LISTEN NOW
“Listening is an Act of Love”
— Dave Isay, StoryCorp
We are delighted to make the “Breaking Barriers: Harvesting LGBTQ Stories from the Northern Plains” collection available to you. Here you will:
- Meet individuals of the 2SLGBTIA+ community and our allies and learn about our experiences growing up and living in the Upper Midwest;
- Encounter the many and varied places, occupations, organizations where we live our lives;
- Discover the many ways in which we have contributed to the social, cultural, religious and political lives of our communities;
- Challenge stereotypes about what it is like to be an LGBTQ person or ally;
- Learn to tell a more inclusive local, regional and national history.
We have conducted close to 200 interviews to date with LGBTQ elders and our allies. These interviews are part of a permanent collection housed at the North Dakota State University Archives.
“We both agree there is value for people knowing how others in the Midwest grew up gay or discovered that aspect whenever they did in their lives, survived, and carried on with their lives through discussion of personal examples might lead someone else to the knowledge and to acknowledge there are “those amongst us” so they become informed and for others they might not feel so isolated.”
— Mary Eagelson and Cindi Psychos
I just have hope and really believe that through this project we’re teaching somebody something that sparks something: sparks an idea, sparks some bravery, sparks some sense of adventure; sparks a craving for safe sex; all those things. I’m very glad that the project is going on, and I hope that this will be helpful to someone.”
— Randy Mann
Listen to the Breaking Barriers Oral History Project on Digital Horizons or Prairie Public Podcast.
You can listen to full interviews online. Audio files, transcripts, and many supplemental materials (such as photographs) are digitalized and made available online as part of the Digital Horizons database.
Additional Ways to Encounter Our Stories
Skip Wood of Prairie Public Radio created a podcast that draws stories from the “Breaking Barriers” collection. He created twelve episodes of varying lengths using clips from the interviews in the collection. Several of these were broadcast over the airwaves, introducing the public to our project. They continue to be available to the public here.
In 2021-2022, we conducted a special project to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the passage of the Same-Sex Marriage Act in Minnesota. As a part of that project, we interviewed 9 of the 18 couples who were married at midnight on August 1, 2013, the judges and other court personnel, witnesses and guests of the couples, and others. The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County developed the exhibit, “At Last: Celebrating Marriage Equality in Minnesota,” which is open to the public at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead through August 20, 2024. Further information is here.