Rainbow LaGuardia: An Interview With Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bieltvedt

Interviewed by Adam Kocurek 

Today on the blog, we talk to Stephen Petrus and Thierry Gourjon-Bielvedt about their project Rainbow LaGuardia, a virtual exhibition that examines what it means to be LGBTQ in academia. In it, viewers can explore dozens of video and audio clips taken of twenty-seven LGBTQ faculty and staff at LaGuardia Community College. In these clips, participants talk about everything from their professional lives as LGBTQ academics to their formative experiences in their youth. Dr. Stephen Petrus, who oversaw the interviewing process with the LGBTQ faculty, captures in his work a holistic appraisal of what life is like for LGBTQ academics, offering intimate insights into this marginalized demographic in the academy. Accompanying these clips are a series of stark photographs of the participants taken by six students that Prof. Gourjon-Bieltvedt trained for several months. For historians and scholars of Higher Education and LGBTQ communities, the accessible oral histories and photographs that make up this digital exhibition will come as a long overdue gift. And for students and enthusiasts of photography, activists, lovers of New York City, and pedagogues working across the humanities and social sciences, this digital exhibition will prove to be an invaluable resource. 

So why now? What inspired the two of you to take on this project?

Stephen: The project builds upon previous exhibits that Thierry and I have worked on at LaGuardia. In 2017 we helped organize The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens at the Queens Museum, based on the Papers of Daniel Dromm, donated to the Archives in 2016. Dromm has been a prominent LGBTQ activist in Queens since the 1990s. He co-founded the Queens Pride Parade in 1993 and formed several LGBTQ organizations in the borough. My first task at the Archives was to immerse myself in his collection. It’s a treasure trove. Typically, we associate LGBTQ movements with lower Manhattan, but his archive helped to expand the geographical focus to Queens. The exhibition illuminated the evolution of the Queens Pride Parade, from a community event in 1993, with some 1,000 marchers and thousands of spectators, to a festival that attracts crowds of more than 40,000 and gains the support of major politicians and corporate sponsors. It was a successful exhibit, supported by a grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. New York City Council was impressed and provided funding to the Archives to continue work on LGBTQ public history projects. In 2019, Thierry and I co-curated an exhibit on campus called Shades of the Rainbow: Generation Z Reframes Gender and Sexuality. It chronicles the personal experiences of sixteen queer LaGuardia students through oral history, video, and photography. The students were candid about their experiences, talking about coming out, family support and estrangement, dating apps, and more. We’re thrilled that it will be transferred to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in 2021. In Rainbow LaGuardia, we wanted to build upon this trend of focusing on historically overlooked groups. It felt timely during the Trump era, given the lack of empathy in the political discourse. We wanted to build community on campus. We also hope that this exhibit will be used as a pedagogical tool, incorporated in courses across the curriculum. In the end, twenty-seven individuals participated. They were open and insightful. Thierry’s students did the photography work, and we created something we’re proud of. I think it’s a model for other college campuses, not just within the CUNY system, but throughout the nation. And I think that when students see this exhibit and hear a little bit about their professors and the staff on campus, they won’t feel so alone and isolated, and might even be inspired. 

How do you understand this archive in relation to other LGBTQ+ archives around the country? Stated another way, were you inspired by another archive?

Stephen: I don’t know of another college that has done an oral history and photography project on their own LGBTQ faculty, staff, and students. We thought, why not tap into our own greatest resources — members of our own queer community? Of course, there are many great LGBTQ oral history collections in university archives and research centers nationwide. Just in New York, we have the NYPL Gay and Lesbian Collections, the LGBTQ Community Center, Lesbian Herstory in Brooklyn, and the NYC Trans Oral History Project, to name a few. But I think Rainbow LaGuardia is unique. Our work is a beautiful mosaic composed of oral history, video, and photography. I spoke about our project at the AHA last January on a panel with other historians and archivists, and we had an audience of maybe 75 people. People came up to me after the talk, and said our project gave them ideas.

Thierry: Your initial question about why do this in the Trump era — with him in the White House, I think those four years, because as Stephen says this is an organic progression, it would have happened regardless of whoever was in the White House but the fact that it happened while we had him in the white house, it makes this project feel all the more symbolic. As to the other archives, I will claim blissful ignorance — once I started the project, I never looked outside of what we were doing. It was more of an art project for me — it started inward. As I tell my students, to tell a larger story, start telling a smaller story. And that’s what we did here.

Tell me about the process of soliciting and collecting submissions from LGBTQ+ faculty. How did that look? Were there any unexpected hurdles?

