Texas Digital Libraries recognizes the LGBT history group’s oral history project and Instagram account

DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
taffet@dallasvoice.com

The Dallas Way will receive Texas Digital Libraries Outreach Award on May 21 in Austin.
Nino Testa, secretary and board member of The Dallas Way, submitted the application highlighting the group’s Instagram account that promotes the history collection and its oral history project.

But applying for an award from Texas Digital Libraries wasn’t Testa’s idea.

“They reached out to us,” he said. “They said we should consider choosing a category and applying for an award.

Founded in 2011, The Dallas Way collects, organizes, stores and presents the history of the LGBT community in Dallas. The collection of photos, stories, audio, video and artifacts is maintained at University of North Texas in Denton, and digitized pieces are stored on the school’s Portal to Texas History, which can be found at TexasHistory.unt.edu.

In addition to items The Dallas Way has collected, Resource Center donated its Phil Johnson Collection and Dallas Voice donated its archives. Together, these pieces make up UNT’s North Texas LGBT Collection.
Texas Digital Libraries is a consortium of Texas higher education institutions that provides online space for preserving, managing and providing access to digital collections of enduring value.

Dreanna Beldon, assistant dean for external relations at the UNT libraries, said UNT is a member of Texas Digital Libraries. But UNT has such a massive collection itself, she said, most of the information is kept on its own system.

In his application for the Outreach Award, Testa wrote about two projects of The Dallas Way including the Instagram page Testa started to help create interest in the collection.

“That way people can easily see what’s in the collection,” he said.

Testa said he encourages people to look at the pictures on the Instagram page as well as in the LGBT collection on the UNT site. Many photos are without captions or without the subjects identified. Adding a comment or identifying people in photos helps UNT archivists better identify and classify the photo, he said.

Testa said he got the idea of using Instagram by following some similar archival accounts.

“We have more than 2,000 followers who like, share and comment on our content,” Testa wrote in the application.

Texas Digital Libraries is also honoring The Dallas Way for its new oral history project. In addition to its Outrageous Oral program, the group is now recording longer oral histories of community leaders that are being archived on the UNT portal.

Several Outrageous Oral programs are staged each year. Usually three storytellers detail an event in Dallas LGBT history. For example, Mica England, who sued the Dallas Police Department to change its hiring policies to include LGBT recruits, returned to Dallas to tell her story at an Outrageous Oral presentation last year.

Now, volunteers are recording longer interviews of people throughout the community to compile more of the community’s history.

“We are training 20 volunteers to conduct oral history interviews so that we can make even more progress on our long list of intended interviews with a wide range of LGBTQ people who have lived in Dallas,” Testa wrote in his nomination letter.

He said the hope is for community members to see themselves as instruments of historical preservation.

After the first training session, which was held at Cathedral of Hope, interviewers recorded conversations with a number of people who had been part of the church for a number of years. Now, any papers and photos from the church are supplemented by a much fuller oral history.

The Dallas Way President DeAn Roper said she was honored for Dallas Way to have been chosen from among all of the nominees from around the state.

“We’re honored to be recognized for the important work of collecting, preserving and presenting our history for the LGBT community,” Roper said. “This level of recognition is great for our mission and brings more attention to our work.”

She said she was glad to be honored this year in particular, because it is the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. Women who have been active in the LGBT community will be recognized in an exhibit that will be mounted in June for Pride Month at Dallas City Hall.