9:30 – 10:15 am, Session I: Visits to the Underground City: Vice, Sex Work, and Social Reform
“If Christ came to Chicago: Tourists, Crusaders, and Voyeurs in the White City"
- Breck Radulovic, 4th-year, Religious Studies
Abstract: The 1893 World’s Fair was important enough to earn a star on Chicago’s flag. The Columbian Exposition drew twenty-seven million tourists, but the vice districts outside the Fair drew other sorts of visitors—crusaders and voyeurs. One such visitor was British journalist William T. Stead, who wrote an infamous 1894 exposé of sin, If Christ came to Chicago. Stead visited brothels, saloons, and lodging houses, creating a map of Christ’s hypothetical displeasure against Chicago’s upper echelons. Visitors found the sordid, profane environment of Stead’s novel more pleasurable than the public spectacle of the White City that had been created for their benefit. This project analyzes the “White City” of the Fair, the “Black City” of If Christ came to Chicago, and archival photographs from the mid-1890s. Using a framework drawn from the anthropology of tourism, tourism can be seen as sacred under Emile Durkheim’s definition of the term as something that is out of the ordinary or different from the every day. By considering different modes of travel as touristic, crusading, or voyeuristic, this project seeks to understand the different implications of the sacredness of travel. Although the city sought to rehabilitate its image through World’s Fair tourism, the Black City has remained a dominant conception of Chicago from the 1890s to the present. If expanded, an examination of this tension in Chicago’s public image over the subsequent decades would illuminate the responses of Chicagoans and outsiders to events in Chicago’s history like Al Capone’s notoriety, the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots, and Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency.
“Making Ends Meet: Women’s Waged Labor and Sex Work in Chicago at the Turn of the 20th Century”
- Ella Hester, 4th-year, History, Creative Writing
Abstract: In pre-World War One Chicago, women entering the workforce and seeking wages as men did were considered morally suspect, yet they did so in increasing numbers. Alongside this period of rapid industrialization, Chicago’s culture of prostitution also grew to become a hallmark of the “Black City.” This research project reveals the connection between the inadequate wages for women in the formal labor market and the resulting increased rates of prostitution in Chicago during this time. While most scholarship on this topic focuses heavily on the "white slave trade" which concerns domestic and international sex trafficking, this research specifically focuses on women who performed sex work in dance halls and cafes as a supplement to regular full-time employment as factory workers, department store clerks, and domestic servants. Primary archival sources utilized include books and pamphlets written by contemporaneous social workers, mission workers, and activists on the topic, as well as court testimony. The centerpiece of this research is Virginia Brooks’ 1915 muckraking expose, My Battles with Vice. A Hyde Park native and suffragist, Brooks put herself in the position of a typical young girl seeking to support herself through paid employment without resorting to sex work to show that to do so was not plausible. Brooks' book is significant in its innovative use of what we would now call investigative journalism tactics and in her dismissal of the theory that unstable family units and lack of religious education were the primary factors contributing to descent into prostitution. Anticipating the findings of the Illinois Vice Commission, she argued for paying women a higher, living wage so that they could be safely financially independent without resorting to prostitution. Brooks’ work shows that examining women’s waged labor is essential to understanding prostitution in Chicago at this time, and her personal, on the ground observations serve to show the sexual exploitation of women in both waged labor and prostitution.
“Betty, Ruby, and Mabel: Sex Work and Perceptions of Respectability in 1930s Social Research”
- Madeline de Figueiredo, 4th-year, History
Abstract: In the 1930s, University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology received a Works Progress Administration grant that funded Professor Ernest Burgess’s research on urban social life and social organization in the city of Chicago. Through this grant, Paul Oien, an undergraduate researcher, was tasked with interviewing sex workers in the University of Chicago’s surrounding community. Oien relied on qualitative methodologies, ethnographic closeness, and participant observation to interview and research the women that lived on the South Side. However, Oien’s research was compromised when he began having sexual intercourse exclusively with the black sex workers he interviewed as research subjects. This research project seeks to understand the stakes of Oien’s methodology, characteristic of the Chicago school of sociology, and the ultimate splintering of his ethics. This research involved the transcription of over fifty of Paul Oien’s interviews with sex workers on the South Side of Chicago, paying particular attention to his interviews with Betty, Ruby, and Mabel to illustrate the overarching themes found in dozens of his interactions with sex workers. Moreover, these three interviews trace the tension between science and social gospel as they tell a story about the instabilities and ambiguities of ethics in social science research and the application of a personal moral framework to a social problem. In Oien’s case, race was used as a means of “measuring” respectability, but it was also a discriminatory device that made sex with black sex workers permissible and resulted in the ultimate breakdown of ethics in his inquiry. While Oien’s archive is symptomatic of its own time, it also speaks to the ongoing debate on the relationship between distance and ethics in social science research. As social science research evolves, turning to the past gives researchers an opportunity to interrogate investigative practices and the perils of proximity today.
