When Larry Peterson set out to interview LGBTQ+ people in Minnesota and North Dakota, he felt a sense of urgency.
“When we first started, we made a list of the 10 people who are most likely to die,” he said.
Peterson worried that if those stories were not recorded soon, they might disappear forever. Historically, many LGBTQ+ people near Fargo-Moorhead had to hide who they were.
“It was a very much hidden community, and that seemed to be quite true for quite a few years,” he said. “When the first gay rights group started here, Dignity/Lutherans Concerned, in their first newsletters people would not use their last names, they would just [be] ‘Joe W.’ or ‘Mark C.’”
Peterson, a historian who spent much of his career with North Dakota State University, has been heading The Red River Rainbow Seniors’ oral history project for about nine years. He and other interviewers go into people’s homes, and for hours they talk about their lives, their upbringing, and the stories of how they came out to their loved ones.
Since 2017, over 200 people have been interviewed for the project.
“One of the reasons we actually talked about very early on, was that lonesome young kid in a small town who wonders, ‘[Are there] people like me and have they made it?’” he said. “And [they] might be able to find this on the internet and say, ‘Oh my god, here’s somebody in their 60s who’s happy and led a full life.’”
One of his favorite interviews was with a North Dakota couple, Valerie Nelson and her wife Diane, who met in Moorhead in the 1970s. In the interview, Nelson talks about how she wasn’t able to tell her mother that they were more than friends until after her father died in the 1990s.
“I went and visited with my mom and had the discussion, and it was so hard, as much as she loved me and loved Diane,” Nelson said. “I was still fearing rejection, but it didn’t happen. What she said to me that night was, ‘Your father and I have always known, and it didn’t matter. We love you.’”
Even though they started with older interviewees, the project now includes stories from adults of all ages. Josh Boschee is the mayor-elect of Fargo. He’ll be the city’s first openly gay mayor and was the first openly gay North Dakota state lawmaker.
He was interviewed for the oral history project a few years ago and was the chair of Fargo-Moorhead Pride when the group helped fund the project.
“It’s integral to, especially our region, our community,” he said. “A lot of times, when we hear about LGBT history, it’s about things happening in major cities, or on the coasts — you know, San Francisco, New York City — but we have our own history”
The project is already being used to get a better sense of the past. Peterson said graduate students of North Dakota State University have used the interviews for research.
Though he’s retired from his days as a professor, the project is also fueling his own research. He recently submitted a paper on early gay rights groups in Fargo-Moorhead and has written about the history of same-sex dancing in the area.
All of the group’s interviews are transcribed by Tammy Lanaghan. Like Peterson, she has an academic background and has been using the information from the interviews to map out the historic hubs of LGBTQ+ activity in Moorhead, like bars and other organizations.
“I’m looking at where did they meet, as opposed to Larry [Peterson] thinking much more about what were they doing,” Lanaghan said.
“The amount of energy and the amount of commitment that the LGBTQ community has had to our region has been extraordinary, and how they have shaped our region and our history is extraordinary,” she added. “There is no way to know that unless you dig deep into their experiences, and so I feel much more a citizen of this region than I did before.”
Despite the progress made in the area over the decades, there are still challenges to collecting stories. After a lifetime of hiding who they are, it’s hard for many, particularly older people, to open up.
“If you’ve spent your whole life being hidden and worried about revealing who you are, because you're going to risk losing family, friends, and community, then you're not going to be very forthcoming, and it becomes a lifelong habit,” Lanaghan said.
Plus, there’s a chilling effect, as support for LGBTQ+ issues has been declining in recent years.
“We had a case just last summer, a gay guy I’ve known for 30 years, and he was set to do an interview,” Peterson said. “And because of what's happening with the current administration and kind of tamping down on things, he said, ‘I’m afraid if I give an interview, that … you know, will someone come after me?’”
And Peterson said that makes it harder to record these stories before it’s too late.
“If we don't capture these stories soon we won’t get them,” he said. “Twenty-three people that we've interviewed have died subsequently after being interviewed, and there’s probably almost another 20 who are on a list of people we would like to have interviewed but died before the project started, or before we got connected with them.”
