The Tretter Collection’s Transgender Oral History Project completed its first community cohort this summer, teaching people how to conduct oral histories, and bringing more narratives into the collection for future generations to discover and use.

Nine community members from different backgrounds and different levels of experience were accepted for the first cohort. For Jae Yates, the oral historian for the TTOHP, it was an opportunity for the University of Minnesota Libraries to spread its knowledge and resources into the Twin Cities and throughout the state, democratize and demystify the field of oral history, and help advance trans rights.

“Truly anybody can conduct an oral history … The skills that we’re unpacking together are skills that you can apply to a family history project, or to your own transgender oral history project,” Yates said. “I really want these interviews to be useful to people and things that the community wants to know and hear about.”

Between transcribing interviews and conducting their own oral histories, Yates talked with libnews about the inaugural cohort, the history of oral histories, what makes a good interview, and more.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the inaugural oral history cohort.

For The Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, we have a certain amount of money set aside for community interviews. So I decided to do a cohort model. We had a short, easy-to-fill-out application, and people just told me a little bit about themselves, told me about their gender identity and their background, and then told me if they had any experience with oral history, which was not required to participate in the cohort.

Then they came for an eight-week course where we talked about oral history methods, the history of oral history, and its connection to the problematic legacy of anthropology. We talked about how do you ask people good questions, how do you talk to them about potentially traumatic or painful events in their life without pressuring them, while still getting robust information about people’s lives and giving them the opportunity to share their experiences.

And yeah the eight-week course went really well. People seemed to really enjoy learning about oral history in a collective environment.

Were they mostly students or different community members?

We did have several U of M students. I tried really hard to have a good mix because I think that it’s important for the participants of the cohort to be exposed to different levels of experience with oral history and different kinds of people. The whole point is you’re learning to interview people who you may not know. So we had a good mix of community members, younger folks, older folks, and racial identity as well. It was a pretty diverse group of people, which I really enjoyed.

How many have done oral history work before?

Almost none of them. One person had podcasting experience, which was definitely interesting. These interviews are more reflective, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be academic and serious either. We had some interesting conversations about the differences between oral history that’s used in an entertainment context, and oral history that’s more historical, and whether we can combine and borrow from those two things. And then yeah, there was one person who had done some family oral history, but for the most part, everybody was completely new to the oral history field.

What goes into an oral history interview?

My style of interviewing people is a little more personal. I try to balance getting some context for the events that the person might want to talk about and talking about their personal life. That’s maybe a difference with oral history. A lot of times, interviews are more targeted to a specific subject, or maybe a specific aspect of someone’s life. Whereas my goal for an oral history is, yes, I want to focus on your experience as a trans person, because this is a trans-specific project. But trans people are literally just people. So I don’t want the interview to be “Tell me about the trauma of being trans, and tell me about transitioning.” The goal of this is to talk about your whole life, not just this one aspect.

So I normally start an interview with a question about basic life history. “Tell me about the place where you grew up” or “Tell me about relationships that were really formative for you as a child or now.” Or I’ll ask them “What was it like being trans in the place where you were raised?”

And I don’t bring a set of pre-written questions to my interviews because when I do, the interviews all start to sound the same. Or people don’t have an opportunity to talk about what they want to talk about, and those are the best interviews. So I normally write down questions as they talk, and I pick things to follow up on that I think are interesting. And that leads my interviews to be more directed by the narrator, which I really like.

Is it more structured than, say, a podcast?

You should definitely have themes in mind that you want to hit, but from an ethical standpoint, it’s really important to me that the person who is talking about themselves has agency over what we talk about.

My interviews are pretty unstructured, but they definitely have themes, and I’ve definitely chosen people to interview that I already knew from activism. I picked them because I knew that they would talk about the George Floyd Uprising and how that related to their experience of gender. Or if I’m interviewing somebody who does trans-specific organizing. So I already knew that some of those core themes would show up.

Do you think about it like storytelling, with a beginning, middle, and end?

I definitely do think of it as storytelling. It almost never comes out that neatly, but I do try. The interviews are two hours, typically. They can be shorter than that, but mine are usually two hours. One of the most interesting interviews that I had was with my friend who does anti-war organizing and who is a Puerto Rican second-generation child of immigrants. And in their interview, we ended up talking about their experiences growing up as half-Puerto Rican and about how that influenced them coming out, how that influenced their relationship with their family.

It really just depends on what you’re able to pull out of the person, and when you’re able to establish a good rapport, people will tell you some honestly wild or intense stories. There’s a lot to unpack with them. And it’s actually really cool to talk with someone when they haven’t unpacked this before, or hadn’t thought of it in that way when you asked them the question. So it’s sort of like this co-creation of a narrative, or even of an understanding of the event that they’re describing, which is what I find interesting about oral history. It’s crazy how much stuff will come up and what people ultimately will feel comfortable telling a stranger.

