Connecting Communities with the LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative
This June, LGBTQ+ communities are gathering nationwide to celebrate Pride Month and commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a series of violent demonstrations against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. That uprising is generally considered to mark the birth of the Gay Pride movement, and the Stonewall Inn was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
While New York’s Stonewall Inn holds an important place in the nation’s cultural memory, historical research reveals that Gay Pride has roots in every corner of the country. Local LGBTQIA+ histories can be just as exciting and meaningful as those from the Big Apple.
“It’s one thing to know about Stonewall,” said Terrance Henderson, a Columbia, South Carolinia-based artist and activist. “But to find out about history that’s right here in my own city, where I am, where I live, and work, and have grown up in South Carolina – it’s even more important to me to understand that my queer history is connected to where I am.”
photo by: Barbara Embick
In 1989, Barbara Embick hosted the first meeting of the South Carolina Gay and Lesbian Pride March at her home. Attendees assigned positions for the group and planned to hold the first march in 1990. Embick and Jim Blanton served as the march's co-chairs.
photo by: South Carolina LGBTQ Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
Regi-Solis tends bar at Affairs on Huger Street. Between 1990 and 1993, the bar hosted ‘Altered Affairs,’ an annual comical drag show competition. The brainchild of bartenders Regi-Solis and Rob Taylor, ‘Altered Affairs’ was a fundraiser for the South Carolina Gay and Lesbian Pride Movement (SCGLPM).
Stories of Columbia’s first Pride March in 1990, LGBTQ+ student organizing at University of South Carolina, and the local effects of the AIDS crisis are now more accessible than ever before, thanks to an initiative from the non-profit organization Historic Columbia. The organization launched its LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative in 2019 as part of its Connecting Communities through History program, which introduces locals and visitors to the little-known histories hiding around every corner of Columbia and surrounding Richland County.
“Knowing the experience of what it was like to be a gay or lesbian or trans person in the middle or late twentieth century in Columbia, South Carolina, is so important because this is a history that was being lost because of AIDS and because these kinds of things aren’t recorded or preserved in the same way that other kinds of community histories are,” explained Ed Madden, a professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and a member of the LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative’s steering committee.
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Community-Led History
Historically, LGBTQ+ figures have not been safe to express themselves, and their covert lives can be challenging to locate in the archive. Records that might hold more personal details, like letters, diaries, and photographs, are less likely to be preserved. Sometimes, snippets of the lives of LGBTQ+ persons can be gleaned from news or crime reporting, but these sources are written from the perspective of an oppressor and not in an individual’s own words. With the AIDS crisis, which began in the 1980s, many gay lives and the records they might have created were cut short.
To help fill gaps in the written record, Historic Columbia partnered with community members and collected oral histories. “Community-led history brings us things that we, as traditional historians, while we might be able to find dates and facts, we might not find these really rich stories about what was happening in these places,” said Katharine Allen, director of outreach and engagement at Historic Columbia.
During its early stages, the LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative received vital funding from the National Trust Preservation Funds grant program. This funding allowed it to collect and process almost three dozen oral histories and create a database and online interactive map of hundreds of LGBTQ+ places and events around Columbia and Richland County.
Allen said the “We’re Here!” interactive map will serve as a starting point for efforts to commemorate or preserve historical buildings with significance to the LGBTQ+ communities in Columbia. “It's one thing to tell a story on a digital platform, but places hold special significance,” she said. “There's something about being inside a place to help people connect with stories about people who spent parts of their lives in those spaces.”
Early funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation also allowed Historic Columbia to process documents held at the University of South Caroliniana Library . Madden said when he began working at the university in the mid-1990s, there was only a single folder in the library associated with local LGBTQ+ communities. Now, the library’s South Carolina Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Collection includes 70 boxes packed with newsletters, organizational files, and ephemera.
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photo by: South Carolina LGBTQ Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia
On September 1, 1991, members of Queer Nation Columbia held a sit-in, "Bigots 'n Gravy," at Cracker Barrel to protest its corporate policies that discouraged franchises from employing homosexuals. About 55 protestors occupied over half the restaurant's tables for three hours, ordering cheap menu items and eating slowly to reduce the restaurant's turnover and profits.
History as Resistance
Of the hundreds of data points on Historic Columbia’s “We’re Here!” interactive map, one stood out to Henderson: a Black gay bar and a staple of the city’s drag scene called The Candy Shop. During the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, when the Candy Shop was serving visitors late at night on the weekends, the growing pride movement was predominately white. Many LGBTQ+ spaces remained de facto segregated. During the period, the Black gay community in Columbia carved out space for itself at The Candy Shop. Henderson, a former patron, said the club was formative for him as he came out and searched for community in the 1990s. “Places like The Candy Shop [which closed in 2022] are where I first found Black queer community,” he said. “It was important for me and my journey to see and understand that we were here and we existed.”
Henderson said the feelings of empowerment and belonging he experienced at The Candy Shop decades ago are desperately needed in today’s political climate, “Queer stories, Black stories, and trans stories are being politicized currently, and there’s a history to it,” he said. “It’s important for us to understand that history and the history of trans and queer people living and thriving in their communities.”
The historical research and preservation of Historic Columbia’s LGBTQ Columbia History Initiative offers both a glimpse into that past and a blueprint for today’s struggle. “It's important to know that our current struggle is not without precedents,” said Madden. “An archive is another kind of political resistance because it keeps those stories alive.”
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