About

Welcome to a story told from 83 points of view. This project is both a collective history and a collection of individual life-stories that tell us a great deal about lesbian life.  Using a metaphor appropriate to Oregon, this project is about both the forest and the trees.

We limited our interviewing pool to those women who lived in Eugene between the late 1960s countercultural westward migration and the transformative anti-gay Measure 9 in Oregon in 1992. With the help of friends in the lesbian community we assembled a list of contacts and sent out an email inviting those who were interested in being interviewed to come to an orientation meeting in Special Collections at the University. We were surprised by the enthusiastic response and we held two crowded meetings in the summer of 2018. Many of the women hadn’t seen each other in many years and the atmosphere was raucous and celebratory.  Some came from out of state to participate.  They added other names to our contact lists, bringing the total to about 150. That list continues to grow.

We started interviewing in the summer of 2018 and quickly fell into a daily routine. We scheduled 2 to 3 interviews a day and met narrators at a mailbox by the library and walked each one down to the studio in the basement of the library. The library staff watched this procession with fascination. Prior to the interview we sent out a life chronology form; many of the narrators spent a lot of time filling it out and said they were grateful for the opportunity to “take stock” of their lives. With the bright studio lights trained on them, many of the narrators were initially intimidated but once they began telling their stories, that discomfort seemed to evaporate. I had warned them that I would not be engaging in the kind of verbal feedback most conversations rely on but would show them with my eyes and face that I was engaged with their stories.

Oral history projects do not start with academic theses or hypotheses so our questions were fairly open-ended, allowing the narrator to create her own path. We began to see that our role was to help form whatever story arc the narrator was creating. We asked each narrator to share as much of her childhood as she wanted to. Some spent quite a bit of time describing the world that shaped them before coming to Eugene, while others started their stories at the point they left home. There were several questions we asked most of the narrators including how they understood their sexual identity, what brought them to Eugene, and what memories they have of the lesbian community. We asked them to try to paint a picture with their descriptions and sometimes followed up with clarifying questions about dates and locations.

As they described the neighborhoods they lived in and located the businesses and bars they built and frequented, Eugene began to look different to us. “The Riv Room is where the Actors Cabaret Annex now is. Mother Kali’s Books was first on Lawrence, then at 5th and Adams, then on Franklin. Mama’s Home Fried Truck Stop is where Pegasus Pizza is now. Jackrabbit Press was above the Grower’s Market.” While lesbian Eugene is still here, there is a faint trace all around the city of where it had been.

These oral histories bring those traces into sharp focus and connect the Eugene lesbian past with the present. Many of the narrators are retired and they continue to create, protest, and contribute to artistic and civic projects.  Having lived in communal spaces when they were young, many fantasize about coming back together either by taking over the top two floors of a downtown retirement home or building a co-housing community. At the end of our first round of interviews, we threw a large garden party for 70 narrators and their families.  We hoped that gathering them once again to celebrate the project might also provide space for organizing around issues of aging and housing. If anyone could imagine better ways of living into old age, it would be these innovative and brave women.