Tomorrow’s History is Gonna Be So Queer: A Panel on Queer Oral Histories
Featuring These Amazing People:
Aiden M. Bettine (he/him) is the Community and Student Life Archivist at the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & University Archives. He works on preserving local queer history in Iowa and is founder of both the Transgender Oral History Project of Iowa and the LGBTQ Iowa Archives and Library. He is also completing a PhD in History at the University of Iowa, studying the development of community archives in the City of Chicago.
Myrl Beam (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, currently on research leave, serving as the Fellow in Oral History at the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Gay, Inc.: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and co-hosts, with writer and activist Andrea Jenkins, the podcast Transcripts.
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who was raised on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia and still calls central Appalachia home. Rae is the founder and director of Country Queers - an ongoing, multimedia, community-based oral history project documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA+ experiences across the United States since 2013. Rae completed a BA from Hampshire College in 2007 and an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. They gained audio production chops as the Public Affairs Director at Appalshop’s WMMT 88.7fm in the mountains of eastern Kentucky from 2017-2020. Rae is white, queer, and non-binary.
Amy McDowell (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi and a leading team member of Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi. McDowell helped establish the Queer Mississippi Oral History Project, which is part of the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi archive. She enjoys mentoring graduate students who are collecting LGBTQ+ life histories for the archive.
Moderated by SL Ziegler
SL Ziegler is a librarian in Baton Rouge, and does oral histories for LaTOHP. They studied philosophy for a while, but decided they’d rather just be nice and friendly.
This program is funded under a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.