Queer Work is an oral history project conducted by Professor Daniel Levinson Wilk and his students at SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. For the past two years, students have interviewed LGBTQ+ people about their lifetimes of work, discrimination, struggles, and triumphs, focusing on a few industries: healthcare, nightlife, theater, fashion, and FIT employees. These interviews will be archived at the FIT Gladys Marcus Library Special Collections (SPARC)and on a website that will be created during the spring 2025 semester. Many more interviews will be conducted in coming years, as part of an ongoing, public-facing archive project.
This paper will outline the project, its history, and its future, including excerpts from interviews already conducted and student-made artwork inspired by the interviews. If funding becomes available, I may invite one or two students to join me in the presentation.
In 2013 and 2014, the landmark books Plane Queer and Out in the Union by Phil Tiemeyer and Miriam Frank were published, arguably the first two books of queer labor history. In 2014 a course was created at SUNY-Fashion Institute of Technology to read these books and conduct oral history projects to expand knowledge of the field, but student interest, like scholarly work, was slow to develop. After several attempts, the class finally ran in 2023 and 2024.
In January 2023, right before the first class began, Margot Canaday released her magisterial work Queer Career. We read excerpts that semester, and the project became deeply shaped by questions she poses in her book. Were gay people visible in the mid-twentieth-century workplace? Were straight bosses tolerant or enthusiastic about gay workers? If so, was it because of their legal vulnerability? Were gay workers pioneers in post-Fordism (a term the students learned to love)? Queer Career also inspired FIT students to ask questions that Canaday doesn’t ask Did straight bosses see gay people as a model minority, more like documented Asian immigrants than undocumented Latino immigrants? If you ask straight people about gay people they knew over their careers, what will they say?