Stephen: The process started in September 2019. We had credibility on campus due to our two prior exhibits and had known about twenty potential participants. Almost all of those faculty and staff agreed to take part. We made it clear that the project would entail an oral history and a photography shoot, both to be archived in our growing LGBTQ Collection. I also benefited from Lavender LaGuardia, a voluntary list of LGBTQ faculty and staff on campus, created by historian Chelsea Del Rio. This group’s purpose is to promote an inclusive environment on campus and provide students access to LGBTQ role models and mentors. The list includes about forty individuals. I contacted all of them, explained the goal of the project, and most agreed. About ten people chose not to participate.  I completely respected their decision. The final result was twenty-seven. It was a challenge in the sense that they were sharing intimate stories about coming out, family strife, depression, and many other sensitive topics. But most people told me the oral history experience was cathartic and empowering.

Thierry: We went from thirty to twenty-seven, but what we ended up with are those twenty-seven portraits of those twenty-seven courageous individuals who made themselves vulnerable because they understood the value of their contributions. Privacy is our last true freedom, and the fact that these people were willing to testify to these difficult experiences is quite impressive. That really struck me every time.

What do you think is the future of Rainbow LaGuardia? How do you envision it growing or changing? Where do you see yourselves going from here?

Thierry: It’s a multiple-fold question. In terms of practical aspects, we need to keep securing funding, and were very lucky to have been helped by NYC council. Funding apart, I think if you give people stories of the human experience, people are more willing to listen. This new project is an organic evolution of the same story we told with our student project. As for a future project, I’m unsure. I like the work to flow organically. Something important I want to reiterate though is that our faculty were photographed by students, which I think is less threatening. I would definitely want to keep that precedent with future work.

Rainbow LaGuardia participant Nireata Seals

Stephen: It’s important to share these stories, particularly in the classroom. In general, interviews lasted about forty-five minutes. As I watched them to identify short clips for the exhibit, I asked myself, would this segment be useful in a classroom? For example, some interviewees reflect about the term “queer” from different historical and personal perspectives. Imagine playing a few of them in your class and asking your students to discuss and debate the various views, or write about them as part of an assignment. The same is true for intersectionality, the relationships between sexual identity and racial, ethnic, and national identities. Four exhibit participants are African-American and discussed what it meant to be Black and gay or Black and lesbian, and the set of unique challenges in our society. Several participants are Latinx and faced struggles with machismo or parents with traditional Christian backgrounds. Geography was also important. Our faculty and staff come from all over the country, from the South, the Midwest, the West Coast, New England, rural areas, suburbs, cities. You get a sense of different regional experiences in their interviews. I’ll say that coming out was a helluva lot harder for one participant in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1970s than it was for another in Providence, Rhode Island in the 2000s. So, I want this project to be useful for courses across the curriculum, not just in women’s and gender studies and history classes, but also in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and more.  

What kind of scholarship are you hoping to see generated by this archive?

Stephen: The potential is vast for undergraduate and graduate researchers. This is all original content. Scholars working on LGBTQ projects that relate to higher education will find rich material. Most of the oral histories focus on coming out, family relationships, and intersectional identity, among other sociological topics. Each exhibit participant has experienced bias, stigma, and discrimination. Some accounts illuminate the politics of sexual oppression and empowerment; others shed light on the meaning of queerness in individual identity. 

How do you feel that the setting of New York City, and of a community college more specifically, influences the kinds of stories captured in your project? To what extent are the stories captured in your project universal or unique to NYC?

Rainbow LaGuardia participant Paul Arcario

Stephen: It’s a very New York story. Very few of the twenty-seven participants are native New Yorkers; almost all were keen on coming to the city at some point in their lives. New York has long represented a beacon for those unable to reach their potential in another place, whether abroad or from another part of the country. The promise of New York is personal renewal. We all know it’s one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world. But I don’t want to be a New York booster. Of course, this town has become prohibitively expensive for many people and is the embodiment of income inequality that plagues the nation. But there is something special about CUNY in general and LaGuardia Community College in particular that attracted our exhibit participants. Our college is organically connected to the city’s cultural and social fabric. Most of our students are immigrants or the children of immigrants and the first in their families to attend college. For the most part, they are from low-income families. So, they face great challenges on a daily basis. Our LGBTQ faculty and staff are perfectly poised to work with them. There’s a level of empathy and a knowledge of struggle among them that cuts across sexual orientation and gender identity and race and class. I do believe our faculty, staff, and students embody what is best about New York. They are open-minded but skeptical and idealistic but also practical.

