Irvine gay bars

In this episode of The UCI Podcast, Hilderbrand shares how bars are powerful community cornerstones; what he learned on his extensive research journey examining archival accounts in all corners of the U. Playlists to accompany the book can be found on both YouTube and Spotify. Apple Podcasts — Spotify. Our guest today is Lucas Hilderbrand, professor and department chair for film and media studies at UC Irvine.

He was named department chair in Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today, Professor Hilderbrand. There are a lot of people who identify themselves as cinephiles. I, for one, am someone who absolutely loves the movies, but you have turned your passion into an academic career.

I find myself rather envious. What drew you to this line of study?

Strut Bar & Club

And so, I really pursued early on two kinds of parallel careers. Your academic journey has taken you to all corners of the U. What led you here to UC Irvine? It was such a generative and generous department and space that it was just such a supportive environment to invent irvine kind of academic trajectory I wanted to pursue.

Well, I started the book because I realized about 15 years ago that nothing of the kind existed. So, I was really interested in exploring that history and revisiting that past, particularly because we were already seeing discourses that the gay bar as an institution was dying within our culture.

So, I was really interested in tackling an ambitious project that was looking nationally at the role of gay bars in shaping community politics, subcultures and the ways in which we imagine what queer public life could be in the United States. What gave you the motivation to tackle such an ambitious task?

My first book, which was based on my dissertation, I wrote very quickly, and I wanted to really sit with a project for a long time, and I wanted to let the archive reveal to me what the shape irvine the project would be. I went to as many archives across the country as I could, as well as did extended summer — basically — residencies at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, which is the largest queer archive in the world.

And by digging through both the local and national gay press and looking through every collection I could find in collections across the country, began to realize certain stories emerged, certain histories emerged, and certain locations emerged as ways to tell what is a really complex history. How did your idea of what that was going to be like align with your expectations and then your experience in your process in this journey?

So, the book begins with Chicago, with Denver, with Kansas City. It continues with Houston and a bar of cities that might not have been the expected cities or the places where we might imagine queer history having been defined. And that was a big surprise for me as a reader.

So, part of it gay a deliberate attempt to decenter the coasts, and part of it was really responding to what I found in the archives. So, I think probably the chapter that will be the most surprising to people is Kansas City gay the drag chapter. And one of the things in my process that I really listened to is that oftentimes in the cities that I focused on, there bar a couple of things that converged or came together that helped me understand that that was a city that could tell me a particular story.