Gabriella Chikhani
Staff Writer
Students in the Archiving as an Activism class at the University of La Verne helped construct the “The Body and the Archive” art exhibit in the Pomona dA Center for the Arts, which documented the representation of the lesbian and gay community.
The archive was displayed Nov. 24 to students and community members and closed Nov. 30.
Adjunct faculty member, Katrina Sire, works in the office of community engagement as well as the writing program and teaches the class. Students who take the course work with The One, which is the oldest and largest lesbian and gay archive in the world.
“The One is in partnership with USC. My class, Archiving As Activism, interns at The One for 15 hours and then we spend the last five hours volunteering,” Sire said.
The students built the exhibit Nov. 23 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sire gave them the freedom to decorate the exhibit.
“This is primarily student built, and what was great about it was that I was able to teach them how to put up an exhibit, what’s considered the right eye level, how you measure everything out, how to organize, and I gave them the option to do something and asked which they preferred,” Sire said.
The students hung covers from the magazine, “The One” and movie posters that depicted images of mainstream movies and advertisements if they had been geared towards the LGBTQ community, such as using lesbians as models for a Calvin Klein underwear ads.
“We’re talking about public representation and all of these different groups try to create a public identity that people could recognize and insert into mainstream media,” Sire said.
The exhibit had a poster for the Lesbian Avengers, which is a group that looks to create a power movement and a new idea of what a lesbian is and reclaim the word “dike.”
“The Lesbian Avengers were incredibly important for the movement because they really helped create a common identity among lesbians after the AIDS epidemic. So the Avengers were created to help a future generation of activist women,” Sire said.
Sire invited Delana Taylor-Martin, author of “Pomona Underground,” which creates a timeline for the Pomona LGBTQ community, to the exhibit.
Taylor-Martin researched the effects that social media and the bar scene have had on the LGBTQ demographic.
“The history of the LGBTQ bars of Pomona hadn’t really ever been studied, and I didn’t want to just research the same thing as everyone else. So I decided to focus on something different and I spoke with bar owners of places like 340 and The Alibi,” Taylor-Martin said.
Taylor-Martin was born and raised in Pomona. After graduating from Cal Poly Pomona in 2012 with a degree in urban and regional planning, she decided to research her local history.
“The fact that there are gay bars here in Pomona, I just did not even know that existed here and how she had to delve into history a little bit to interview people who lived decades before us was interesting to hear about,” said Jessamine Rodil, senior English major.
Rodil has been researching the LGBTQ community and how social media platforms have changed the way they communicate.
“She was saying how back in the day people from the LGBTQ didn’t have many people they could come out to and bars served as that family atmosphere, whereas now you can go to apps like Grinder or Her to meet people and it was interesting to see how communities have evolved over time,” Rodil said.
Gabriella Chikhani can be reached at gabriella.chikhani@laverne.edu.
