Rediscovered Photographs of an Early Gay Liberation Rally in Chicago

April 16, 1970

These photographs represent a moment in the history of the visibility of gay rights, 45 years ago. How would gay rights be seen? As a militant civil rights group or a quasi-ethnic celebration like later Pride Parades? Across Michigan Avenue from what is now the Chicago Cultural Center, there took place, 45 years ago, on April 16, 1970, a significant moment in the history of Gay Liberation: a rally for gay rights that drew 250 people into Grant Park, followed by a march down nearby Washington Street. This rally, less than a year after the Stonewall riots in New York City brought the struggle for gay rights into the open, was the first large gathering where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Chicagoans took to the streets to demand equal treatment from their fellow citizens. The ranks of activists were growing, energized by the militancy of the black freedom struggle, radical feminism, and the movement against the Vietnam War. Some saw their role as championing liberation for all of societies’ underdogs worldwide. Others believed in working methodically, carefully, through legal channels and targeted protests, to achieve equal rights and recognition for gays. Still others were simply patrons of gay bars who wanted a convivial environment free from harassment, a place where they could dance and socialize.

There were onlookers as well, those who came, perhaps with some trepidation, to observe or to assess. Some stood a little apart, spacing themselves widely, not catching one another’s eye. They may have been there to observe warily, to see what might happen, whether it would be safe. A few years later, they may have been waving flags themselves. Others may already have been active in gay organizations, and wished cautiously to offer support, to judge whether this method of agitation would work. In addition, there are the openly hostile, some perhaps sent by an intelligence-gathering organization. Others may have come out of alarm or pure hostility. But even some of these may have been anxious not to express any sympathy for fear that their actions might disclose secrets of their own. Finally there were startled passers-by on Washington Street after the rally. They did not go into Grant Park to see the demonstrators. They found themselves momentarily distracted, unsettled or inconvenienced by the band of sign-waving gay rights advocates. A little more than two months later, activists would commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots and what came to be known all over the world as the Pride parade would be born.

Technical Specifications: The exhibition includes approximately 20-25 black and white photographs, variable dimensions up to 125 cm depending on the venue and exhibition needs. It can be accompanied by texts comprised of facsimiles of news stories, flyers, rally ephemera and excerpts from interviews with the former activists in the photographs. Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter, author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) is available to consult and provide additional introductory and analytical texts. In addition, I am willing to collaborate to produce a catalog if desired.

Previous Exhibition: 17 photographs from the exhibition were exhibited in Death of the Straight, 140 Herzl Gallery, Tel Aviv (June, 2015). Review: Haaretz print edition, 11 June 2015. Hebrew: HaAretz-review-DeathoftheStraight-sml

Publication: Several photographs were featured in the book Queer Clout, by Timothy Stewart-Winter including its cover, and in numerous articles by the same author, as well as in magazines and newspapers, including Slate, the Windy City Times and a six-page spread in the print edition of Current Affairs, and on line. In 2019, some also appeared in episode 8, “The Struggle for Stonewall,” of “Proven Innocent,” a series on Fox TV.

all photographs and text margaret olin © 2019

The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine

Photographs by Margaret Olin and texts by David Shulman

“Can Rocks Feel Pain? The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine.” An exhibition of photographs by Margaret Olin and texts by David Shulman

“Can Rocks Feel Pain? The Bitter Landscapes of Palestine,” addresses the fraught situation in the South Hebron Hills and in the Jordan Valley through images of landscapes that we hope are both beautiful and anxious. The landscapes range from the pastoral and ideal to serene views where, on second look, you can make out the presence of soldiers or their jeeps, to an actual demolition. There are also photographs of Palestinian shepherds and of soldiers interacting with them. The first iteration of the exhibition consists of 20 photographs by Margaret Olin and 10 texts by David Shulman. It will take place at Yale University, from mid January to the end of June, 2020.

Statement by the artist and the writer:

These harsh desert landscapes are home to a small population of farmers and herdsmen, whose way of life is threatened with extinction. We want to show those who have not entered this world what it is like to live its reality. To make palpable the experience of being transformed from a mere outsider to someone who, simply by being with these people, is implicated in their fate.

We aim to bring the visitor into the spaces of the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley, where in our experience it is not possible to remain indifferent. We ourselves have for years been deeply engaged with that reality, with the Palestinians and with their oppressors: Israeli soldiers, settlers, policemen. Our photographs and texts converse with all of the above.

