(Courtesy of The #TUOR Project)
Eric Solomon, visiting professor of English and American studies at Oxford College of Emory University, has a bulletin board in his office in Oxford’s Humanities Hall. The board features stickers with messages like, “Let’s say gay!” and “Get out of hell free.” The poster for Solomon’s Oct. 3 LGBT teach-in event, “Say GAYTL,” in collaboration with experts from the Atlanta LGBT community, is still on the board.
After graduating from University of Mississippi with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Spanish, Solomon moved to Atlanta, attended Emory University and graduated with a Ph.D. in English. Solomon said he was drawn to the city because of its vibrant queer community.
“Atlanta was where I needed to be as a young queer person in my 20s,” Solomon said. “I didn't really have friend networks and networks of intimacy even to explore as much where I grew up in Mississippi, and so Atlanta is, for the Southeast especially, sort of a queer mecca, a queer beacon for so many people, and it has been that way for decades now.”
After building connections with Atlanta’s LGBT community, Solomon shifted his focus to the queer community within his English research.
Among these explorations, Solomon accepted an opportunity from Atlanta LGBT activist Dave Heyward to contribute to the #TUOR project, celebrating the oral history of local LGBT people. The project’s name, an acronym for “Touching Up Our Roots,” is also a misspelling of “tour” and records four routes around Atlanta that bear historical significance in the queer community.
“A lot of my research agenda is very site-specific, and so I get really interested in particular spaces or places,” Solomon said.
Besides fitting into his research interest, #TUOR also motivates Solomon to hone new skills.
“I saw it as beneficial to my intellectual development and research agenda,” Solomon said. “I also saw it as an opportunity to gain new skills, curating audio clips, recording them, editing them, putting them together, building a website.”
Diving into the details of #TUOR, Solomon described his favorite LGBTQ+ history sites along the routes. The former site of Atlanta Gay Center on “Route 3”, surrounded by lesbian and gay bars, is among an interesting cluster of LGBTQ+ sites to explore. Also on “Route 1,” the former site of Atlanta Metropolitan Community Church is an important location that used to host congregations of social justice fighters.
Solomon emphasized sites that commemorate important figures in the local LGBT community. The Fulton County Board of Commissioners renamed The Ponce De Leon Library to Joan P. Garner Library in 2021 for her contribution to LGBT rights and education equity in Atlanta. Additionally, Ray Kluka Memorial Park, located on Monroe Drive NE, commemorates the editor of the Etcetera magazine, a gay magazine in Atlanta.
Through his work with #TUOR, Solomon met Charlie Paine, co-founder of Historic Atlanta, a nonprofit with the mission to further social justice movements and grow community by preserving historic places. Historic Atlanta partnered with the City of Atlanta and Georgia’s Department of Community Affairs’ Historic Preservation Division in 2022 to create the Atlanta LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement, a framework that identifies historical sites to preserve LGBT history in Atlanta. The organizations finalized the statement on Aug. 31. It is the first of its kind in the Southeast.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that there's so many people doing so many different kinds of work in queer history, in queer activism and archiving and scholarship around Atlanta,” Solomon said. “One of my goals and one of my dreams is to try to bring all of that together into a symposium or a conference of some type, so that we can all just meet each other.”
Solomon has connected his students to both #TUOR and Historic Atlanta, involving them in the conservation of Atlanta queer history. Research assistant Joshua Jacobs (22Ox, 24C) helped transcribe Solomon’s interviews with LGBT Atlantans when constructing the project’s routes.
“You have these continual forces of erasure that try to get rid of queer stories, get rid of queer significance, and in Atlanta, that applies as well,” Jacobs said. “I thought it was just important to help in some way to catalog those stories. If you look at where we are today, as a movement, as a culture, I think it's really important to look back on where you came from and the progress you've made.”
Alex Campo (22Ox, 24C) took the opportunity offered by Solomon to intern with Atlanta LGBTQ+ History Project, cataloging LGBTQ+ history through making podcasts and attending presentations. Feeling the connection from the welcoming Atlanta LGBTQ+ community, Campo was inspired to write his senior honors thesis, “Queer Worldbuilding and Role-Playing as a Form of Security.” Solomon is his thesis advisor.
“I'm trying to make the argument that role-playing games and games in general exist as spaces of creativity, imagination and exploration where anyone, anywhere in the world can come into a collaborative space where they will be supported in trying out different things with their identity, in fostering community with other people and in practicing the kinds of ways that they want the world to be organized,” Campo said.
Paine also emphasized the importance of Emory students engaging in Atlanta’s LGBT projects. Around Emory, there are a lot of locations for students to learn about local queer history.
“There's a number of different connections to the neighborhoods around Emory University,” Paine said. “People that were students or faculty and also other members of the community were able to get housing in some of the areas that would eventually develop as LGBTQ nodes.”
Apart from bringing together the local queer community with Emory through the two projects, Solomon teaches classes such as “Women in the South” and “Queer Intersections,” telling the history of Atlanta that has been shaped by the queer community.
“Queer folk often build their own families, their chosen families, their chosen networks and so this is sort of ... a reminder to myself and, I hope, to others [to] look at what the people who have gone before you in our community have been able to accomplish that have made our lives just maybe somewhat easier,” Solomon said. “Despite all the challenges we still face, it's possible to lead a full and rich and good life as a queer or trans person in the South.”