Thierry: Stephen used the term “mosaic” earlier on, and I believe NYC really is that. I’m an example of that — I was born and raised in Paris but also lived in Iceland, where I have most of my family, and now I live here in NYC. NYC gives you that sense of freedom and there is safety in that multitude, in the sheer volume of people and experiences around you. NYC is still a big magnet, and I don’t think it will change any time soon. Regarding the community college — we are on the forefront of higher education. Students can afford to come to CUNY, receive an outstanding education, and all faculty in CUNY and SUNY are aware of that. I taught at private universities in the past, but LaGuardia, while in some ways harder, was so much more rewarding.

I was surprised by how many of your project’s participants discussed everything from club life to online dating, in addition to their experiences as scholars and educators. Was that intentional on your parts? Could you elaborate on why you wanted to keep the scope of this project broad and not narrow?

Stephen: We didn’t just want to talk about professional experiences and research. I wanted to focus on coming-of-age experiences. Those pivotal moments were important, and to connect those to their research and pedagogy, if possible. Some of them were taken aback by this approach — why are you asking me about my struggles in high school? — but I wanted to get to those moments because our audience of students and others want to know faculty and staff on a deeper level, outside of their books and articles. It was critical to peel away the artifice. Rainbow LaGuardia is the anti-Instagram exhibit. We’re not just interested in glamorous photos and remarkable achievements. “Authenticity” is a fraught term. But when they became vulnerable, they showed their strongest selves and were, in fact, authentic.

What new insights do you think your project gives us about the history of New York?

Stephen: Could we have done this exhibit at every other college in the nation? Certainly not. New York has been at the vanguard of LGBTQ activism for decades. Here is where we try out new ideas, spark provocative dialogue, make people feel a little uncomfortable. We embrace our city’s history of agitation, and see our campus as part of the ongoing national experiment to create an inclusive and meaningful democracy.  

Thierry: As an immigrant, in NYC there’s a feeling that you could still dream bigger. NY is a magnet, and I don’t think this project would have been the same anywhere else, simply because of the numbers we have here.

There have been recent legal gains made for LGBTQ+ workers in the United States, the case of Aimee Stephens before the Supreme Court being maybe the most immediately recognizable. In your work with LGBTQ+ faculty, what struggles do you believe we have overcome, and what do you think we still need to work towards?

Rainbow LaGuardia participant Allie Brashears

Stephen: Regarding the second question — transgender people have experienced significant discrimination and violence, particularly during the previous presidential administration. We hope our project provides greater insight to all of the “LGBTQ” experiences. I want to cite in particular the experience of Allie Brashears, a transgender biologist. Allie’s story of personal transformation could go a long way to raise awareness about transgender Americans, and I don’t mean to imply that she speaks for all transgender individuals or that the trans community is monolithic. It’s very diverse. As far as progress, sure, there are signs of it in the realms of political legislation and cultural attitudes. But I want to avoid a triumphalist narrative and focus on work that needs to be done. At LaGuardia, and in CUNY, in general, many of our students are not out and are still afraid. Some of our queer students have told me privately that they won’t come out to parents for fear of expulsion from their homes. Many religious traditions remain hostile to social change. To revisit the idea of progressive New York, I want to walk that notion back a little and remind everyone of the pervasive homophobia in many neighborhoods. Take the recently elected Congressman Ritchie Torres, for example. He experienced depression growing up as a young gay man in public housing in the Bronx. I’m especially impressed with him. He speaks openly about mental health issues in a district where these problems are often ignored. In the end, this exhibit reinforces to me the importance of not just telling stories but asking questions that stimulate reflection and help us understand the identities of others. We want to provoke thoughtful discussion and promote awareness. As City Councilmember Daniel Dromm often reminds us, “invisibility is the greatest enemy” of the LGBTQ community.

Thierry: Agreed. I’m approaching this as an artist and an advocate for LGBTQ issues, not a historian. The work we are doing is not just art for art’s sake, but it has a social stake. The rate at which society changes is excruciating slow compared to how we wish it would change. I never approach this work from a triumpantalist position. Change is needed from all people.

What was your favorite thing about working on this project?

Thierry: The photography part of the project was twofold. I had to prepare my students for the technical work with the machines, as well as the human aspect of this work. Teaching students that it’s normal to be nervous, but to remain creative and honest. What I found beautiful about this project is that I was able to provide my students with a professional experience, but in the service of a much larger goal.

Stephen Petrus is a historian of 20th-Century US at LaGuardia Community College and Wagner Archives.

Theirry Gourjon-Bieltvedt is a photographer and an associate professor in the Humanities department at LaGuardia Community College.

Adam Kocurek is a PhD candidate in modern American history at The CUNY Graduate Center. His research lies at the intersections of labor history, the history of activism, and the history of education. He currently holds positions at Hunter College and Medgar Evers College.