A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project

Abstract

The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot screen. The images were curated by Peggie Miller, a Newark activist and businessperson who has been organizing New Millennium Butch fashion shows in Newark since 2000. The crowd also viewed a series of photographs of Newark’s LGBTQ leaders, produced for this event by Newark black lesbian photographer Tamara Fleming. Each photograph was accompanied by an epigraph describing her subject’s vision of social change. “Mentorship is the key to our longevity as a community,” read the epigram by Sauce Leon, LGBTIQ commissioner of the City of Newark. “I want to see a community where we are all free and safe enough to unleash our unlimited potential,” urged Janyce L. Jackson, Pastor of Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church. “We must individually and collectively create, organize and establish viable institutions that speak truth and realness to our lives,” Newark activist

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