Last updated: July 20, 2023
Article
Podcast 112: Sharing Experiences with the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project
Starting the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project (LaTOHP)
C. Cooper: My name is Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am here with…
S. Ziegler: …Sophie Ziegler, an oral historian with Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, pronouns are they, them. So excited to be here, thank you for having me.
C. Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us. So, can you tell us a bit about the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project and how it started?
S. Ziegler: So, we started in May of 2020. The pandemic was already going. So, it was two motivations; one was to fill a perceived gap in the documentation of Louisiana centered trans and gender non-conforming communities and the other motivation was the crippling isolation of the pandemic. Some of us just got really lonely.
I started looking around for some sort of project to join and help out with. I assumed something like this would exist. I couldn’t find that it did, so I reached out to just a couple of friends and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. If I do, like would you want to interview, would you want to be part of this” and I got several immediate yeses right. Had people been skeptical, I wouldn’t have done it.
Simultaneously, I reached out to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center here at LSU because they do a lot of community work. And so that’s my colleague at LSU, Jen Cramer. I told her about what I was thinking about doing and she does what that center does, a lot of sort of helped me get up to speed on what oral histories are, like best practices for that. That center shares their forms right, interviewee and interviewer permission forms. We talked about what informed consent would look like and all of those things and then I just sort of ran off and started.
So, since March of 2020, we’ve had about 40 interviews, I think. That’s always going to be an inexact number because during the process, there’s always people who fall out or ask to be removed. But so, we’ve been going since then. We had an LEH, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, grant for 2020 and which we were able to do a lot of events, pay trans folks in Louisiana to do transcripts for us, pay people to do events.
So, really what we’re interested in doing is bringing in money and redistributing it to our communities. And then I got another, whatever year this is now, we got another LEH grant which we’ll start working on in January of ’22. And that’s going to allow us to do some really great things, including building a participatory map in which we can rethink the geography of Louisiana through the lens of trans joy. So, we’ll be redistributing funds to our community members around the state, asking them to record a short oral history about some place that elicited trans joy and then just take a video of that, upload it to the map and this will just be an ongoing project, which we are very excited about.
And then, we’re going to be holding a Joy-fest in probably June-ish, in which we get everyone together and we talk about trans joy, which is a reaction to just how terrible everything is all the time. We’re just going to make our own joy.
My day job is dealing with paper archives primarily and then running a team that digitizes that and then managing digital repositories. I have a sense of the infrastructure that’s needed for that and what I wanted was wanting to get around the dearth of materials that would be related to the types of people that I wanted to talk to. Also, I wanted a project that could be more or less independent and stay more or less independent.
So, we work with the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center, and they’re sort of our community partner but we’re completely independent from them and everyone else and the institutions such as Louisiana State University. So, oral histories kind of allow us to do that. We’ve been doing everything over zoom, which is not oral history best practice. It definitely wasn’t when we started. I think they’re kind of coming around because you know, what else are you going to do.
One, I just love oral histories because you get so much more unmitigated access to people. It’s such a beautiful format. It is inexhaustible too, right, because you can always go back to the same person, ask the exact same questions on a different day and always get a different perspective.
So, their life shines through them in a lens that’s always changing, it’s just so nice. It’s also just a wonderful way to connect to people and it makes a lot more sense for people who are not in the history game, who don’t really think a lot about records and leaving this type of legacy. It makes a lot more sense to say, hey, we’re just going to sit down and talk because you’re really interesting and you do really important things versus whatever it would look like to try to collect the manuscript materials related to them, right? Because most of us are just leaving behind Google Docs. And there are some really smart people figuring out how to do that, God bless them. But I didn’t want that for me. That’s really, I guess the focus from here.
S. Ziegler: …Sophie Ziegler, an oral historian with Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, pronouns are they, them. So excited to be here, thank you for having me.
C. Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us. So, can you tell us a bit about the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project and how it started?
S. Ziegler: So, we started in May of 2020. The pandemic was already going. So, it was two motivations; one was to fill a perceived gap in the documentation of Louisiana centered trans and gender non-conforming communities and the other motivation was the crippling isolation of the pandemic. Some of us just got really lonely.