Do you listen to NPR at all? It sounds similar to live interviews for radio.

Yeah you’re just having this stream of consciousness conversation with someone, and it is a weird dynamic sometimes because I don’t want them to forget necessarily that this is being recorded. But also in order to get a good narrative, to get them to actually open up and share with me, there is this sense that they’re forgetting the recorder. And that’s also why I choose not to do video interviews because I feel like that really takes people out of the headspace that they need to be in to feel comfortable.

Ultimately people feeling comfortable in their interview and feeling good about what they share is really important to me. And it’s not to say that I don’t want things that are controversial or difficult. But historically, the way that oral history and some of those narratives have been collected has been really problematic and takes agency away from the person who’s being interviewed.

There’s definitely a lot of power dynamics between interviewer, interviewee, especially when you’re getting to socioeconomic status and race. That can definitely affect what people are willing to share and how it’s represented.

Are there any particular cohort interviews that you’re excited to listen to?

I had one person who actually interviewed a family member or friend from India. They did a Zoom interview with them. I’m really excited to listen to that because immigrant or international stories around trans rights, or trans experiences even, are just very far and few between.

It’s really cool to get a narrative from somebody who’s living in another country that has a different perspective on their gender identity. And also, it’s really cool to show the international solidarity between trans activists, and compare and contrast their experience to experiences here.

We assume that everybody’s concept of being trans is the same, and everybody experiences the same barriers or features of transness. And there’s no way that’s true. So it’ll add a lot to the larger canon of this collection, and also it’s an opportunity to broaden people’s horizons. It’s important for you to listen to trans people from everywhere. And it’s so critical that we don’t ever lose sight of our privilege and lose sight of the fact that it’s our responsibility to have solidarity with trans people around the world.

I really want to bring that international perspective to this project because I feel like that’s something that’s really lacking in the interviews that we already have.

Have you guys done this kind of cohort before?

This is something that I designed. I designed the curriculum. And oral history is one of those things that to me is just so fundamental to how human beings are and how human beings work. And we’ve been talking to each other and storytelling since time immemorial, so I want to demystify it. There’s this sense that I always have in an oral history workshop with people being like, “Oh this is academic stuff. I need to be an academic to understand this, and I need to know methods.”

And I’m like, “Sure, there are things that you need to learn and techniques that I want to teach you, but truly anybody can conduct an oral history.” If you just approach people respectfully, and you have a passion for listening to them, hearing their story, recording it, and using that for analyzing historical events, you can do this.

The goal of the cohort was, for me anyway, to get people to think about projects that they might want to do outside of TTOHP. The skills that we’re unpacking together are skills that you can apply to a family history project, to your own transgender oral history project. I don’t want to replicate the gatekeeping vibe of oral history, and of history in general. It’s my responsibility to take that knowledge and those experiences out of this place and into the community, so that it can be used.

The other thing is I’m not interested in just collecting people’s stories for the sake of it. I want to collect things that can be used to advance trans rights, that can be used to teach other activists about what other activists are doing, the tactics that they use, and what works. I really want these interviews to be useful to people and things that the community wants to know and hear about.

Why do you feel like it’s important to have the community involved in collecting these oral histories, instead of you doing it alone?

The legacy of gatekeeping in institutions is a big reason why I find that important. And also because projects like this are often just so divorced from the reality of the people that actually live here.

The vast majority of people that came to this cohort didn’t know anything about The Tretter Collection. They didn’t know it existed. They didn’t know that they could come here. They didn’t know that they could research here. And that’s just so messed up.

You should be embedded in the community that you’re working with, and it’s really weird to do anything else. The Tretter Collection historically hasn’t done the best job of reaching the community, and especially hasn’t done a good job of reaching non-white, non-cis people in the queer community. And that’s such a shame. I don’t want to replicate that. I want to have a project that the community can feel invested in.

The Tretter is literally one of the largest collections of queer ephemera in the world, and it’s one of the largest in the United States. It’s a huge collection with a massive amount of stuff that people can use to research, to make art. And it’s just so sad that so much of that stuff in our collection is just sitting there. It’s just languishing with nobody to use it. What’s the point of just having a thing if nobody’s going to use it, if nobody’s going to interact with it?

We should be giving our community a resource because we have the ability to do that. We have this huge institution with all of these resources that should be used by the people that live on and around its campus.

Is there anything you want to mention?

Aiden Bettine, the curator of the Tretter Collection, and I are working with Myrl Beam, the TTOHP’s previous oral historian, on a George Floyd Uprising specific oral history project called The Long Fire at Lake Minnehaha. So we might just do the cohorts in the spring for timing. But I’m really excited about that project and really excited to conduct those interviews.