10:25 – 11:10 am, Session II: Seeking the Invisible: Discovery, Loss, and Transience
“Revisiting Breakthroughs in Science: Jean-Pierre Flourens and the Discovery of the Vestibular System”
- Tyler Chan, 4th-year, Neuroscience
Abstract: Jean Pierre Flourens was a 19th-century French experimental physiologist and one of the first to perform and publish studies on the function of the semicircular canals — components of the vestibular system, which detects rotational acceleration along three dimensional planes. Patients who have impairments in this sensory system often suffer from symptoms such as vertigo and impaired balance. This archival research project explores how Flourens uncovered that which his predecessors were unable to understand: the function of the semicircular canals. What were the historical circumstances that allowed him to make this groundbreaking medical discovery? A detailed analysis of over 100 of Flourens’ scientific manuscripts, lecture notes, and newspaper articles housed within the Special Collections Library at the University of Chicago, the Collège de France, the French National Museum of Natural History, and the Institute of France helps us understand how this one man found that which was unfindable for his contemporaries. It became clear that Flourens’ discovery was possible not only due to the groundwork his predecessors laid out in the field of inner ear anatomy, but also due to his open-minded mental framework and his innovative use of localized ablations: a revolutionary new method. Flourens saw what everybody else had seen, but thought what nobody else had thought, and did what no body else had done. At the onset, Flourens sought to better understand the mechanisms of hearing. Logically, he systematically lesioned the inner ears of pigeons. However, much to his surprise, instead of detecting impaired audition, he observed impaired motor function. Flourens came to the unexpected conclusion that the semicircular canals in the inner ear help regulate motor output by studying the same anatomical organ as did his predecessors, but also by approaching his inquiry with an open mind and by applying a novel technique. But what are the repercussions of understanding his scientific method and thought on the pursuit of scientific knowledge, today? This historical research into the field of medicine provides insight into how the mental framework and methods used by past scientists, to approach the mysteries of their time, can inform the way we go about tackling the many medical unknowns of today.
“My Dear Girl: The Lost Story of Albert Hafner and Elizabeth Chandler, 1891-1899”
- Danielle Schmidt, 4th-year, Public Policy
Abstract: Chicago in the 1890s was a city full of promise, adventure, and opportunity; its streets teemed with excitement and change. The infinite possibilities of this sprawling metropolis left their impress on the love letters of a Swiss-born and self-proclaimed “Cracker from the Everglades” to the sweetheart he left behind. A collection of over 120 letters, housed at the Chicago Public Library Special Collection archives, documents this fascinating epistolary love story between Albert Hafner (b. 1859) and Elizabeth Howard Chandler (1852-1939). From 1893 to 1899, Albert wrote to Elizabeth of his everyday life, a thousand miles away. He recounted his experiences at iconic events during the vibrant turn-of-the-century period that colored Chicago’s history, such as visiting the World’s Fair, witnessing the Pullman Strikes, and photographing the labor riots known as the Battle of Virden.
Through the intimate lens of their love story, readers can retrace Albert’s pursuit of the American Dream through the streets of Chicago. Job after job, he continuously searched for the chance he needed to make his fortune and return to marry Elizabeth. But each time, just when he thought he made it, he was met with another brutal failure. Eventually, eight years after their engagement, Elizabeth terminated the relationship, writing in her notes, “Duty has claimed us both.” What began as a story full of hope ended in utter despair and failure, reminding us that for every achiever of the American Dream, there are many more who live a nightmare.
The American Dream has burned the image of success into our minds, but what do we make of the countless, untold stories of failure that it erased? This collection, rich in historical data, was inaccessible before now. The aim of this project has been to transcribe, index, and visually represent the collection, which may now be explored and considered for inquiries as far ranging as bachelor life in urban contexts to opinions of Chicago’s expanding city limits. By improving the accessibility of stories such as the one told by Albert Hafner, we open the door to future research that includes the many lost stories of promise, risk, and failure.