I started looking around for some sort of project to join and help out with. I assumed something like this would exist. I couldn’t find that it did, so I reached out to just a couple of friends and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. If I do, like would you want to interview, would you want to be part of this” and I got several immediate yeses right. Had people been skeptical, I wouldn’t have done it.
Simultaneously, I reached out to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center here at LSU because they do a lot of community work. And so that’s my colleague at LSU, Jen Cramer. I told her about what I was thinking about doing and she does what that center does, a lot of sort of helped me get up to speed on what oral histories are, like best practices for that. That center shares their forms right, interviewee and interviewer permission forms. We talked about what informed consent would look like and all of those things and then I just sort of ran off and started.
So, since March of 2020, we’ve had about 40 interviews, I think. That’s always going to be an inexact number because during the process, there’s always people who fall out or ask to be removed. But so, we’ve been going since then. We had an LEH, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, grant for 2020 and which we were able to do a lot of events, pay trans folks in Louisiana to do transcripts for us, pay people to do events.
So, really what we’re interested in doing is bringing in money and redistributing it to our communities. And then I got another, whatever year this is now, we got another LEH grant which we’ll start working on in January of ’22. And that’s going to allow us to do some really great things, including building a participatory map in which we can rethink the geography of Louisiana through the lens of trans joy. So, we’ll be redistributing funds to our community members around the state, asking them to record a short oral history about some place that elicited trans joy and then just take a video of that, upload it to the map and this will just be an ongoing project, which we are very excited about.
And then, we’re going to be holding a Joy-fest in probably June-ish, in which we get everyone together and we talk about trans joy, which is a reaction to just how terrible everything is all the time. We’re just going to make our own joy.
My day job is dealing with paper archives primarily and then running a team that digitizes that and then managing digital repositories. I have a sense of the infrastructure that’s needed for that and what I wanted was wanting to get around the dearth of materials that would be related to the types of people that I wanted to talk to. Also, I wanted a project that could be more or less independent and stay more or less independent.
So, we work with the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center, and they’re sort of our community partner but we’re completely independent from them and everyone else and the institutions such as Louisiana State University. So, oral histories kind of allow us to do that. We’ve been doing everything over zoom, which is not oral history best practice. It definitely wasn’t when we started. I think they’re kind of coming around because you know, what else are you going to do.
One, I just love oral histories because you get so much more unmitigated access to people. It’s such a beautiful format. It is inexhaustible too, right, because you can always go back to the same person, ask the exact same questions on a different day and always get a different perspective.
So, their life shines through them in a lens that’s always changing, it’s just so nice. It’s also just a wonderful way to connect to people and it makes a lot more sense for people who are not in the history game, who don’t really think a lot about records and leaving this type of legacy. It makes a lot more sense to say, hey, we’re just going to sit down and talk because you’re really interesting and you do really important things versus whatever it would look like to try to collect the manuscript materials related to them, right? Because most of us are just leaving behind Google Docs. And there are some really smart people figuring out how to do that, God bless them. But I didn’t want that for me. That’s really, I guess the focus from here.
Why Oral Histories?
C. Cooper: So, you see that it complements the archival record or the historical record by these personal stories.
S. Ziegler: Yeah, I mean complements for sure, but there’s not a lot to actually complement. So, there’s been a push recently here in Louisiana, elsewhere in the south, all over the country--it gets more attention in the south, because the people don’t expect it from us. But there’s been sort of a push for LBTQ+ collecting in archives and libraries. But I mean what that really looks like on the ground is mostly cis white gay men, cis white lesbians, mostly of a specific class during a couple of decades, right? Then you get these wonderful lesbian action pamphlets, which are just wonderful collections, but I mean those holes are just so big you can drive an archive through them.
And so, it’s just like kind of hard to think about what we could do that would work better. And I also want to say the goal of our oral history project is to, first and foremost, tell our stories to ourselves. So, we are most interested in creating the types of examples that many of us wish we had when we were younger, right. Some of us die from lack of examples. Like this is really, really important. Secondarily, we’re telling our stories for other people.
So, the process with oral histories or people doing interviews with us, we go through the whole transcription process, we get them to see the transcripts and okay everything, de-identify, etcetera anything that seems to come off wrong or people just get carried away talking shit or something like that.
