I really loved your presentation! I think you’ve made a great amount of progress with your work and research regarding queer communities in Miami. I remember vaguely in one of our groups discussions in class you telling me you were worried about potentially finding the sources you needed, especially with the added difficulty of the Spanish language barrier in certain regards. But I think that you’ve done super well finding what you need for this project. I did appreciate your comment about how you shifting towards using art and story telling as a way of finding out first hand experiences of those in the queer community. I think the story telling is especially compelling because in most minority groups, especially immigrants, documentation is hard to find.
I found interesting your discussion about ‘homonationalism’, and as someone who has very little experience studying queer history in the United States, the way you described it was very digestible. As you have said, this is obviously part of your project, but I do find this concept incredibly interesting and valuable for your overall research questions and arguments. Especially because of its influence on legal systems and asylum policies for queer immigrants. This concept too would especially affect the overall culture and dynamics, surely, within these queer communities. I wonder how they vary from place to place? How could that change our understanding of the communities in Miami? Definitely transnational! Maybe a comparative approach could be cool here!
I also was very fascinated by the YMCA song history. I never knew the origin of that and the background of the YMCA in general. This is important stuff! I would be interested to read other examples of queer influence, acceptance, and cultural within music too! I forget if you said you were doing a paper for the final project, but a video essay would be very cool. I know you mentioned you’re planning on turning this into a bigger project in the future, and real life video interviews with people in a video essay format would be amazing! Especially because these communities rarely have platforms to share their stories. Because this was recent too, you have the added benefit that other historians don’t where the people who experienced these events first hand are still alive. Definitely take advantage of that!
So excited to see this further come into focus!