“Transient Lives Along the Main Stem: Hobohemia and Chicago's Near North Side in the Early 20th Century”
- Adam David, 4th-year, Sociology
Abstract: Chicago’s Near North Side neighborhood was home to a growing consciousness occurring at the turn of the 20thcentury, as corporate capital moved westward and the demand for casual seasonal labor radically increased. Industrialization and other political-economic changes in cities led to the development of a class of homeless migratory workers, then known as hoboes, who occupied Hobohemia, low rent districts in cities where artistic bohemians and down-and-out workers mixed. The goal of my research is to investigate Chicago’s unique role, as the capital of Hobohemia, in fostering a counter-cultural movement led by those living transient or unconventional lifestyles in the city’s Near North Side neighborhood. This investigation seeks to map out the class, race, and gender-based dimensions of Hobohemia, as well as its central individuals and organizations. In order to do so, I have studied a few notable archives. The first is The Dill Pickle Club records, which includes various ephemera and newspaper clippings on a radical bohemian speakeasy located in Bughouse Square, the section of the Near North Side where orators (or “soapboxers”) from the revolutionary left gave speeches on a variety of topics. The second includes the papers of Chicago school sociologist Ernest Watson Burgess and his students, which includes life histories, interviews, and research notes on hobos and the sociology of homelessness. What I hope to demonstrate is that the experience of transience among hobos was both oppressive and liberatory; it gave birth to unique social worlds and movements that could not have been as possible later on due to economic and cultural transformations that brought the hobo deeper into the fold of society. This study has broader implications for how we think about the way individual lives fit into economic systems in history, since transience today looks very different than it used to, and homelessness and its social dimensions have changed heavily since the days of the early Chicago school, the Hobo College and the Dill Pickle Club.
11:20 – 12:05, Session III: Myth, Music, and Memory: A Century of Russian Immigrant Life in Chicago
“Chicago's Russian Colony: Myth, Paradox, and Pilgrimage”
- Zoe Kaiser, 4th-year, Russian and Eastern European Studies
Abstract: In the aftermath of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, thousands of Russians fled the new-fledged Soviet Union to the United States. These people were not immigrants, seeking opportunities in a new land, but emigrants, cut off from their native culture, their gaze fixed firmly on the nation they had once called home. They considered themselves the “Russian colony” and in doing so faced a fundamental problem: how to be Russian without Russia. Primary-source Russian-language newspapers and journals published in Chicago circa 1929 illuminate how this community framed their identity in response to their displacement to America. Across four different publications, from a Russian Orthodox monthly to a daily worker’s rag, the paradoxical nature of this Russian identity emerges. A short story published in one of these journals, entitled Kaliki Perehozhie, provides a microcosm of these tensions and offers a potential resolution. The story posits that by taking on the role of a mythic class of spiritual pilgrims, the Kaliki Perehozhie, who traveled the land as seekers and dispensers of holy truth, Russian emigres, despite their lost connection with their native land, can regain it spiritually by spreading a new gospel -- Russian culture itself. This desire to share authentic Russian culture with the rest of the world is reflected across the editorial pages of these newspapers. The Russian situation in the 1920s was historically particular, but Russian emigres’ struggle to form identity and nationhood through myth -- to establish their Russia colony as the “true” Russian nation in opposition to the alternate mythos of the Soviet Union - is especially relevant to America’s current political situation, where more than ideology, culture, or class, the question of the American mythos itself is at stake.
“Chicago-born, freestyle: Mapping the Musical Landscape of The Adventures of Augie March”
- Emily Lovett, 4th-year, Music, English Language and Literature
Abstract: In 1953, Saul Bellow published his astounding novel, The Adventures of Augie March, which told the story of a young Jewish boy from a Russian immigrant family, who grows up in Chicago during the Great Depression. Now hailed as an American classic, the novel is being adapted, this spring, into a stage production at Court Theatre by Pulitzer-winning playwright, David Auburn. Sets, costumes, music, and sound will replace Bellow’s great prose in an effort to bring the world alive on stage– the world of Augie March, of Humboldt Park in the 30s, of the Jewish-American identity.