And then if they’re interested after that, they can sign the paperwork and donate it to the Harry Williams Oral History Center but those are two different things. So, they can just work with us, have their interview up on our website, maybe do a podcast with us but not everybody wants it in an official archive. That’s really important because we’re not necessarily telling it for posterity. It’s not necessarily history work.
S. Ziegler: Yeah, I mean complements for sure, but there’s not a lot to actually complement. So, there’s been a push recently here in Louisiana, elsewhere in the south, all over the country--it gets more attention in the south, because the people don’t expect it from us. But there’s been sort of a push for LBTQ+ collecting in archives and libraries. But I mean what that really looks like on the ground is mostly cis white gay men, cis white lesbians, mostly of a specific class during a couple of decades, right? Then you get these wonderful lesbian action pamphlets, which are just wonderful collections, but I mean those holes are just so big you can drive an archive through them.
And so, it’s just like kind of hard to think about what we could do that would work better. And I also want to say the goal of our oral history project is to, first and foremost, tell our stories to ourselves. So, we are most interested in creating the types of examples that many of us wish we had when we were younger, right. Some of us die from lack of examples. Like this is really, really important. Secondarily, we’re telling our stories for other people.
So, the process with oral histories or people doing interviews with us, we go through the whole transcription process, we get them to see the transcripts and okay everything, de-identify, etcetera anything that seems to come off wrong or people just get carried away talking shit or something like that.
And then if they’re interested after that, they can sign the paperwork and donate it to the Harry Williams Oral History Center but those are two different things. So, they can just work with us, have their interview up on our website, maybe do a podcast with us but not everybody wants it in an official archive. That’s really important because we’re not necessarily telling it for posterity. It’s not necessarily history work.
Storytelling for Survival
C. Cooper: It’s for the community and preserving the community.
S. Ziegler: Yeah, yeah.
C. Cooper: And strengthening it.
S. Ziegler: I mean maybe not even preserving it, because not everybody wants it for that long. So, like this is just communicating right now. Like things have been hard, right. So like the last legislative session saw four anti-trans bills come through. Just basically picking fights with the trans youth because they’re still one of the groups you can do that with as a politician and really rally your base without getting attacked for it.
So, it’s just a really tough time, which is why we’re focusing on trans joy. So, the number one reason for doing it is like survival, right. It’s very much like a here and now thing. With, hey wouldn’t it be nice if these stuck around forever. Cause again, like some people are just like, I don’t want to do that part.
C. Cooper: So, is there residence time of the interviews on your website for people who might not want it around forever but just for the now?
S. Ziegler: Do you mean like a sunset?
C. Cooper: Yeah.
S. Ziegler: Oh, ah, no. We have at least two people who said “I will probably contact you soon to take it down.” So, there’s not like anything set. I get the sense if they have life plans such that there’ll be a time when they really don’t want that up.
C. Cooper: Okay.
S. Ziegler: That has all sorts of practical ramifications for how we deal with this. So, it’s on the website, it’s totally accessible right now, but that means we have to have conversations with them about the Wayback Machine capturing that. People reach out like the Transgender Digital Archive; the big online Transgender Digital Archive would like to repurpose the oral histories and like also have them as part of their materials, you can search and find them on their site, which I love, but we can’t just do it as a blank slate. We have to deal with each individual oral history separately because the intentions are different.
S. Ziegler: Yeah, yeah.
C. Cooper: And strengthening it.
S. Ziegler: I mean maybe not even preserving it, because not everybody wants it for that long. So, like this is just communicating right now. Like things have been hard, right. So like the last legislative session saw four anti-trans bills come through. Just basically picking fights with the trans youth because they’re still one of the groups you can do that with as a politician and really rally your base without getting attacked for it.
So, it’s just a really tough time, which is why we’re focusing on trans joy. So, the number one reason for doing it is like survival, right. It’s very much like a here and now thing. With, hey wouldn’t it be nice if these stuck around forever. Cause again, like some people are just like, I don’t want to do that part.
C. Cooper: So, is there residence time of the interviews on your website for people who might not want it around forever but just for the now?
S. Ziegler: Do you mean like a sunset?
C. Cooper: Yeah.
S. Ziegler: Oh, ah, no. We have at least two people who said “I will probably contact you soon to take it down.” So, there’s not like anything set. I get the sense if they have life plans such that there’ll be a time when they really don’t want that up.
