Girlstown

I distinctly remember my first visit to Andersonville, about five years ago. I was seventeen then, an outspoken lesbian with green hair and a commitment to being a gender studies major no matter which college I chose. But despite my extremely vocal pride in my identity and an incredibly supportive family, I had always felt that something was missing--a real queer community. At school I was surrounded by straight peers who were above outright bullying but somehow still figured out how to make it clear that they knew I was different, and didn’t like it. I spent a lot of time imagining a magical, impossible place where hordes of lesbians joyfully roamed the streets. Visiting Andersonville was like stepping into my adolescent daydream: queer people and queer joy everywhere I looked. I didn’t know a feeling of such contentment and belonging was possible.

Over the years I learned more about Andersonville and its incredibly unique history. The neighborhood began developing into a hub of lesbian community in the 90’s, but had been undergoing significant changes over the past decade due to gentrification. But as I tried to dig deeper into the details of Andersonville’s history, the gaps in documentation became more and more apparent. When I talked to other Chicago residents about Andersonville, I realized most were either unaware of its lesbian history or had never heard of the neighborhood at all. I decided then that I had to discover this history, document it, and share it myself. I would not be complicit in letting another forty years of queer women’s history disappear into the darkness of a heteronormative historical record. It was this commitment to both queer preservation and celebration that motivated the creation of my documentary Girlstown. Girlstown takes the voices of various Andersonville community members as a starting point in constructing a diverse portrait of the neighborhood’s past, present and future.

In making the documentary, one of my greatest priorities was to protect the diversity of voices present in Andersonville’s story and avoid representing the queer community there as a singular and uniform entity. Andersonville does not contain one history or one future but many, and their ability to coexist simultaneously within the documentary is what makes it truly queer. In an attempt to capture the depth and liveliness of Andersonville’s under-documented past, I dug into the archives of individuals and newspapers. I modeled my use of and interaction with archival materials on the queer documentaries Looking for Langston and Tongues Untied, two films that combine various forms of nonfiction storytelling to capture experiences of black queerness. I was deeply inspired by the way both films innovatively intermix audio, video, visual art, and performance to create a story that prioritizes emotional legibility over narrative legibility.

Prior to beginning the documentary, I had experience in interviewing and was informed on the ethics of feminist oral history practices. Based on this knowledge, I planned the documentary with a deep political commitment to treating any interviewed subjects as active participants and ensuring their satisfaction with how they were represented in the film. However, as I progressed deeper into the post-production phase, I had to renegotiate my understanding of the relationship between myself and my subjects. Though I tried to share authority with my subjects as much as possible, I could not escape the fact that I retained individual control over editing and structure. I ultimately attempted to address this difference by making my own role as filmmaker more explicit. My physical presence manifests in a variety of handheld shots of archival footage; the slight shake of the camera situates me corporeally as the researcher in the archive, pouring through old newspapers and capturing what personally interests me.

Ultimately, Girlstown is not in any way a complete history of Andersonville and I never intended it to be. I hope that the film serves not to close the chapter on the neighborhood, but open it. I hope it encourages even more in-depth diving into the faded memories of long nights spent on the dancefloors of now-closed lesbian bars, into boxes of dusty records where one can read moments of community and creation between the lines. These journeys into queer lifetimes are not just generative in terms of the historical record, but also for the individual doing the excavating.