This project seeks to understand and exhibit the musical landscape of The Adventures of Augie March by revealing four popular genres of music, all of which are contemporary to Augie’s adolescence, and personifies those genres into characters within the novel– and subsequently, the play. The findings of this presentation, moreover, will become raw materials for the sound design and composition of Augie. Using research from Bellow’s own words about the music he heard growing up, as well as research from Jewish Newspapers and Yiddish radio archives, this presentation features classical music, jazz, blues, and Yiddish swing – from the shrill violin of Grandma Lausch to the Chicago blues of Augie himself. While the presentation does not present the full breadth of sounds within Augie, the four excerpts provide a glimpse into a world that might seem distant, dusty, or inaccessible. Ultimately, the music of Augie highlights the creation of a new American identity; one that is not borne from assimilating nor fiercely holding onto one’s homeland, but instead, forging new genres, new music, and new art.
“Migration Memories: Recollections of Soviet Jewish Refugees, Thirty Years Later”
- Dasha Beniash, 4th-year, Global Studies; Russian & Eastern European Studies
Abstract: In the 1980’s, 117,000 Jewish refugees left the Soviet Union fleeing pervasive antisemitism. 79,000 eventually settled in the Unites States under the sponsorship of Jewish organizations and families who fully expected these refugees to embrace a Jewish identity. In the 30 years since their arrival, these people have grappled with the consequences of their displacement and assimilation process, and have had to navigate often conflicting cultures and identities—Soviet, Jewish, and American. This research explores the various manifestations of these cultures in the daily lives of these immigrants in the contemporary. Mobilizing the researcher’s close ties with this complex cultural heritage, this study uses one-on-one interviews with six individuals who emigrated from the USSR to Chicago between 1987 and 1991. These Soviet Jews were asked about their lives in the Soviet Union, their immigration journeys to the US, their experiences upon arrival, and finally, their daily lives in the US now, almost 30 years later. These interviewees revealed that much of Soviet culture has been retained in their daily lives. However, the Jewish organizations which sponsored them often emphasized Jewish religious and cultural values, which came into conflict with the refugees’ Soviet understanding of Jewishness as an ethnic category, as well as with the elements of Soviet culture they integrated into their life in America. As transcripts from interviews show, the Soviet past of these people has affected their willingness or ability to meet the expectations for accepting a fully Jewish religious identity that have been set for them as part of the intended goal in the fight to get these people out of the USSR. This dissonance between the Jewish culture and Soviet culture has made the question of identity more challenging for these individuals and their children to parse out, and this theme of dissonance may also provide us with a broader understanding of the difficulties of assimilation faced by those immigrants and refugees who continue to arrive in the US today.
1:05 – 1:50 pm, Session IV: Traces of Cultural Exchange: Modernist Poetry, Documentary Photography, and Net Art
“China and Chicago: Traversing Cultures Through Verse”
- May Huang, 4th-year, English, Comparative Literature
Abstract: The early twentieth century saw a literary exchange between American and Chinese poets in which American poets borrowed from classical Chinese forms, and Chinese poets of the New Culture Movement drew on the work of English-language poets. While the majority of Western scholarship examines this dialogue through the framework of appropriation, this project seeks to identify an effort between Chinese and American poets to not only borrow from each other, but to also create work that unites both cultures. The poetry, letters, biographies, and literary criticism produced by the Chinese poet Wen Yiduo (1899–1946) and the Chicago poet Eunice Tietjens (1884–1944) reshape the narrative of Sino-American poetic exchange by revealing that the cross-cultural relationship between American and Chinese poets, far from being unbalanced, succeeded in creating new poetic forms and modes of literary analysis that defied tradition.
Through archival research and close-reading of their writings, this project illuminates close connections between Wen’s study abroad experience in Chicago in 1922 and Tietjens’ sojourn in China in 1916. Although both poets were initially averse to living in a foreign country, their work was productively informed by local poetic traditions and their natural surroundings. Wen’s poem, “Autumn Colors” (translated into English for this project), paired with Tietjens’ “The Most-Sacred Mountain,” exemplify how Wen’s debut collection, Red Candle, as well as Tietjens’ Profiles from China, conjoined both Eastern and Western elements to encourage comparative readings. As an associate editor of Poetry Magazine, Tietjens also contributed scholarship to the journal that reflected a nuanced understanding of Chinese literature in English translation. As such, this dual study of Wen and Tietjens reveals that Chinese and American poets shared an intimate and harmonious relationship shaped by travel, translation, and correspondence; indeed, the meeting of both poets in 1922 reveals how certain Chinese and American writers even moved in the same literary circles in Chicago. Further research may examine the work of other American and Chinese poets part of this Sino-American poetic exchange to arrive at a fuller understanding of how modern poetry movements transform in tandem on a global scale.
