small talk being made in the hour it takes to light and get the microphones up and you know someone asked the question about that what advice would you give for this kind of a project and I think um you know we were lucky in that we had a little more technology to make it work to to get rid of the background noises to have appropriate microphones above them or or below them and to have a lot of lights but sometimes as the old photographer saying goes what's the best camera to use the one you have with you that said there are rules for you know composition for not having a set that's so big that you lose sight of the person in it uh you know for people not realizing it's out of focus until it's too late um because this it's different now right with the it used to be that you look through the camera I still look through the camera but now we have that screen that folds out in front of you and so you're busy looking there there or at the or you're talking and trying to communicate with the person but you're not paying attention to the screen down here and that's when things can wander out of focus and you don't notice it till you're done and then you kind of get upset with yourself I was even here I was looking there we go the classic composition right the rule of thirds there's the diagonal line the the Greek model for composition and and what what engages an audience I I I've seen the thing where the person is way over here and they're talking to you over here you say well what's going on here I don't know but if you're over here and I'm talking to you here now this space is engaging right it's an active space rather than nothing because it's between my eyes and you the the person asking the question over here and so if we fill this space with stuff that's illustrative of the person's life now you have something that because an interview runs 90 minutes you have something that doesn't get that boring that quickly that's and I I would also we were also very fortunate to have David with us to to do help us with a lot of like making you look beautiful right and that was a big part of it is making sure that the the interviews are visual they are highly a lot of detail and that they're they're done professionally I think if you don't have access to those resources like use what you've got phones right to have amazing cameras on them but you know people have been doing oral histories before there were kind of useful or portable kind of recording tech like video recording technology so audio recording right works too and so using whatever you can to you know get those stories down and then if you have the opportunity to do right the kind of amazing high quality visuals right take that chance that opportunity getting good sound is important because they use automated transcripts now and you know our project spans the gap the first transcript was Michael's job to do as a college student and you you sit down and do 90 minutes of verbatim I think he worked on that for months you know now of course you you feed an automated transcript into one of the many services you feed in a 90 minute interview and you have the there was that you have it back in 90 minutes and it could be anywhere from 80 to 95 percent accurate you just have to edit it but again the accuracy depends on how clear the audio is going into the into the machine and how free of distracting background noises it can it can be as well yeah the transcription services are really nice but you know you can always do it and I think there is something to be said from doing it by hand because you really learn the transcript that way you get really familiar with it but it's really nice having a lot of that work done for you too and what the transcript also does of course is when you begin to put them all together if you decide that there's a particular subject area that you're interested in remember we're all discussing the same region here what we had developed is you the first interview brings up certain subjects and so obviously if it's Lisa Dean and she talks about breezes we're going to ask the subsequent interviewees what do you remember about breezes now breezes becomes a category a column in a multi-column spreadsheet of topics when someone brings up as happened and we have stories about that the the AIDS flag came to Cal Poly was a very big deal for the San Luis community so you ask multiple people in an attempt to kind of triangulate the whole story well do you remember when the pride flag came to Cal Poly and so we would have a number of different answers about that there was in the early 90s an attempt to get the San Luis City Council to have a vote on an equality or an anti-discrimination measure and so we would ask a number of the people do you remember that and therefore we get different points of view and different perspectives on on that story as well and so someone looking to put together a more comprehensive history history could say well tell us about the politics and let's pull out those stories tell us about the social spaces and pull out and assemble a piece just with those and that's again this is an open source archive you can go to the web and there are ways you can download the clips it's it's open source you want to put together a compilation that just looks at the queer spaces of slow you could pull out just just those clips or you could pull them out of the transcripts using the word search function and put your own paper together on those on those particular subjects yeah that wasn't particularly touching story I don't know we do we have do you have another room for another three-minute clip well I'm gonna cut in for just a minute because we are at the top of the hour and I want to honor everyone's time if attendees want to stay we can do one more clip and then do a you know maybe a quick five we'll say five-minute wrap up we do want to make sure we share with you the link to a couple things as well as if there's any final dying questions you want to ask so David yeah I would say play it and then we'll do our final wrap up all right this is have to go you can listen to it when we post it online and what I guess about what about the thing about Carol Leslie in this clip is that she is the only person from the archived interviews from 2005 who was still alive so this is the one link between the past and the present history so we can do that one for three minutes oh the other good thing that we did is we raised money to bring the AIDS quilt for the first time and we had it at Cal Poly and it was very expensive the first time we brought it it was ten thousand dollars and nobody was going to pay for it so we raised every single penny to bring it by having an auction at the Grange and Morrill Bay and I will share this with you because I think because I was so active Barbara said oh Carol's out on her begging tour so I I begged a lot of stuff from the community and so I was picked to unfold a portion of the quilt and I don't know if any of you have ever unfolded the quilt or felt the but you have such or I had such a visceral effect of feeling the energy of the one that created it and also the loss of the energy of the one who was no longer here so that was I think that was one of our more impressive endeavors and a contribution to the community it was very Solomon I still attribute the wonderfulness of the hospice movement because I believe that the hospice movement is gay and lesbians gift to the community because it wasn't there was no hospice movement prior to that and it was an outgrowth of gay and lesbian people caring for their brothers during this process I'll never forget at one meeting we said well enough of this gay people and lesbian let's just all be gay and so we went through that transition this was before the broader jail ABTQ so anyway it was very heartwarming and we were at a meeting and the lights were dull we were meditating at this out going to outreach and one of the young men there must have been two three hundred people got up and said I want to thank my lesbian sisters because he said we couldn't have made it through this without you and I'm haunted by the fact that if there's something that happened in the lesbian community I'm haunted by the fact that we might not have been as supportive so he was it was a beautiful moment very touching so so beautiful I just want to say thank you this was I have learned so much and I hope that somehow somewhere this will continue and for those that are interested they'll reach out to you all maybe we can all collectively come together and apply for another grant and expand the work but I just want to say thank you for sharing and I think engaging with us and really as a reminder to the students here and in how you want to get involved and if you have an interest in this do reach out Kara shared the links thank you Kara so you can contact um Steven and the team directly and then we'll add them to on the blog I'm going to turn it over Kara if you have any final words and then if you want to wrap it up with the speakers I'm just really echoing Dr. V thank you again for just giving us your time to being able to share something that's so powerful and something that maybe a lot of us had not realized you know we needed having these voices of our elders being preserved and and being shared with us is so important and I mean just as everyone's echoing in the chat it's it's beautiful it's it's powerful the work that you've done the time that you've taken to be able to do this is just it's unlike anything we've seen and thank you thank you so much and we really do hope that this isn't you know not just the first and last time but that we do get to see you know ccqap continue to do interviews and really grow and and expand even beyond um central california just to capture as many voices and intersectional identities as possible so I thank you again do any of you have any last words that you'd like to share with us before we head out just thank you for the opportunity for letting us you know share our work with you yeah it's very nice thank you and a shout out to those of the project who weren't here tonight professor Zach McKiernan and our students um Elias Simmons and um uh dylan canterbury and michael morris that's that last words Rowan um yeah thank you for letting us present and um it was a pleasure thank you thank you all everyone have a great evening it's you too thanks very much good night bye