Doing Recent History

by Alexandra Miller, August 20, 2025.

When we tell people we have been studying the history of the 90s, their first thought is often one of surprise. They cannot believe that something so recent could be history. Should history not begin sometime before? But the 1990s are surprisingly distant. Three of our research team were born in the 1990s, we have few to no memories of the decade. Those who lived through it often have large gaps in memory. For example, when we reached out to Victor M. Glasberg, the lawyer on The French Quarter Cafe et. al. v. Wade Hampton, Jr., he could not remember any details of the case aside from having worked on it. Anyone who works in oral history could speak at length about the problems attendant on that mode of research. People have trouble remembering their own lives due to the distance of months and even years, but also personal bias, a reluctance to speak about oneself, and the tendency to relate certain memories to facts of the present in a way that might not have been true as they developed.

That problem is compounded in the area of our own study, the queer community of the late twentieth century in Northern Virginia’s DC suburbs. As older gay men would tell you, the AIDS epidemic ravaged the queer community, particularly in large cities. While individuals might live unscathed, it is unlikely that a gay person living in the 1980s and 90s would be unaffected by the disease. Everybody knew somebody who lived with the disease, or died from it. By 1992, AIDS was the leading cause of death in American men aged 25-44. By 1994, AIDS was the leading cause of death among Americans in that same age bracket. Only by 1997 did AIDS diagnoses in the country begin to decline due to highly active antiretroviral therapy. And the disease disproportionately affected Black men.¹ Elsewhere on this site, we mention people lost to AIDS. The chef of the French Quarter Cafe, Robert “Bob” W. Tidwell died in 1993 at the age of 30 due to complications from AIDS. A local artist, Clay Huffman, who had displayed his silk screen prints at the Cafe in 1991, died after living with the disease for over 15 years. But these are only the few who were mentioned in the historical record. As much as queer communities seemed to become highly visible and self-identified by the late twentieth century, they were dealing with a crisis of unprecedented proportions. That crisis has left today’s community without many of the older members it might otherwise have had. Queer oral histories were lost as gay men died in massive numbers.

As historians, there are also certain disadvantages to studying the recent past. Because not enough people see it as yet being part of history, there are simply not the large donated collections of archival material that are available in earlier periods. While the late twentieth century is a comparatively rich period for archival production in queer history, the period itself has a comparatively minimal presence in the archival space. And as digital historians, who rely on images to accompany our words in public-facing projects, we also run against the problem of the public domain. Most of the images of the recent past are owned by a person or corporation, and they are often unwilling to part with the rights to those pictures. In this project alone, for example, we have been instructed by The Washington Post not to include any headlines or photos from the paper in our website. The Washington Blade never responded to our query. Fortunately, we have had more luck in contacting archives who own the material they hold.

In the age of digital searches for sources, when finding archives and documents is easier than ever, the recent past poses other problems. We can learn relatively easily what documents might be related to a project, and see documents that should exist. But they have been destroyed. When we researched the French Quarter Cafe, for example, we followed a trail of other documents all the way to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. There, we found that the legal documents pertaining to the Cafe’s multiparty suit against the ABC Board were destroyed because the case had never gone to trial.

Despite all these drawbacks, the study of the recent past also holds its own appeals. When we tell people what we are studying, after their initial doubt that something they remember could be considered history, their second thought is often of excitement. They want to share their own memories. For this project we coldcalled (or at least tried to contact) a lot of people who had been involved in the late twentieth century Northern Virginia queer scene. While certainly many were dead, and many had moved, there were a few who enthusiastically answered the call. We first spoke to Wayne Curtis, the former President of the William & Mary Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association (GALA), who had presided over the organization through its involvement with the French Quarter case. Curtis spoke with us at length about his memories of the case and his life as a gay man in the region at that time. Later, we also spoke to Freddie Lutz, the owner of Freddie’s Beach Bar in Crystal City. Though we called just after he had stepped out for the day, the very kind host ran after Lutz and brought him back to discuss the possibility of talking with us about his experience running Northern Virginia’s only “straight-friendly bar.” He agreed to speak the next day and recommended several other people who might be interested and willing to speak with us on their own experiences of the region’s gay bars. And, when we delivered an in-person version of the Alexandria walking tour you can find on this website, we found several members of the audience had their own memories of the period and wanted to share or to connect us with their friends.

Though for most of us, the recent past is not the period of our own study, it has been instructive to venture into the unique problems and opportunities which it offers. This project gave us a deeper appreciation for the archival collections that do exist, and for the power and pitfalls of oral history.

Notes