C. Cooper: Okay.
S. Ziegler: That has all sorts of practical ramifications for how we deal with this. So, it’s on the website, it’s totally accessible right now, but that means we have to have conversations with them about the Wayback Machine capturing that. People reach out like the Transgender Digital Archive; the big online Transgender Digital Archive would like to repurpose the oral histories and like also have them as part of their materials, you can search and find them on their site, which I love, but we can’t just do it as a blank slate. We have to deal with each individual oral history separately because the intentions are different.
The Importance of Language
C. Cooper: Could you walk us through some of the important terms that folks may not be as aware of, and how they’re used--or vary in use--in the trans and queer communities?
S. Ziegler: Yeah, you know, I’ve done all the interviews so far. I’ve been trying to go out of my way to define as many terms as possible. Most of what people are likely to find right now I think, are pretty understandable. So maybe some people trip over the word cis, which is just meaning somebody who’s not trans. There are various sex acts, which we’ll just leave it for people’s imagination at this point.
But for the most part there’s not a whole lot. There’s a lot of identities that are shifting, and our vocabularies for them are shifting, right. So, like gender queer, obviously the non-binary and the binary woman, a lot of that type of thing.
And so, one of the decisions we have to make is whether or not to have a glossary on the website and we opted to not. One because a glossary for a group of words that change so often--it’s sort of a big undertaking. But also secondly, because we had to make the decision that we’re not doing Trans 101. There are plenty of resources out there and because again, if you think about who our community is, that’s just not energy that that makes no sense to expend on that. But I think the identity is, because we do ask people how they identify currently during the day that we’re targeting.
C. Cooper: Right.
S. Ziegler: We just have a lot of wonderful things. Most of the pronouns are what you’d expect to hear, he/she, they/them but you know pronouns shift also.
I guess if anything it wouldn’t be specific vocabularies. It might be... I wonder if one of the challenges, so some people use any pronouns respectfully, so, you can have a single story about one individual, and they have multiple pronouns throughout, which I think is lovely personally, but I could where that might be a little hard to follow if you’re not used to it, but we do bracket notes and stuff like that, we try to make it easy.
C. Cooper: And each individual may define the terms for themselves differently.
S. Ziegler: Oh, yes.
C. Cooper: Do you get into that a bit when you talk to people?
S. Ziegler: It really depends. So, it’s tricky, right. So, this is an identity-based project. But we’re always concerned if you’ve got a trans person who’s also another thing they’re like, “hey, that trans librarian” so, it’s always a sort of tension. It depends on whether or not they want to talk about it. Some people… like we do “coming out” stories sometimes, we do like “gender journey” stories sometimes, but some people just aren’t that into talking about that. They’re much more interested in talking about their community work that they do for instance. Which totally makes sense, so really it just depends.
S. Ziegler: Yeah, you know, I’ve done all the interviews so far. I’ve been trying to go out of my way to define as many terms as possible. Most of what people are likely to find right now I think, are pretty understandable. So maybe some people trip over the word cis, which is just meaning somebody who’s not trans. There are various sex acts, which we’ll just leave it for people’s imagination at this point.
But for the most part there’s not a whole lot. There’s a lot of identities that are shifting, and our vocabularies for them are shifting, right. So, like gender queer, obviously the non-binary and the binary woman, a lot of that type of thing.
And so, one of the decisions we have to make is whether or not to have a glossary on the website and we opted to not. One because a glossary for a group of words that change so often--it’s sort of a big undertaking. But also secondly, because we had to make the decision that we’re not doing Trans 101. There are plenty of resources out there and because again, if you think about who our community is, that’s just not energy that that makes no sense to expend on that. But I think the identity is, because we do ask people how they identify currently during the day that we’re targeting.
C. Cooper: Right.
S. Ziegler: We just have a lot of wonderful things. Most of the pronouns are what you’d expect to hear, he/she, they/them but you know pronouns shift also.
I guess if anything it wouldn’t be specific vocabularies. It might be... I wonder if one of the challenges, so some people use any pronouns respectfully, so, you can have a single story about one individual, and they have multiple pronouns throughout, which I think is lovely personally, but I could where that might be a little hard to follow if you’re not used to it, but we do bracket notes and stuff like that, we try to make it easy.
