Emily Baker is celebrating Pride Month at the Tualatin Historical Society by launching a project to record, preserve, and share local LGBTQ+ stories told in the first person by community members.
Her vision is to capture the experiences of Tualatin’s LGBTQ+ community across multiple in a series of interviews she’ll compile into an oral and transcribed history for the Tualatin Historical Society “so they can be a common point of reference for experiences of people who lived in Tualatin,” she said.
The engineer and Tualatin High School alumni is hosting a kickoff on June 24 at the Tualatin Historical Society to detail her vision, field questions, and ideally connect with people who are interested in taking part.
“I’d like to start a conversation, but I don’t quite know how yet,” she said. “Anyone who’d like to be involved in that conversation should come. And, I hope people who do will come away with a clearer sense of why it matters to focus on the lives and stories of LGBTQ people in our community.”
Baker, who is transgender femme, wants the Tualatin LGBTQ+ Oral History Project to become a patchwork of individual experiences that both serve as a resource to provide perspective and help people feel less alone.
“Part of my own coming out process was having this idea that it’s important to know the history of your community, the history of the ways in which we experience queerness and transness,” she said.
Her effort to “design, develop and deploy her research on Tualatin’s LGBTQ+ people is in its infancy,” but as the project matures and evolves, she hopes to accumulate 10 or 20 accounts of local life spanning multiple decades to raise understanding and foster community.
A history buff like her dad, Tualatin Historical Society president Ross Baker, she was inspired by similar collections that shine a light on little-known nooks of the city’s past.
“There is some really interesting stuff that’s happened in Tualatin,” she said, adding that the accounts give her hope about the possibilities in her project. “(The Historical Society) has a book of oral history interviews and historical documentation about a farmer’s revolt in the 1950s.”
Farmers sabotaged a local steel mill that was gobbling up the water supply before it hit their irrigation lines. “There was a whole dam sabotaged by these farmers, and they had a conspiracy to never talk about it. It’s just this really interesting little episode.”
She wants to create something similar to convey the experience of living through particular times in a specific place, but she also hopes it can provide the wisdom of community elders to young people.
“One of my good friends is a trans woman about 20 years older than me,” she said. “She can talk with expertise and personal experience about what it was like to find gender-affirming surgery in the 1990s in the U.S., and what her experience was like coming out of work.”
Though she understands not everyone has intergenerational friendships, she can help pass on their experiences.
She’s found multiple similar projects but has yet to find anything that looks at small-town life for the LGBTQ community.
“There’s good resources for queer oral history in Oregon,” she said. But those projects either document life in larger cities or, more often, center on very specific groups of people, like an oral history she found in Oregon State University’s collection with interviews of lesbians working in the lumber and logging industry during the mid-20th century.
While she’d initially hoped to have some early interviews to share for Pride month, Baker said making connections with people has been difficult so far.
Narrowly focused projects like the mid-century accounts of lesbians in the timber industry provide tight, insular communities where finding one person to interview naturally leads to many more. The same truth holds for larger cities, but not so much for a smaller place like Tualatin.
“I’m looking for anyone who’s lived anyone in the LGBTQ community who’s lived in the Tualatin for a significant amount of time or lived here in the past, and would be willing to talk about their experience, even if they think that it’s mundane or uninteresting or unimportant,” Baker said. “I can guarantee you it’s not.”
For more information, contact Baker at volunteer@tualatinhistory.org.
Exploring the history of the LGTBQ+ community in Tualatin
When: Monday, June 24, 7 p.m.
Where: Tualatin Historical Society at the Heritage Center
8700 SW Sweek Dr, Tualatin
This event is free to attend and no tickets are neccessary. For more information, visit tinyurl.com/msbm29ma
