ABSTRACT
Hear, Here is an audio-documentary project in downtown La Crosse Wisconsin that incorporates short (two minute or less) oral histories about space. Alerted by orange street-level signs with toll-free numbers on them, visitors use their cellular phones to access first-person narratives about the exact location where they stand. The purpose of Hear, Here is to subvert the traditional narratives in La Crosse that focus on Protestantism, prosperity, heteronormativity, and whiteness, in favor of bringing to the fore narratives that prioritize indigeneity, race, queerness, and cultural difference. While Hear, Here is not strictly an LGBTQ space-based project, it incorporates five oral histories about formerly queer spaces including a gay bar, a queer bookstore, and a second-hand tux shop frequented by lesbians.
“Mapping Queer Stories in La Crosse, Wisconsin” looks at spaces that LGBTQ people frequented in La Crosse from the 1960s to the 2010s when many traditional queer spaces like gay bars, local queer periodicals, and lesbian/feminist bookstores closed down. The Hear, Here project remaps these former queer spaces and renders visible the gay world of a small Midwestern town. This engages the LGBTQ historiography—which has tended to be bicoastal and urban—to explore instead regional semi-rural gay geographies that are more dispersed then the gayborhoods found in larger metropolises. Based on stories told by queer people about spaces around La Crosse, this chapter takes a deep dive into local LGBTQ archives to further map the queer spaces and their meaning. We argue that mapping queer space and making evident their 70-year history in a small Midwestern city ‘makes real’ the community as it stands today. The work of Hear, Here helps not only to map these former queer spaces but to create intergenerational coherence and understanding about work by previous generations which has helped create a solid foundation for today’s queer La Crosse culture.
