Pride and Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons and Everyday Heroes by Kathleen Archambeau

Author:Kathleen Archambeau [Archambeau, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Lgbtq, Social Science, LGBTQ+ Studies, General
ISBN: 9781633535510
Google: aJUREAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
Published: 2017-06-22T04:21:24.030052+00:00

“Growing up under Communism, you had a longing for the West. But I think, being gay, there was an added level of that. The opportunities to live a fuller life as a gay man were obvious just 200 kilometers from our hometown in Vienna.”

Robbie Tristan Szelei

Ardel Haefele-Thomas, PhD: A World of Firsts

Chair, LGBT Studies, City College of San Francisco

Author, First Undergraduate Transgender Studies Textbook in the World

“My biological family—we don’t talk, because, you know, ‘I’m goin’ to hell.’ Only one has reached out to me in thirty years and she’s a lesbian.” Ardel Thomas grew up in the heart of the South, raised by a family of born-again, Bible-thumping Baptists. They always felt like an alien. And not just because they were queer. At age four, they questioned their uncle’s racist comments when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. They came out when they were nineteen, and their grandmother responded by praying over them in earnest.

Their affinity for the disenfranchised, evident in the LGBT Pride Graduation at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), where they are Chair of LGBT Studies, began young. Growing up a tomboy, Ardel didn’t like wearing the frilly dresses of their Oklahoma childhood. They empathized most with what their mother thought “the family dunce,” their Uncle Kenneth, a washing machine repair man, and their Aunt Lorita, a garment factory worker. In their own family, Haefele-Thomas saw how hard people struggled and knew, even as a child, that education was the way out. So, it came as no surprise when they presented the first LGBT Pride Graduation’s highest honor to a formerly homeless heroin addict, a transgender student. That graduate of community college is now a straight-A student in Creative Writing at Columbia University.

Haefele-Thomas, an Aries, is all about FIRSTS. They were the first to come out as queer in their family. They started the first independent, free-standing LGBT Studies Department in the US, and the second in the world. They secured A.A. degree status for LGBT Studies in California—the first in the country. And Dr. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, with contributions from Thatcher Combs, is writing the first Introduction to Transgender Studies undergraduate textbook in the world, published by Columbia University’s Harrington Park Press in 2017.

“I don’t identify as Lesbian. This is going to put the interview off the rails. I’ve always preferred the word, Queer,” she said. On a personal level, Haefele-Thomas wanted to look at transgender issues. They chose not to transition, though they’ve considered it for twenty years. “I actually identify as non-binary and use the pronoun, they, not she.”

Dr. Haefele-Thomas presented for the second year in a row at the Transgender Archive Conference in Victoria, BC, Canada, in 2016. To them, “gender’s a performance. It depends of the occasion.” Their book is being piloted at Yale University, Penn State, and Colorado University-Boulder, where Haefele-Thomas finished their master’s degree in English/Creative Writing and their bachelor’s degree in women’s studies, and at CCSF. “The response has been off the hook,” they said. People are hungry for this book.

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