“Harold Allen's "Egypt": Orientalism, Kitsch, or Americana?”
- Katherine Kamel, 4th-year, Fundamentals, Issues & Texts
Abstract: Ancient Egypt has held a persistent and unique place in the collective American imagination for over a century, as can be seen through the phenomenon known as Egyptomania, the popularization and use of ancient Egyptian aesthetics throughout the 20th century. Although visual representations of the Middle East have often been Orientalizing, based on colonialist stereotypes that serve to emphasize the West’s superiority, the presence of ancient Egyptian imagery and motifs, such as pyramids, sphinxes, and obelisks, in everyday American aesthetics points to a different phenomenon altogether.
Harold Allen, a Chicago-based photographer, spent decades thoroughly documenting the architectural manifestations of Egyptomania. Using Allen’s writings and photographs, as well as critical commentary of his work, this research seeks to understand Allen’s project, as well as the overall aesthetics of Egyptomania: Why was Allen so captivated by this aesthetic? How do his photographs capture the phenomenon in-and-of itself while simultaneously revealing something deeper? In what ways does the kitschy quality of this aesthetic transform it from faux Egyptian to Americana?
Although Allen was aware that these buildings often lacked aesthetic appeal, his serious photographic treatment of them encourages the viewer to look beyond the kitsch, yet still draws attention to the Egyptian imagery itself. Indeed, his collection emphasizes the sheer ubiquity of this aesthetic across the United States, providing for an understanding of how ancient Egyptian imagery, or the American interpretation of it, became vernacular. Thus, this research concludes that the manifestations of Egyptomania in architecture are not merely poor imitation or kitsch, but Americana.
“Campeones de la WWW: playfulness and the net.artistas”
- Zach Sherman, 4th-year, Latin American Studies
Abstract: This project examines Latin American net.art through the lens of playfulness, exploring its political and aesthetic functions within the intersection of Latin America, the art world, and the early internet. Net.art (circa 1995-2005) was an art movement that took the internet as both its subject and medium. With its roots in avant-garde traditions such as fluxus and situationism in the mid- to late twentieth century, it is one of the first instances of artistic playfulness expressed on a global scale. Latin American net.art used the same logic of playfulness to critique globalization from various local perspectives, resulting in a so-called “glocal” approach. The analysis of this particular net.art community contributes to a growing understanding of artistic playfulness, which remains an understudied phenomenon, especially its use by artists from the global south.
To this end, this research analyzed listhost archives, net.art databases, interviews and artist essays through the lense of playfulness, with a focus on two key net.artistas: Arcangel Constantini and Brian Mackern. Mackern, creator of both the Latin-America-specific listhost and net.art database, was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of Latin American net.art as a distinct category. Constantini was a prolific artist and community-builder in his own right during his time as a curator at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Because there are few existing interpretive frameworks of playfulness in art, the bulk of the analysis takes the form of thorough descriptions of how each item employed playfulness and to what end, whether implicit or explicit. Thus far, this study has shown that net.artistas used the logic of playfulness, characterized by appropriation, recontextualization and self-reference, to create art that deftly melded politics into aesthetics. As this project continues, it will seek to contribute to an emerging framework for analyzing playfulness in cultural production. This investigation of playfulness in Latin American net.art can illuminate a path forward for a new art that is both “millennial” and actually adopts a global approach.