C. Cooper: And each individual may define the terms for themselves differently.
S. Ziegler: Oh, yes.
C. Cooper: Do you get into that a bit when you talk to people?
S. Ziegler: It really depends. So, it’s tricky, right. So, this is an identity-based project. But we’re always concerned if you’ve got a trans person who’s also another thing they’re like, “hey, that trans librarian” so, it’s always a sort of tension. It depends on whether or not they want to talk about it. Some people… like we do “coming out” stories sometimes, we do like “gender journey” stories sometimes, but some people just aren’t that into talking about that. They’re much more interested in talking about their community work that they do for instance. Which totally makes sense, so really it just depends.
LaTOHP's Process
C. Cooper: So, can you share a bit about what the interview process is like and how you develop the questions and how the conversations may go.
S. Ziegler: We have a standard form on the website, so that’s step one where we get the names and the pronouns that they want to use for this project. And then we ask them a question on that form: “What does being trans Louisiana mean to you?” And it’s really the answer to that question that leads to a lot of the conversation that we have. Especially on the earlier interviews, I would just read their answers back to them and then just ask questions about it. Like, oh you know you said this and of course by then they don’t remember.
I do light research on folks, especially people who are like very active. You know I would just build sort-of not specific questions but like broad ideas that we could talk about. So, like for instance if they’re very active in an organization like reproductive justice for instance, or prison abolition, we might be to talk about that and just ask them about that and ask them about how they’re relationship to power influences their choice of work and how it is that they work.
Most of the interviews we’ve done so far is sort of full-life interviews, so we do actually start off with where they were born. What it was like growing up there if they want to talk about that. The requirement to participate is that you lived in Louisiana at some point. So, it’s geographically constrained, temporarily rather open and I did that on purpose. I’ve interviewed people in Virginia and in other states. And I did that on purpose because we’re very interested in like what their perspective of differences are too right? So what it looks like in Virginia versus what you did in Louisiana. Because we’re just trying to paint a large picture of how their life is, what turns their life has taken, given their existence in Louisiana.
But you know, based on their answers, you know the questions or topics are always changing. I leave it open. Generally, I end with a question about “If you were to donate this and then it becomes like part of the “official history” of Louisiana and that is like in the archives, somebody runs across it in like 30 or 40 years, what would you like that person to know about what is like living your life here, now.” And so, we generally end on a question like that in which people get like a final opportunity for people to say anything that hadn’t come up.
C. Cooper: So, what has been the most rewarding part of this project for you?
S. Ziegler: So, I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of really wonderful people that I don’t think I would have met before or at least not as quickly. So many phenomenal people, so that’s really rewarding.
This is my first oral history project. I feel like having spent time doing oral histories, I now spend a lot of time listening to other oral history projects, podcasts for that, books based on those. I feel like I’ve become a much better listener, I’ve be come a lot more empathetic. It’s just a lot easier to get outside of yourself, especially when you’re re-listening for these, for transcript purposes and you know, you have the headphones on and it’s just you and that person. It’s rather intimate. So all of that’s very rewarding.
And then, I’m particularly proud of the fact that we are able to bring in funds through the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities who has funded us twice so far, through a Patreon account, through just donors; and we take all this money, we’re not an entity, we’re not an LLC or non-profit, but we just take all this money, and we just give it back out to all the communities here. So, either to have them do panels, like we can pay everybody for that. With our podcast, we just finished the first season, it was very short but I’m not good at podcasts. It was grueling. Every episode featured a trans artists from here in Louisiana, so we were able to pay them. There’s this upcoming project we’re going to be paying the participants for the maps.
So yeah, it’s really good. So that’s really rewarding because it’s just an immediate, actual, tangible good.
S. Ziegler: We have a standard form on the website, so that’s step one where we get the names and the pronouns that they want to use for this project. And then we ask them a question on that form: “What does being trans Louisiana mean to you?” And it’s really the answer to that question that leads to a lot of the conversation that we have. Especially on the earlier interviews, I would just read their answers back to them and then just ask questions about it. Like, oh you know you said this and of course by then they don’t remember.
I do light research on folks, especially people who are like very active. You know I would just build sort-of not specific questions but like broad ideas that we could talk about. So, like for instance if they’re very active in an organization like reproductive justice for instance, or prison abolition, we might be to talk about that and just ask them about that and ask them about how they’re relationship to power influences their choice of work and how it is that they work.
