History of the project written by Dr. Brock:

The LGBTQ Oral History Project was begun in the fall of 2016. It started in conversation with Blynne Olivieri, Head of UWG Special Collections, who was, at the time, organizing an exhibit on LGBTQ+ history at UWG (the exhibit, Live Out, opened in October of 2016). She and students who worked on the exhibit discovered a lack of sources about LGBTQ community members at West Georgia, and the Center for Public History offered to begin an oral history project to correct that absence.

There was a special interest in the project from Hannah Givens and Jennifer Sutton, LGBTQ+-identified graduate students in the Public History program, who were instrumental in the first year of interviews. Hannah wrote the project brief that gave a framework and scope to our work, and Jennifer used her contacts in the LGBTQ community to secure many interviewees. Jenn and Hannah both stepped back after the summer of 2017--Hannah graduated and Jenn focused on finishing her M.A. degree. I continued interviewing until July of 2018, when I separated from UWG.

We interviewed in several locations. Many of the early interviews take place in the Bonner House in a second floor office. At the time the Center for Public History had an office there and it was a reasonably quiet and private space in which to do the interviews. As an aside, I appreciated that these early interviews took place in a former plantation house--that one building could, in its lifetime, support a rigid form of oppression (slavery) and host a chorus of voices sharing queer experience on campus (among its many other lives). Especially poignant was interviewing Shikera Thomason there, who is the great-great-granddaughter of Abraham Bonner, a man who was enslaved at the Bonner Plantation. At any rate, we lost use of the office in the fall of 2017 and conducted a few interviews in the Center for Public History before moving the interviews to the History Department conference room on the third floor of TLC.

The interviews are not necessarily professional quality, especially visually. We first worked with equipment from the ITS Media Services unit and then acquired camera and lighting equipment in the fall of 2017. Any lack of quality can be solely placed on my shoulders--though I have trained in oral history audio recording, filming is relatively new for me.

Overall, we interviewed 34 people between August 2016 and July of 2018--the collected information spans almost five decades of West Georgia history (late 1960s-2018). The group includes faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members as well as a range of identities--queer, gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, and pansexual, among others. We conducted the interviews as life histories; we began in the narrator’s childhood and continued through present-day life. We tried to ask the same or similar questions of everyone so future researchers might have comparative information. We were especially interested in asking about experiences at UWG in the hopes of collecting useful information for UWG administrators. To that end, Vanessa Blanks, a trans woman who was an undergraduate Student Research Assistant at the Center for Public History at UWG, used the interviews to write a white paper for UWG administrators in order to speak to needed policy changes in the spring of 2018.

The interview files include audio and video files of the interview (for most--some interviews do not contain a separate audio file); consent forms; questions; thank-you notes (for some); indexes (for some); notes (for some). Some files contain images, newspaper clippings, and poetry.

I wish that the interviewees included more people of color. Though we do have a certain diversity of experience, greater racial representation is one way this collection might be strengthened moving forward.

Thanks to UWG Special Collections for stewarding this collection! I hope that it illustrates the vital presence of queer people in West Georgia’s history.