NORTHAMPTON — The city held its first Pride march on May 15, 1982, and back then not everyone was ready to rally openly in the streets.
At the event, organized by the Gay and Lesbian Activists, some people wore bags over their heads, and organizers made clown makeup available to marchers who wanted to disguise their identities as they walked from Bridge Street School to Pulaski Park, according to a Gazette article published that month.
Other details in the article stand out — the fact that “some homosexuals and lesbians received threatening phone calls” before the march, for instance. In another article several years later, it was reported that city officials were taken to court after they tried to deny march organizers a permit to hold the event on a Saturday.
Five hundred people marched the first year, and now, the event, called Noho Pride, draws tens of thousands to celebrate in the city’s streets.
A lot has changed in the nearly 40 years since Pride started in the city, and for local historians, there are questions and missing pieces. That history is precisely what the organizers of a new research project hope to capture and preserve. This spring, graduate students at Simmons University’s satellite campus at Mount Holyoke College will conduct 15 oral histories of people who were involved in Northampton Pride marches and parades. The interviews, conducted with guidance from Kelly Anderson, the oral history course instructor, will be video-recorded and archived. In addition to Simmons University, the project is being organized by groups including Forbes Library, Lilly Library, the Sexual Minorities Archive and Noho Pride.
“It’s an important part of history for the people of Northampton,” Adam Novitt, director of Lilly Library in Florence, said of Pride. “And if we don’t do it now, it’s going to get lost.”
“We’ll be looking to talk to elders first,” Anderson said. “There’s always urgency among the older members of the community.”
Interviews will be about Pride in Northampton and also more generally about queer history in the region. “I’m also just interested in leaving behind a more thorough historical record that would help us understand queer history in the Valley,” Anderson said.
“Northampton has drawn people from all over because of its queer history,” she noted. “How did people hear about Lesbianville, U.S.A., and how did they come?”
Piecing together queer history can be challenging, Anderson explained. “We don’t always leave behind a robust paper trail. Sometimes we don’t realize we’re doing something important,” she said. “I think that oftentimes, we’re busy going about the business of the daily lives — which includes resistance — and we don’t always think to document that in the moment.”
For example, tracking down much of the archival records from Pride organizers is difficult, though the Sexual Minorities Archive in Holyoke has some of those records, Anderson said.
“There have been many decades — and we’re still in this period — where queer history is dangerous, and people don’t want to be recorded … It’s hard to create LGBTQ history because it’s information that can be used against us.”
She added, “I think we still burn our letters — metaphorically and literally.”
The project organizers are still looking for participants. “The thing we really, really need now is for people to come forward and say they are willing to be interviewed — especially people with direct knowledge who were involved in organizing,” Novitt said. “I’m having a really hard time tracking down people who are narrators for the early years — ’82, ’83, ’84, up until around 1995.”
People can be reluctant to take part in oral history projects such as this one, Anderson said: “This is a brave thing to do. It’s not for everybody, and to know that it’s going to be archived and available to the public requires a level of vulnerability that not everyone wants to take on.”
The oral histories will include information about the person’s life before and after Pride. “Oral history as a practice is about recognizing somebody’s full life story — from family of origin and memories passed down from ancestors to the present — in order to make sense of the person,” Anderson said.
“It’s a life interview where Pride takes center stage,” Novitt said. “I think in order to understand what happened with Pride, you need to understand the person, right?”
The oral histories are a pilot project, as the collaborators hope to continue their research on Pride after the first round concludes, Anderson said: “I would say we’re a collaborative, community-based team that’s interested in a larger documentary project, and this is our first volley.”
Material from the oral history project will eventually be available for checkout at Forbes and Lilly libraries, Novitt said, though its shape is still being determined.
“I’m not sure yet what the community will find helpful,” Anderson said, “but it will certainly be turned back to the community in some way rather than sitting on a shelf.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.