We thus reference ourselves in conversations and reactions to events, and to the environment, verbally and visually, making clear our own point of view as it evolves, forcing the occasional soldier or settler to meet our eye or gesture toward us.

These pictures were taken between 2014 and 2019. Both of us are long-time volunteers in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership, a grassroots peace and human rights organization active in the areas we have mentioned. We accompany Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their fields and grazing grounds in order to protect them from violent settlers. We help them harvest their crops, pick olives, and plow their fields. We’ve been involved in many dozens of land ownership disputes, following the rightful owners through the Israeli courts and sometimes forcing soldiers and police on the ground to obey the court’s decision. There are solidarity visits to communities living under constant threat of demolitions and expulsions.

Part of our responsibility and our hope lies in documenting what we have seen.

***

Technical Specifications: The exhibition as mounted at the Whitney Humanities Center in 2020 consists of 18 photographs (from an extended series) with accompanying texts of varying lengths. The photographs are printable in variable dimensions depending on the venue and exhibition needs. They can be printed at least as large as 125 cm, or 50 in, although many of them also work well at smaller dimensions. The texts and photographs are given equal weight. In practice this means that some texts accompany photographs to which they pertain, and others are hung separately. An accompanying booklet is available. Both of us are available to speak at openings or panels, and some other participants of Ta‛ayush, or Palestinian residents of the areas in which we are active, may be available as well. Accompanying film programs are also possible.

About Margaret Olin and David Shulman

Margaret Olin is Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. The author of Touching Photographs and the curator of Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv, her current photographic work centers on the visual culture of the occupation in Israel and Palestine.

David Shulman is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University. The author of Tamil, More Than Real, Dark Hope and Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills, he is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

The nearly invisible border called the eruv is an ideal subject for photography. As well as revealing to the viewer the previously unnoticed, photography of the eruv speaks to the timely and troubled subject of borders.

Much of my work centers on visual spatial practices, investigating the relation of people to space and the effect of visual interventions in the environment. The photographs here are from a long-standing series on the eruv, which I have pursued in the United States, in Israel and in Palestine. An eruv is a symbolic courtyard used by orthodox Jews. For one day each week, Shabbat, an eruv turns a neighborhood encompassing many private dwellings into one shared home for anyone who lives there and wishes to take part in it. The transformation allows its inhabitants to transport things (a prayer book, a meal, a key or handkerchief; or a wheelchair or stroller) from their private homes into the public space and throughout the eruv, an activity otherwise forbidden on that day. For some people, Shabbat would be a somber affair without an eruv.

To construct one involves a complex series of rules originating in a notoriously difficult Talmudic tractate devoted to the subject. The material that marks the borders of the courtyard is usually subtle and unnoticeable, rarely more than carefully positioned wire sometimes linking to power lines that mark off the territory by symbolizing an unbroken series of gates. The wires or the power lines create the lintels, while a pole, or something attached to it, such as a PVC conduit, may symbolize a post. People who do not need an eruv may never notice any of this. In North America, often something on the order of a floor protector must be mounted like a capital to the top of the PVC conduit that serves as a post to make it clear that it is functioning as part of an eruv gate and something, a piece of cloth or tape perhaps, may be attached to a line to make it even faintly visible to those who need to see it. Yet the creators of an eruv must ask permission for the boundary markers from the owners of the land through which the eruv runs, or from public authorities. In Israel, permission for an eruv is granted to all communities, and special eruv poles carry wires with easily visible, and often decorative ribbons. Everywhere, the entire process, from the planning and the permissions to the materials and the visual attention given them, throws light upon differing attitudes toward ownership and authority. The series has been realized in several exhibitions and publications.

Marking Time: Photographs from Dheisheh Refugee Camp,

2014-ongoing

These are photographs of a community in a state of suspension. The parents and grandparents of the residents in the photographs left behind villages in East Jerusalem and South Hebron in 1948 and moved to Dheisheh, a refugee camp established in 1949 on 1/3 square kilometer on the edge of Bethlehem by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), under whose supervision it remains. Begun as a tent city, Dheisheh is now crowded with buildings on narrow streets that by 2007 housed nearly 13,000 registered inhabitants. Less than 5% of them were born before 1948, and nearly half are children. Most of the inhabitants assert their readiness to move to their ancestral villages at a moment’s notice; meanwhile, life goes on. But while they wait for the past to return, an active discourse in images about this past has materialized and visibly marks the walls of the camp. Most images are of people, few of them living. They are martyrs of Dheisheh and martyrs of Palestine, deceased cultural and political leaders and revolutionary figures from abroad. Some are on posters; others on small stencils: red for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), green for Hamas, black for Fatah. But the most prominent are paintings on white backgrounds, far larger than life. The walls of the camp, crowded with these oversize faces of the dead, turn a refugee camp visually into a memorial city through which the inhabitants wend their way, live their lives, and argue. What is it to be Palestinian? What it is to be a martyr? Who is worthy of commemoration? As the dead interact with the living, the past speaks to the future. I have met the artists of the murals in these photographs many times beginning in 2014, heard their discussions, their doubts about which martyrs should be memorialized and how, or whether they should be memorialized at all. I have also met some of the relatives and friends of the young people commemorated in the murals. I offer here a small selection.