Most of the interviews we’ve done so far is sort of full-life interviews, so we do actually start off with where they were born. What it was like growing up there if they want to talk about that. The requirement to participate is that you lived in Louisiana at some point. So, it’s geographically constrained, temporarily rather open and I did that on purpose. I’ve interviewed people in Virginia and in other states. And I did that on purpose because we’re very interested in like what their perspective of differences are too right? So what it looks like in Virginia versus what you did in Louisiana. Because we’re just trying to paint a large picture of how their life is, what turns their life has taken, given their existence in Louisiana.
But you know, based on their answers, you know the questions or topics are always changing. I leave it open. Generally, I end with a question about “If you were to donate this and then it becomes like part of the “official history” of Louisiana and that is like in the archives, somebody runs across it in like 30 or 40 years, what would you like that person to know about what is like living your life here, now.” And so, we generally end on a question like that in which people get like a final opportunity for people to say anything that hadn’t come up.
C. Cooper: So, what has been the most rewarding part of this project for you?
S. Ziegler: So, I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of really wonderful people that I don’t think I would have met before or at least not as quickly. So many phenomenal people, so that’s really rewarding.
This is my first oral history project. I feel like having spent time doing oral histories, I now spend a lot of time listening to other oral history projects, podcasts for that, books based on those. I feel like I’ve become a much better listener, I’ve be come a lot more empathetic. It’s just a lot easier to get outside of yourself, especially when you’re re-listening for these, for transcript purposes and you know, you have the headphones on and it’s just you and that person. It’s rather intimate. So all of that’s very rewarding.
And then, I’m particularly proud of the fact that we are able to bring in funds through the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities who has funded us twice so far, through a Patreon account, through just donors; and we take all this money, we’re not an entity, we’re not an LLC or non-profit, but we just take all this money, and we just give it back out to all the communities here. So, either to have them do panels, like we can pay everybody for that. With our podcast, we just finished the first season, it was very short but I’m not good at podcasts. It was grueling. Every episode featured a trans artists from here in Louisiana, so we were able to pay them. There’s this upcoming project we’re going to be paying the participants for the maps.
So yeah, it’s really good. So that’s really rewarding because it’s just an immediate, actual, tangible good.
The Possible Futures of LaTOHP
C. Cooper: So, you mentioned that this project was kind of born out of the pandemic…
S. Ziegler: …Yes.
C. Cooper: Where do you see it going forward?
S. Ziegler: I don’t know how long it’s going to go and that’s because of the way that it’s been formulated so far is it’s me in my living room with a Zoom account. We’ve done a lot of amazing things and with again with wonderful people. But I’m white, I’m fortyish and you know with luck, middle class-ish right, so most of the people that I have contact with are more or less the same. So, most of the people I’ve interviewed are white, a lot of trans femes.
So, I’ve been making a lot of effort to work with other projects that focus specifically on black and brown communities. So, this most recent project I’ve got funding for from LEH is a joint project with Last Call NOLA, which is a long going oral history project built originally on the fading dike bars scene in New Orleans and so they were really focusing on that and they are very multi racial, like intentionally multi racial, intentionally storytelling focused.
So, we’re working very closely with my colleague Nathalie Nia Foulk from that project. So, I think what I would really prefer, oh, and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who want to do interviews when we can do them in person. But I would like to de-center myself in the sense that like we just sort of dissolve the center of LaTOHP, which is currently again, me in my living room. Build capacity so that people can go around like this, like what you’re doing now and interview the elders that are important to them and then we can centralize in whatever makes sense, the interviews for access.
So, this was the model that the New York Trans project did for a while. I think they might be re-thinking it now but the types of interviews you get would be very different; the questions asked are very different for both good and challenging as that might be. Well, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be doing these sort of full life interviews.
We’re doing another series currently based on trans resistance to the anti-trans bills from last season so, we’re talking with a bunch of folks that we know who are really active in building resistance to that and building community around coming out for the protests and calling lawmakers and organizing around that.
