Hi my name is Nancy Wallace, I am a student services librarian and also the library diversity
fellow here at UC Davis.
I am here to talk about some books that I enjoyed and that are important to me as part
of the LGBTQ+ History Month so I want to start with this book called “And the Band Played
On”.
It's by journalist Randy Schilts and it chronicles the early years of the AIDS crisis starting
in the late 70s and going through the mid-80s.
This book is important to me because it's centered around the time that I first became
aware of the fact that gay people existed and like many people from my generation, that
was during the age crisis in the context of a pandemic the book talks a lot about uh sort
of the history of the uh the disease when it was first discovered it was initially referred
to as GRID which was stood for “gay related immune deficiency”.
It was only later that they changed the name to “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”.
The book talks a lot about how no one was really sure how to respond to the pandemic
especially because it seemed to primarily affect populations like gay men and also Haitian
immigrants as well as intravenous drug users, so it was all people that were deemed not
important or expendable at the time by both the medical and the political establishment.
Another reason that I chose this book was because one of the people who figures uh prominently
in the story of the AIDS crisis in the U.S. is Dr. Anthony Fauci and I thought it was
really interesting how he some of the things that he said and some of the things that he
learned about how science is communicated um uh came up again in the current pandemic
in terms especially in terms of how science is reported in the media and in ways that
often loses a lot of the nuance and the fact that science is about asking questions and
not necessarily always having the perfect answer all of the time so i think there are
some lessons to be learned from the previous pandemic that apply to this one so if you
are all interested in gay history and also in the history of the AIDS epidemic and how
science responded and how the political establishment responded I would definitely recommend this
book.
Okay the next material I actually want to talk about is a movie, this is a documentary
called “Before Stonewall”.
So when Ii um first came out in um 1986 to my mother um as I said before mostly what
we what people in the mainstream consciousness knew about gay people was AIDS and so I started
looking for more information and happily I found this documentary on which was shown
on PBS on my local PBS station in chicago and this talks about gay activism in the U.S.
starting in the 1920s and it's a really fascinating look at what people did, how people found
community, both within the community and also in terms of reaching out to other people and
taking inspiration from other liberation movements that were happening um during the um early
part of the 1960s.
One of the things that Ii really liked about this particular this particular documentary
is that it features some previously unseen footage from uh people like Audre Lorde and
Allen Ginsberg and so these are um people who were very influential in the community
talking about what it was like before Stonewall, before 1969 when um it was even more there
were even fewer legal protections for people who were not heterosexual than there are today
so um I highly recommend this it's a fascinating look at um it really does show that while
things may not have changed as much as we would like they've still changed a lot.
So this next book is called “Fun Home: a Aamily Tragic Comic” and it's by cartoonist
Alison Bechdel you may have heard of the Bechdel Test which is uh a theory that uh sort of
a way that she devised to look at movies in particular and media in terms of how often
the female characters talk to each other about something other than men um and that's very
much in keeping with sort of her uh her work um for 25 years she wrote a and illustrated
a comic called “Dykes to Watch Out” for that was about lesbians in um it was never
clear exactly where they were but mostly in the it sounds like they're in the northeast
and it involved people who were lawyers and stay-at-home moms and academics and um it
was it was huge in the 90s for me it was one of the first places that i saw depictions
lesbians who looked like me um because she had characters who were fat who were uh black
and brown and who were bisexual and non-binary so um there was a lot there was a lot there
and when she published her autobiography she did it in the form of a graphic novel and
you can see some of her fabulous art.
What I love about this book, is that even within the confines of this format, she manages
to do some amazing writing.
The illustrations though they're all black and white are so powerful.
She talks about her very complicated relationship with her father, her parents and what it was
like growing up, not quite feeling like you belonged but not really knowing why.
Even if your family background is very different than hers like mine was, you can still read
this and still see yourself there.
It's an excellent read and I highly recommend it, especially if you like graphic novels.
This book is asking a lot of questions about gender, how we think about gender within the
context of the queer community.
A lot of the people she's talking about are people who identify bi, trans, non-binary,
etc.
At the time that this was written and the time that I was reading it, asexuality and
being non-binary, were new to me and to the discourse.
This helped me see beyond the confines of the gender binary, both for myself and other
people.
I think it was one of the first things that made me think that there's more than just
two, that I can choose multiple labels.