Parts of the series have been exhibited in Germany and the United States. A related one-person exhibit at the Yale Divinity School, Gone like a Sip of Water, was canceled in 2020 because of the pandemic. It is now scheduled to open in early 2022.

No Carry Zone is a series of 36 photographs of eruvin markers printed as linen banners for an exhibit in the Yale School of Art. The banners are 40″ (101.6 cm) long. Most photos were taken in New Haven, Connecticut, but some in Manhattan and Jerusalem.

The comments here are culled from associations to these photographs conveyed to me on instagram, facebook, and other sources, including my own imagination. The ideas and the forms are in development.

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When I first became acquainted with them, the two trees were little more than veils and skeletons: interlocking webs emitting legs and sticks; spiky, graceful and sad. I had come to them in search of photographic companionship, close at hand. My projects at the time carried me far away; they made and renewed the human contacts that sustained me. Yet I found myself faced for the foreseeable future with the prospect of sheltering in place. Social distancing colored the most common social interactions with fear.. I told myself that I needed a pandemic project so that when I would need to use my camera again I would remember how. On my regular “corona walks,” one tree seemed to beckon to me. As it began to capture my interest, I chose it, rather randomly, for my project. Gradually I realized that my tree had a companion.

Sometimes I had to push myself. I don’t always feel like leaving the house. I get bored taking the same steps through the same places. But eventually i was on a first name basis with the white swamp oak and the silver maple and with the vine, called Celastrus orbiculatus, but Oriental (or Asian) Bittersweet to its friends. Or rather, to its enemies. According to my plant-recognition app, supplemented by Wikipedia and the concerned messages of gardener friends who saw these pictures, “it grows and spreads aggressively and has been deemed an invasive species in many areas.” “Oriental bittersweet is an opportunistic climber and climbs any available tree or structure. The vine wraps around itself as it climbs. The encircling vines have been known to strangle the host tree to death.” “All parts of the plant are poisonous.” “It is called oriental bittersweet because it looks sweet but it is toxic to humans and animals. Moreover, it originated from China and the Celastrus species is widely distributed in China, Japan, and Korea.” “The tree is trying to tell you to cut the damn vine.”

I had chosen trees who were being slowly strangled.

What did I think about while making photos of these two brittle trees, over and over, while demonstrators filled the streets downtown and there seemed to be a chance that governments might finally learn that Black Lives Matter; while history raged about -and without - me, here and abroad, as I cautiously stayed home? For some reason what kept coming to mind was that distraught witness, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History who watches the wreckage of history pile up in front of him as he is dragged backward into the future. The monotony of horror.

The trees were even more stationary than I was. They could do nothing about the rains that soaked them or the winds that blew off their covering vines. They were imprisoned. The vines became a spindly form of barbed wire. So they were changing after all. They changed clothes; they hid behind veils. As the veils began to flower they resembled the embroidered flowers on the veils that sometimes dropped from her strange hats to decorate my mother’s face during my childhood when she was all dressed up to go out. The silver maple began to put out leaves on its highest branches, above the vines. The white swamp oak remained naked, a clothes hanger for the bittersweet vines.

And if the angel of history had been a photographer? What then? He would be looking for the Paradise behind the storm, behind the catastrophe and its mounting wreckage. He would try to find and photograph the moment before the storm began; he would try to communicate that experience of the moment before the disaster, so when the disaster finally strikes, it leaves an indelible memory of what has been lost.

The trees seem stalwart in the face of disaster, or perhaps stoic. The words capture the inner pain they might be struggling to hide. In a blizzard these two trees seemed neither stalwart nor stoic. I knew that they could never survive. It will make a good ending for my project when they succumb.

When I arrive in March, I expect to find a stump, the trunk on the ground, the dead vines like dry garments decomposing. Instead, a reminder of angry winter stands its ground in the middle of a joyous spring.