His personal collection seeded one of the country’s greatest archives of LGBTQ experience, the University of Minnesota’s Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. Back in the Twin Cities, Tretter led a rich gay life and collected a truly staggering quantity of gay ephemera: newspapers, fliers, brochures, etc. Jean Tretter: Born in 1946 in Little Falls, Minnesota, Jean Tretter served in the Navy as a linguist, where part of his duties included intercepting Soviet communications.Scott Mayer: Former AIDS event fundraiser events consultant and founder of the Ivey Awards.Billy Beson: Interior designer, founder of Billy Beson Company.John Veda: Former server at Minneapolis’s first openly gay restaurant, Ye Gadz.Gail Lewellan: Former environmental attorney in Hennepin County member, Amazon Bookstore Women’s softball team.Charlie Rounds: Former president of RSVP Travel, cofounder of gay bar Boom and restaurant Oddfellows.Stewart Van Cleve: Currently a librarian at Augsburg University, Van Cleve wrote the definitive encyclopedia Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota.Andrea Jenkins: Activist and poet Minneapolis’s first trans black city council member former director of the Transgender Oral History Project at the Tretter Collection.Russ King: AIDS activist and creator of drag character Miss Richfield in Minneapolis in the mid-1990s.Tom Hoch: Founder of Hennepin Theatre Trust, former Minneapolis Downtown Council board chair one-time Minneapolis DFL mayoral candidate.Mark Addicks: Former General Mills chief marketing officer and senior vice president an original member of Betty’s Family, the internal LGBTQ group at General Mills.Lisa Vecoli: Founder of the Minnesota Lesbian Community Organizing Oral History Project, one-time Amazon Bookstore employee, and the second curator of the Tretter Collection.Kim Hines: Theater artist and a key member of Mixed Blood, Penumbra, At the Foot of the Mountain feminist theater company, and Out and About Theatre.Patrick Scully: Artist and activist most closely associated with Patrick’s Cabaret, a radical, brainy vaudeville founded in 1986.And they made clear to me that we can have a different sort of pride this year: pride in our history, pride in our accomplishments, pride in our resilience through tragedy, and pride in our capacity to find new things to love about our home. The stories people shared with me were sometimes dark and painful, sometimes light and funny, and always enlightening. The bright, public LGBTQ world we see around us in the Cities today was built on these foundations, the way modern Rome coexists with, and couldn’t exist without, its ancient skeleton of roads, monuments, and ruins. Names many of us haven’t heard about in years-or decades. With that in mind, I called a number of prominent folks in the LGBTQ community and asked, ‘What would you tell someone who arrived with a rainbow suitcase today about LGBTQ life in the Twin Cities before they got here?’ What landmarks should we know about this personal, political, geographical Twin Cities we all share?Īnd, in a rush of memories, they talked to me about bars and bookstores, softball leagues and churches, theater troupes and travel companies, hookup spots and health centers.
But what was long hidden is easy to lose. Hiding in forts was useful, important, necessary. Paul memoir, The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s-one of the best mid-20th century looks at American gay experience-the LGBTQ life was “a ruse that kept all of us safe,” conducted in “a fort in the midst of a savage and hostile population.” LGBTQ cultures have, historically, needed to hide their bars and bedrooms for fear of eviction, firing, imprisonment, or worse. Each of us lives in a different Twin Cities: We share the Foshay Tower and the Mississippi, but we go home to different bars and bedrooms.
Of course, the cancelling of Pride-the festival, the parade, the week when tens of thousands of far-flung LGBTQ peeps come streaming home-represents an act of love to keep people healthy.īut its absence presents us with an opportunity to consider all the profound and important local LGBTQ landmarks that built Pride-and often disappeared. It feels like saying we’re cancelling joy and progress. Later on, the civil rights “march” became more of a festival. Its destination, Loring Park, represented a spot where LGBTQ people often encountered danger and arrest. The second Twin Cities Pride March, in 1973.