We Live On: Stories of Radical Connection

Storytelling is a practice stretching back over thousands of years. It is often a method used to transfer people’s stories, knowledge, values, morals and survival tactics. Storytelling provides both cause and container for celebrations, mourning, and organizing. It is one of the most powerful human art forms.

Shared stories also help people to get from a place of visioning to actualizing those visions. It is an especially effective tool for creating sociopolitical change that leads to increases in global human and civil rights.

Telling Queer History (TQH) is an organization that uses oral storytelling and community building as vehicles for connection, care, belonging and wellbeing. This month saw the launch of its major final-year project – a touring LGBTQIA+ history and culture exhibit titled We Live On: Stories Radical Connection. The exhibit is live at Red Wing Arts in Red Wing, Minnesota through March 6. Following, it will travel to Moorhead and show at The Red Raven Espresso Parlor from Saturday, March 22 through Thursday, April 3.

This exhibit is a major actualization of a vision that began in 2013. And in a style true to all of TQH’s work, it will continue to push boundaries, to ensure stories that are often buried are unearthed, shared, and respected. Read on to learn more about the exhibit’s features and the organization’s history.

Rebecca J. Lawrence, founder and executive director of Telling Queer History, was mobilized to begin their work through hearing stories their uncle shared during the Equality and Justice summit of 2012. Their uncle spoke about how many peers he had lost to HIV and AIDS in the 1980s, and Rebecca made the connection about all of the personal and collective history that was lost along with those people who died. That awareness galvanized them to create a series of oral storytelling and community-building gatherings.

LGBTQIA+ people live within cultures that often refuse to see, accept and love them. What’s most needed are spaces where queer and trans community members can show up and connect around shared experiences and interconnected history. After participating in a TQH gathering, one attendee shared, “Many people in queer communities have inadequate knowledge and/or inaccurate understandings about our history. We need to hear the stories from the people who lived them, before that wealth of information and the valuable perspectives that go with it are lost forever.”

Over the eleven years of TQH’s work, feedback about the benefits of these gatherings has been shared anecdotally, in conversations, and through surveys. A significant theme that has emerged from feedback is the shared appreciation for the community vibe of the gatherings, which allows attendees to contextualize their own identities and experiences through storytellers.

Following a gathering an attendee said, “I really appreciate the multi-generational element…I think we have a lot to learn from each other as people coming from different parts of our life journeys. also really appreciate hearing from older queers, as I’m just coming into my queer identity. Experiencing turmoil over whether I’m ‘queer enough’ to identify as such has been challenging and hearing the narratives of elders was affirming.”

Telling Queer History started as a grassroots creative movement in June 2013, and by January of 2020 it became an official nonprofit organization. Gatherings and programming happened from 2013 through 2024.

TQH gatherings became spaces of radical hospitality, centering accessibility and offering people lot of different kinds of support: sensory-friendly zones, childcare, food and non-alcohol beverages, ASL interpretation, sliding-scale tickets and more. The value of radical hospitality arose from the understanding that as LGBTQIA+ people, many spaces don’t create opportunities or support for showing up authentically, nor for connecting through a spirit of authenticity with one another. The kind of authenticity that community members crave requires lots of support, care, and intentionality so that all who show up feel that there is an opportunity for them to be seen, heard, and appreciated.

Sara, a sustaining supporter of TQH, shared, “My favorite thing about TQH is intergenerational queer joy! Last year at ICONIC [a drag brunch fundraiser] with my partner and my young transgender neighbor, I witnessed happy, joyful and awe-inspiring interactions with other audience members and performers. I just love meeting in community, sharing stories – both positive and heartbreaking – and celebrating what we’ve accomplished and what we aspire toward.”

We Live On: Stories of Radical Connection is a series of exhibits culminating TQH’s 11 years of community gathering, oral storytelling and LGBTQIA+ work. Traveling to five places across Minnesota over the course of five months, the exhibit shows the love and work that has gone into TQH and hopes to inspire others to continue creating storytelling projects by and for the LGBTQIA+ community.

The exhibit is unburying histories that often get excluded from more mainstream narratives. Unburying, in this sense, means doing the important work of lifting up the stories of people who are on the margins of the margins – those people and stories that often get excluded from larger conversations about queer and trans communities.

Exhibit visitors will interact with and learn from stories by LGBTQIA+ incarcerated people, Indigenous and Two Spirit people, and stories from Minnesota’s Iron Range. TQH’s existing archives will also be presented, highlighting stories of queer joy and pleasure, performance, and HIV & AIDS. Visitors will engage with historically-situated video and audio recordings, transcripts, photographs, an ancestral altar, and will experience queer ephemera spanning decades.

The kick-off events will be hosted in partnership with local organizations at each location, and storytellers at the events are drawn from the host communities. Events will be shaped by practices of radical hospitality that have guided TQH gatherings for years. All of the events will have ASL interpretation, snacks, n/a beverages, masks and hand sanitizer, and include opportunities for event attendees to meet and share stories with one another.

When asked how she might take in, process and integrate the exhibit, Sara shared, “I’m craving it. This exhibit links to TQH’s practice of sunsetting with abundance, as it shares its archival gifts and its history of doing such good work. I expect to be wowed, challenged, sad, and better because of the exhibit experience, and because of the invitations given by all the individual contributors who are sharing their stories.”

In many ways this final year of Telling Queer History’s work is right on time, even though there is new precariousness present in our current political landscape. TQH has always centered the idea that people within the community need to learn about what has come before, how our LGBTQIA+ ancestors persisted, survived and even thrived among cultural and political hostility. We Live On: Stories of Radical Connection will be archived with local institutions and the hope is that it will be available for showings long after TQH has closed. Presenting this retrospective and new work as an exhibit ensures that the organization’s mission will continue to offer opportunities for people to inspired by deeply personal stories, to count their own stories as living history, and to stay connected even in the most divisive times.