Gonzaba continues to add items from cities across the United States and the world. Wearing Gay History includes material culture not just from these two cities often associated with American LGBT culture but also from Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and San Antonio. One of the nontraditional sources that I’m most interested in is the idea of material clothing, particularly the t-shirt, which can uncover histories of queer people who aren’t necessarily in San Francisco or New York and combat bicoastal bias of queer history.”Įric Nolan Gonzaba at the Gerber/Hart Library andĪrchives of Chicago, Illinois. Gonzaba elaborates on the bicoastal bias of queer history and how Wearing Gay History addresses this concern: “One of the goals of Wearing Gay History is to uncover LGBT histories, and one of the ways we can do that is to look for sources that are nontraditional. One objective of Wearing Gay History is to challenge the “bicoastal bias” of queer history.
To archive the images and make them available to the public, Gonzaba uses Omeka, an open source archival web platform created at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. From there, Gonzaba continued adding collections from different archives across the country to the online archive, and Wearing Gay History grew into a larger project.
For the project, Gonzaba digitized the entire LGBT t-shirt collection in the Chris Gonzalez Library and Archives in Indianapolis, Indiana. Gonzaba explains that Wearing Gay History originally began in 2014 as a small project for a graduate class at George Mason University. I think the shirts prove that by having them at different archives and owned by different people at different times, (like going to a Gay Pride March in New York City or going to the March on Washington), people are exchanging ideas and shirts and comingling in a way, and I think the shirts show that.” From the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s to the present day, you have a communication, if not migration of people, across geographic lines. Īccording to Gonzaba, each t-shirt tells a story in relationship to specific historical and social locations: “By looking at these diverse shirts, the collections often don’t necessarily deal with the communities that they were a part of and so one of my arguments is how interconnected LGBT communities are during the time they were wearing these t-shirts. The project uses an everyday item, the t-shirt, to uncover and make available often unknown narratives regarding LGBT history. The Wearing Gay History website includes material culture from the past 40 years gathered from archives across the United States. He is a contributor to OutHistory, a blog that aims to explore LGBT history. Gonzaba is a member of the Board of Directors of the Rainbow History Project, which aims to collect and preserve LGBT history in the Washington, DC area. Eric Nolan Gonzaba, Founder and Director of Wearing Gay History, is currently a doctoral student in American history at George Mason University studying 1970s-1980s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) nightlife in the Mid-Atlantic.
On September 12, 2016, The Sociologist interviewed Eric Nolan Gonzaba about Wearing Gay History, an online archive that explores lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities though material culture. An Interview with Eric Nolan Gonzaba by Briana Pocratsky