2:00 – 2:45 pm, Session V: Re-Organizing the City: Political Activism, Civil Liberties, and Social Networks
“A Failure to Intervene?: The Organization of Arab Students and the Formation of Policy in the Illinois ACLU, 1957”
- Gabriel Davis, 4th-year, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Abstract: In October 1957, the Illinois Division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) debated issuing a condemnatory public statement against the Illinois Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its criticism of the Organization of Arab Students (OAS), a national college organization with contingents in Chicago. Citing the free speech rights of both organizations, the ACLU decided not to respond. However, given the dramatic difference between how many people the messages of the ADL or OAS could reach, both the ACLU’s choice and its justification can be seen as inequitable applications of the concept free speech, and in fact appear to allow the ADL to openly discriminate against the OAS. How did this happen? This presentation analyzes the process of policy formation within the Illinois ACLU that led its board of directors to this decision. Using internal ACLU correspondence, official publications, newspaper clippings, and secondary literature, I examine four conflicting priorities that weighed on the Illinois ACLU in helping determine its response to the ADL. Further, I analyze how the sociopolitical and geopolitical contexts of the time produced three specific “jargons”—of the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis and rise of pan-Arabism, of the Cold War, and of Americanism—that the ACLU readily employed to navigate and rationalize its evolving social position. I conclude by detailing both contemporary and historical effects of these actions within the ACLU and among Arab Chicagoans writ large. On these grounds, I argue that by deciding not to respond to the ADL, the Illinois ACLU discriminated against Illinois’ Arab students, and inadvertently helped lay a foundation for future anti-Arab sentiment in Illinois and the United States.
“Testing the World: Information Flow in Chicago’s AIDS Activism”
- Kaeli Subberwal, 4th-year, Political Science
Abstract: AIDS today looks very different than when it first emerged. When public authorities first confronted AIDS, they faced fear, disorientation, and hostility surrounding a disease that was both unknown and stigmatized. Political actors determined the fate of tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding through laws that regulated the meaning of, and response to, the AIDS crisis. This project seeks to explore how activists in Chicago intervened in state control of information in the AIDS crisis by analyzing the dialogue surrounding Illinois’ mandatory premarital HIV testing law.
Three documents from the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) Chicago archive-- a letter from Illinois State Representative Penny Pullen defending the testing law, testimony from the AIDS Foundation of Chicago (AFC) against the law, and march pamphlets from ACT UP/Chicago that reveal how it reacted to other similar legislation-- show that activists were able to intervene in state collection of information to effect change. The language and context of these pieces reveal that Pullen and other legislators hoarded personal information about people’s HIV statuses as well as educational information about the prevention and nature of the disease in order to define and limit the terms of the AIDS response in Illinois’ public health institutions. AFC and ACT UP intervened in this information flow by engaging with legislators directly to protect the privacy of people with AIDS. They also used protests and education programs to allow the dispersal of information about AIDS to the public. The investigation concludes that by intervening in government control over both personal and educational information, these groups shifted Illinois’ AIDS response from focused on heterosexual “innocent” populations to the queer and low-income populations who were most affected. Although the premarital testing law was unique, it implies that unmediated government collection of information is dangerous because it allows the state to define the crisis being addressed-- by intervening in this information flow, activists and the public can become part of this definition process.
“Asians & Friends Chicago: Navigating Interracial Intimacy in a Gay Friendship Network”
- Khoa Phan, 4th-year, Sociology, English Language and Literature
Abstract: How is intimacy political, especially across racial lines? This project aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of queer interracial intimacy beyond fetishistic and stigmatizing approaches, and of everyday constructions of gay Asian identity in America. These stakes emerge in Asians & Friends Chicago (AFC), a gay friendship network and social group of gay Asian men and their gay (majority white) friends established in 1984. The group’s individual stories and group dynamics are documented and analyzed through mixed qualitative sociological methods: archival analysis of the AFC 1984-2009 Archives at Gerber/Hart LGBTQ Library, participant observation of the group’s interactions at official events and informal gatherings, and informal interviews with group members about their experiences navigating AFC and gay life in Chicago. Further methods involve analysis of the researcher’s subjective positions during interactions with members of different races, and archive visits with members to expand knowledge of the archive and analyze their responses to archive objects. Preliminary data suggest two interweaving patterns of inquiry: (1) as a whole, collective Asian identity in AFC is determined by racial inclusivity and interraciality. Along with AFC’s claim to provide a space and voice for gay Asian men, it prioritizes its openness to gay men of all races. (2) Within the group, gay Asian men and gay white men in AFC negotiate their friendships and/or interracial relationships to expand their circles of intimacy – forming friendships, finding sexual intimacy, or initiating romantic love. Because gay Asian-white relationships carry social stigma, the members’ strategic negotiations around this stigma contribute to the group’s looser social network and racially porous identity. These primary findings provide the foundation for a more complex reading of queer interracial intimacy and collective identity, and further research in this group and its connected social networks will also explore the roles of aging and technology in the group’s history and interactional dynamics.