Since 2018, the Muncie LGBTQ+ History Project has been collecting the stories of queer people who grew up in and around Muncie, Indiana. I worked with the project for over a year as a research associate, conducting interviews with members of the LGBTQ+ community about their experiences growing up in Muncie, a small town in… Read more →
Tag: Oral History
In God’s Own Image: LGBT+ Community History at Lipscomb University
Growing up queer in evangelical Christian Southern culture is a unique experience. Having attended the same Christian K–12 school my entire life, I didn’t have access to the tools I needed to understand my gender or sexuality until relatively recently. Maybe I would have been able to do more of that in college had I… Read more →
“No-Tell Motels”: Abortion in Pre-Roe South Carolina
“Charleston was the place to come before Roe v. Wade, for abortions.” Reminiscing about illegal abortion in South Carolina in the 1960s and early 1970s, this woman in her 60s, an oral history narrator, highlighted the roles of “backstreet” abortion networks in Charleston. She also told a story about a college friend who needed an… Read more →
Faith, Reproductive Politics and Resistance: A Conversation with the Reverend Joan Bates Forsberg
Reverend Joan Bates Forsberg played a notable role in struggles for contraceptive access in the 1950s and 1960s and abortion access in the 1970s. Although her name regularly appears in historical accounts of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court case that overturned Connecticut’s ban on contraceptives, historians have repeatedly described Forsberg as a minister’s… Read more →
Archiving Abortion: Sharing One Story At A Time
“I feel like nobody should have to experience anything in life without sharing it. I feel like through our experiences it teaches us a lesson and I feel like we owe it to the world to share it.” That was Nikki’s response when I asked her the question I ask everyone who shares their story with… Read more →