2023 had begun with my re-housing due to gentrification, a situation that, though inconvenient for me and not according to any plan of mine, original or plan B, led to some needed attention being paid to the local housing situation that was becoming better for the potential and hoped-for new arrivals to the high-end, luxury condos and apartments, space for which was made available by un-housing of the great unwashed than the people living here now.
I was then able, via the USRail pass, to revisit the places I had lived and worked in for the last fifty years, and made positive changes to. I saw that planted seeds had grown and I got to visit with some who had planted them and remember those who had passed and about whom their beneficiaries were showing no desire to learn.
Someone got them stuff.
I had the chance to save my own history from the ravages of non-triggering language that watered down my own history and presented a story that, although true in some respects, was modified for an audience that had not experienced the past and like their stories more comforting than realistic so as to be unrecognizable in its totality of my reality.
I saw this repeated twice more as the history of the post Stonewall Inn rebellion era and the subsequent local histories was arbitrarily reinvented in with actual heroes being replaced with more glitzy ones and events added to emphasize a modern point that was not one at that moment. Too often real people were replaced because they were just ordinary people doing extraordinary things and bringing little attention to themselves for the sake of progress.
Celebrity was bestowed a generation and a half after the events while ignoring those who were there.
I saw the relabeling of assigned labels of the past and with the modern terminology and a history based too often on repeated social media posts from trusted friends, resulting in the erasure of some wonderful people that it would be better for these social media dependent people to know about as they benefit from them and not those upon whom the present has for now bestowed the crown
And when I returned, attempting to ascertain whether my found 2016 answer to the question, ”Was there Homosexuality on whaling ships?”, which I had found in past transcription work to be “Yes,” chose to move forward with that log entry, hoping it would be one of many found entries before, when, and after I had found mine and began the website for The Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology so I would never have to again sit on a bench on the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma, discussing with a friend the new versions of the experiences we had had but are now related differently and more comfortably than they happened even as we are corrected when we attempt to so much as explain ourselves, and how, if nothing else, we elders should archive the factual history to be available for serious research in the future and to keep the story true.
2023 for me was all about the History.
That of whalers, myself, the people I once worked in the trenches with, and those who indeed need to be restored to history.
Not sure what 2024 has in store, but if all goes well, there will be a relaxing trip to an important Pride Week and a leg to the West Coast to restore the Gay Men’s Chorus of Long Beach back into the history books where it belongs.
It was an AIDS Era chorus at a time when it was needed and the young need to know who these men were.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
