EVENT: Preser-GAY-tion Chatter
What: PreserGAYtion Chatter
When: June 7, 6 pm — 8 pm
Where: Club Cafe, 209 Columbus Ave, Boston, MA 02116
Cost: $30 per person
This event is generously sponsored by Renaissance Properties and Roger & Maryanne Tackeff.
We’re taking Preservation Month and Pride Month and merging them into one event we’re calling, “PreserGAYtion Chatter.”
Join the Young Advisors in celebration of PreserGAYtion Chatter. Unlike our usual chatters, this event will focus specifically on the people and places integral to Boston’s LGBTQ+ history. Enjoy several lightning talks (seriously quick and informative) by a variety of presenters while enjoying snacks and drinks in the historic Club Cafe.
Anyone who makes an additional donation of $20 or more on top of their ticket price will become members of the Boston Preservation Alliance.
Ticket holders will receive one drink ticket each. A cash bar is available for additional tipple. Light appetizers will be provided.
Presenters include:
- Thom Burns with the Gibson House Museum
- Joan Ilacqua with The History Project (A Preservation Award recipient for the Stonewall 50 Project)
- Russ Lopez, author of Hub of The Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond
- and Cindy Yiin.
A brief description of each presenters topic:
Thom Burns: “Filling in the Rainbow: Investigating the Lost Queer History of the Gibson House and Expanding Contemporary Queer Representation.”
There are large historical gaps in documenting and discussing Charlie Gibson’s queerness. While the museum’s physical space has been preserved, there have been various instances where Charlie’s queer history was lost or destroyed. Charlie’s queerness was often relegated to lavender langue and opaque or possibly apocryphal anecdotes. This presentation will discuss a proposal for how the Museum will hope to bring in Queer BIPOC artists and L_BTQIA+ voices into the space by a diverse group of individuals investigating and responding to these anecdotes.
Joan Ilacqua: “From New Words to Somewhere Else: Overlooked Queer Women’s Spaces”
As of 2020, there are no longer any lesbian bars in Boston. Join Joan Ilacqua, Executive Director of The History Project, for a discussion of vanishing and overlooked lesbian and queer spaces in the Greater Boston area. We’ll briefly talk about bookstores, bars, and efforts to revitalize queer community spaces.
Russ López: “Is That All There Is? Assessing Boston’s LGBTQ+ Legacy”
We know there have been gender- and sexually- nonconforming people in the Boston region since humanity first settled in the area. But the physical evidence of their existence is sparse. Some were too busy to leave buildings, places, and other physical evidence behind, others needed to hide their true nature, while many had all evidence that they ever existed brutally erased. While this is true for all LGBTQ+ people to some extent, it was particularly a factor for non-white, non-male, non-cisgender people. As these forces are still present, this means we have to take special care to preserve the legacy of LGBTQ+ people today.
Cindy Yiin: “House, Mid-Fall: A Home for 1 widow & her spouse’s ghost, 2/3 of a throuple, and 3 parties of an open relationship”
Based on a central thesis of finding stasis through friction, the architecture, physically and formally, consists of planes, boxes, and blankets cooperatively achieving stillness on inclined planes via oppositional and surface friction. Socially and conceptually, the project samples historical figures in non-normative relationships who have passed through the Schindler House to imagine a house of asynchronous harmony in which an individual’s stake in a home is not dependent on continuous, permanent physical occupation.