That’s one direction we’re going and again, we’re working with a lot of different people so it’s not just the LaTOHP project. We’ll see what happens. I’m not that interested in making sure LaTOHP survives. I’m much more interested in taking advantage of the connections that that enabled to be able to do something potentially more impactful in the future.
In the way that a lot of my interviewees--and this is always so beautiful--so many people I’ve spoken with, at the end of our interview, will say something along the lines of, “interviews like this often make it seem really bleak. And we know that there’s a cultural narrative around transness that’s tragic. But the amount of joy and resilience among the community is just really empowering.”
And so, for everybody who is donating these for long term preservation, these interviews for LaTOHP, that’s really something that I want to shine through, right. So again, we’re doing this for those of us alive right now in Louisiana and those of us who are about, you know, currently coming and out and having a really hard time here in the deep south. Secondarily, we’re doing it for the future. To have a source of non-tragic narrative I think is a really beautiful thing and I’ll leave it with that.
C. Cooper: So if anyone is interested in reaching out to you…
S. Ziegler: … Yes, absolutely you can find us at LouisianaTransOralHistory.org is our website. We’re on Facebook and Twitter…and Instagram, yes, yes, we are. And we’ll have lot to advertise during 2022 and I hope people participate and reach out with questions.
C. Cooper: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
S. Ziegler: Thank you for this, this is great.
S. Ziegler: …Yes.
C. Cooper: Where do you see it going forward?
S. Ziegler: I don’t know how long it’s going to go and that’s because of the way that it’s been formulated so far is it’s me in my living room with a Zoom account. We’ve done a lot of amazing things and with again with wonderful people. But I’m white, I’m fortyish and you know with luck, middle class-ish right, so most of the people that I have contact with are more or less the same. So, most of the people I’ve interviewed are white, a lot of trans femes.
So, I’ve been making a lot of effort to work with other projects that focus specifically on black and brown communities. So, this most recent project I’ve got funding for from LEH is a joint project with Last Call NOLA, which is a long going oral history project built originally on the fading dike bars scene in New Orleans and so they were really focusing on that and they are very multi racial, like intentionally multi racial, intentionally storytelling focused.
So, we’re working very closely with my colleague Nathalie Nia Foulk from that project. So, I think what I would really prefer, oh, and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who want to do interviews when we can do them in person. But I would like to de-center myself in the sense that like we just sort of dissolve the center of LaTOHP, which is currently again, me in my living room. Build capacity so that people can go around like this, like what you’re doing now and interview the elders that are important to them and then we can centralize in whatever makes sense, the interviews for access.
So, this was the model that the New York Trans project did for a while. I think they might be re-thinking it now but the types of interviews you get would be very different; the questions asked are very different for both good and challenging as that might be. Well, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be doing these sort of full life interviews.
We’re doing another series currently based on trans resistance to the anti-trans bills from last season so, we’re talking with a bunch of folks that we know who are really active in building resistance to that and building community around coming out for the protests and calling lawmakers and organizing around that.
That’s one direction we’re going and again, we’re working with a lot of different people so it’s not just the LaTOHP project. We’ll see what happens. I’m not that interested in making sure LaTOHP survives. I’m much more interested in taking advantage of the connections that that enabled to be able to do something potentially more impactful in the future.
In the way that a lot of my interviewees--and this is always so beautiful--so many people I’ve spoken with, at the end of our interview, will say something along the lines of, “interviews like this often make it seem really bleak. And we know that there’s a cultural narrative around transness that’s tragic. But the amount of joy and resilience among the community is just really empowering.”
And so, for everybody who is donating these for long term preservation, these interviews for LaTOHP, that’s really something that I want to shine through, right. So again, we’re doing this for those of us alive right now in Louisiana and those of us who are about, you know, currently coming and out and having a really hard time here in the deep south. Secondarily, we’re doing it for the future. To have a source of non-tragic narrative I think is a really beautiful thing and I’ll leave it with that.
C. Cooper: So if anyone is interested in reaching out to you…
S. Ziegler: … Yes, absolutely you can find us at LouisianaTransOralHistory.org is our website. We’re on Facebook and Twitter…and Instagram, yes, yes, we are. And we’ll have lot to advertise during 2022 and I hope people participate and reach out with questions.
C. Cooper: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
S. Ziegler: Thank you for this, this is great.
Read other Preservation Technology Podcast articles or learn more about the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.