One of the things Eric Gonzaba appreciates about American Studies is the ability to study history by looking at different sources, disciplines or even artifacts.
Take T-shirts.
Gonzaba, who started this fall as an assistant professor in Cal State Fullerton’s American Studies Department, focuses on race and sexuality. He’s teaching an introductory American Studies class and an upper level seminar on Race in America.
But he’s also excited about finding ways to involve his students in a project he has been working on since 2014 — Wearing Gay History, an award-winning digital mapping project that explores the global history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people through T-shirts.
The site includes photos of almost 5,000 T-shirts worn over the last 40 years in most of the 50 states and over 25 countries, including South Africa, Netherlands and Australia. The shirts are divided into dozens of categories, including AIDS/HIV, bullying and violence, the pink triangle, Pride, marriage and equality and politics and elections.
“Phase one was the collection, and people still want to add to it,” said Gonzaba, 29, fresh from getting his doctorate in history at George Mason University. “But I am at the 2.0 version, figuring out ways to get students to somehow use it for research. That’s the whole purpose.”
The idea for the project actually started when he was an undergraduate at Indiana University Bloomington, where he had a double major of history and political science. Gonzaba, who came out as gay when he was 16 and was active in LGBT groups on campus, decided he wanted to work on a gay history of Indiana — even though he was worried he might not find much.
That plan took another path when he visited a gay archive where he hoped to find documents on gay rights groups in the area. Instead of documents, he found worn T-shirts in dusty boxes. The shirts, which had been donated to the archive, went back 30 to 40 years and had logos for gay bowling leagues in Indianapolis, gay bars in Indiana and lesbian rights groups.
“I wanted to explore history through these T-shirts,” Gonzaba said in an interview in his CSUF office. “And I went to the fashion department on campus and used their mannequins to display the shirts on campus for an exhibit.”
Once the exhibit was over, the T-shirts went back into the boxes.
He found new inspiration when he discovered that George Mason University was a hub for digital history — the idea of using digital tools to understand the past in different ways. And his thoughts went back to those boxed-up T-shirts in Indiana.
With a digital exhibit, he thought, he could put photographs of T-shirts online and they could be preserved indefinitely.
Gonzaga started traveling around with his camera to gay archives in Chicago and Philadelphia, and then, after he got funding, all the way to Johannesburg, South Africa to visit the only gay archive in Africa, where he found shirts from Namibia, Sri Lanka and Shangai.
“Whether to protest, satirize, or show pride, the LGBT community’s often ignored history can be seen vividly in the clothing we often throw out,” he wrote in the introduction to “Wearing Gay History,” which won the 2016 National Council on Public History Student Prize.
Gonzaba has other projects in the works. He’s finishing a book on the history and culture of gay male nightlife since 1970. And he’s about to launch another digital mapping project that explores the gay world and how it has looked over the last 50 years by charting where gay men went to dine and dance and the hotels where they stayed in Southern California and the South.
For a guide he is using the Damron Address Book — the gay equivalent of The Green Book, which helped African American travelers find safe places when they traveled in the South and was the subject of the 2018 Oscar-winning movie. The pocket-sized Damron Address Book was first published in 1964.
Gonzaba is using a spreadsheet to note the cities and places the book mentions, as well as the short descriptions used for each, such as AYOR for “at your own risk.” There are also letters that correspond to dancing, girls, private, popular and mixed.
“What we are finding about places in the South is they were not actually gay bars but the Holiday Inn hotel, and they’re listed as mixed,” he said. “Gay men and lesbians were meeting each other at straight spots because there wasn’t a physical gay world there.”
Once the database is built, Gonzaba would like to see the public add photos to make it a community-based program he can curate. He also plans to apply for a grant that would allow him to include the rest of the U.S. in the project.
Although he considers himself a historian, Gonzaba said he does it in his own way.
“I teach my students about the past,” he said. “But what I do is super interesting. The things I look at to understand the past are odd things like T-shirts or these address books.
“It’s liberating to explore history in a different way. I can have a day of looking at a topic in 500 different ways.”
