Behind rows and rows of archived materials in the UTSA graduate school and research building, Melissa Gohlke has carved out a corner space for a small desk.
It’s where she chronicles the unique and momentous history of a San Antonio community hidden for too long.
Gohlke’s work — collecting and curating volumes of data, narratives and material on LGBTQ+ history over almost two decades — helped lead to the recent designation of the city’s Pride Cultural Heritage District.
On Friday, the city plans to mark the designation with a celebration from 6-9 p.m. at the intersection of North Main Avenue and Evergreen Street, where the four-way rainbow crosswalk was first painted in 2018.
The annual Pride Bigger Than Texas Festival follows a week later, on June 28, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., in Crockett Park, 1300 N. Main Ave.
June is Pride Month, a time when the nation recognizes the LGBTQ+ community and their contributions to the nation.
Earlier this month, the City of San Antonio’s Office of Historic Preservation (OHP) proposed the new cultural heritage district as a way to honor the community’s stories, places and contributions locally, relying on people like Gohlke, among others, to support the cause.
Gay Pride SA
San Antonio’s LGBTQ+ history is distinctive in that it was particularly influenced by both a strong military presence and also the city’s rich and diverse culture, said Gohlke, assistant archivist in special collections at University of Texas at San Antonio.
Gohlke first began her research into the LGBTQ+ community in 2009 while at UTSA earning her master’s degree in history. Her interest in the subject began as an undergraduate learning about vice districts and marginalized parts of the city, she said.
“So I had that really solid foundation of looking at urban spaces and how populations use urban space,” Gohlke said. “With the LGBT community as well, I could see these patterns of development, how gay men and women and trans folk claim spaces within the city where they felt safe, and they could also really thrive.”
In the OHP report she helped to write, a detailed timeline of the lives and businesses, struggles and wins in the LGBTQ+ community starts in the late 19th century and is centered in the Tobin Hill neighborhood and San Antonio College area.
Through the following century, the report notes the names, places and events important to the history, such as the formation of advocacy group Gay Pride SA in 2004, and concludes with a description of North Main Avenue and the surrounding area as a “vibrant space” for LGBTQ+ today.
Gloria Colom Braña, OHP cultural historian, began doing research on the district by creating a short list of local academics and experts, “and Melissa Gohlke’s name came up over and over again, along with people like Dr. Amy Stone from Trinity University.”
Braña said Gohlke’s work, along with the others, was very helpful to her research on the district and especially with the list of culturally significant places.
“One of the main findings [Gohlke] gave us … is that specific buildings were the home for multiple businesses and institutions related to the LGTB community,” Braña said. “She added years of research.”
Pushed into hiding
Recording all of that history through her master’s thesis, and in several other reports since then, is important, Gohlke said, especially in times when the community is under attack.
“Those histories can go missing,” she said, as people are pushed into hiding as they were by military leadership in the early 1940s.
“It’s important to capture the dynamic of how the military actually helped to perpetuate a culture that it was trying to eradicate,” she said. “They did this through the actual off-limits list during WWII,” which aided service members to know where they could gather with others in their community — though at great risk.
In 1973, for instance, a bar owned by River Walk visionary and gay personality Hap Veltman was put on that list and then raided. Through a military hearing, Veltman was successful in getting the establishment cleared from the list.
Transcripts from that hearing are among the LGBTQ+ archives that Gohlke has begun to collect which also includes many other activists’ and artists’ personal papers.
‘Be themselves’
One of the smaller collections is a packet of correspondence that showed up on Gohlke’s desk one day. Discovered in a thrift shop by the donor, the letters are representative of “how queer history may have been treated in the past,” perhaps discarded to conceal that a family member was gay.
“It’s just everyday correspondence, but in those dozen letters or so I was able to get an insight into the life of the small group of gay friends and how they got together, where did they go?” she said.
A larger collection is in the works. Gohlke is now in the process of recovering the Veltman Happy Foundation archives, items compiled over 40 years by foundation director Gene Elder at the historic Bonham Exchange nightclub.
The archives are important for educating a generation that don’t know the history. “Many of the students we have here have not lived during decades of oppression, and they’re very much able to be themselves,” she said.
The Pride District announcement in early June brought Gohlke to tears, she said.
“Getting that designation is such an affirmation that we are standing up for this culture and we’re recognizing it,” Gohlke said. “It really was an affirmation that this is important and it’s recognized not just by members of our community, but by allies and hopefully, the greater community.”
