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he basic thing about knowing
our history is that it really
helps LG B T people to create a
social location for themselves.
When you don’t have history,
it’s as if you don’t exist past your own life,”
explains Ann Mussey, who is doing her part to
identify that social location.
The Portland State University professor
moved to the Rose City from the Midwest in the
early 1970s with a group of women. They were
college dropouts who wanted to put their femi
nism into action. For Mussey, the move to Port
land was also her coming-out transition.
She kept busy with an assortment of jobs.
Some were traditional vocations for women
such as day care and waiting tables, while others
were not: She also worked as an auto mechanic
and a spring maker.
"Yes,” she says with a laugh, “that is what we
were called. Spring makers. I thought it was
kind of fun."
Mussey also was involved with political
issues. She helped set up a women’s health clin
ic and a halfway house for women who were get
ting out of prison.
But by the early 1980s, her partner noticed
that perhaps Mussey needed something more
and said, “You are understimulated; you need to
go back to school." And that put Mussey on her
path to becoming a professor.
She enrolled at PSU and took a wide variety
of classes until she landed in David Johnson’s
U.S. social history series. He presented history
in terms of social events rather than just eco
nomic or military events.
“I loved it!" Mussey says. “It sure was differ
ent from when 1 last took history in the 1960s.”
Mussey became a history major with an empha
TWI ST.
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Portland State University professor teaches queer history
by Pat Young
Ann Mussey wants students to discover the evolving way sexuality has been understood
through the years
sis on women’s studies. At one point, she helped as limiting as it had seemed in 1968 and 1969.”
By now, she was hooked and went to Rutgers
facilitate discussion groups in the Women’s Studies
101 class. That experience got her interested in in New Jersey to pursue a Ph.D. in history with an
emphasis on women’s studies. She chose to look
going to grad school and becoming a professor.
"1 had never really thought about it before,” at lesbian history for her first research project.
Often she would hop a train to New York
Mussey notes. “But 1 was really turned on by
ideas and discovered that going to college wasn’t City and spend hours researching at the Lesbian
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P ORT L AND,
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Herstory Archives. “The faculty was really sup
portive of my interest,” Mussey explains, “but
they couldn’t necessarily support me with lots of
guidance about research and stuff, as the field of
lesbian history was just starting to open up.”
After finishing her classroom work, she and her
partner returned to Oregon. Massey was in the
right place at the right time to receive a phone call
from the PSU Women’s Studies Department. One
of the professors was taking a year off, so she was
asked if she wanted to fill in; she replied, “You bet!”
“The department had always considered offer
ing more items related to queer studies, and I
ended up being the person who actually took that
on as a project,” Mussey says. “It was the perfect
opportunity for me. 1 just sort of walked into it.”
Through the years Mussey has developed a
cluster of courses relating to sexuality. Although
she is not the only instructor, she is usually the
one who teaches History of Sexuality, Introduc
tion to Queer Studies and Lesbian History.
PSU plans to add more courses to the cluster
including Lesbian Spaces, Sex in the Media and
Pornography. There even has been talk about
developing a certificate in queer studies.
“One of the things that is so important about
the history of sexuality is that students can dis
cover the way sexuality has been understood
and has changed drastically over time and that
terms like ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are
actually historically specific terms that arose at a
particular time in history,” Mussey explains. “I
am not saying that same-sex behavior did not
exist prior to the invention of those categories,
but the ways in which that behavior is under
stood has changed over time.” J H
P at Y oung is a Portland free-lance writer and gay
and lesbian historian.
BY
J O H N
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