ABSTRACT
Oral history has been central in creating knowledge about lesbian and gay male life before Stonewall. This is particularly true for working-class lesbians whose oppression as women and as lesbians, combined with race and class oppression, has made it unlikely that they leave many written records. However, even upper-class women, unless they were inclined to the literary world, were not likely to leave documents about their lesbianism.1 Despite the prominence of oral testimony in lesbian and gay history, there has been surprisingly little discussion of the problems and possibilities of the method. Most theoreticians of oral history have come to see the practice as revealing two different but complementary kinds of ‘truth’. First, oral history adds new social facts to the historical record. Second, being based in memory, it explores subjectivity-an individual’s interpretation of the past.2 In my own work I have tried to embrace and pursue both kinds of ‘truth’. But I have been hampered by the fact that the tradition of gay and lesbian oral history has thought much more about the former, what I will call for want of a better term the ‘empirical’, than the latter, and has not fully considered the interconnections between the two.
