Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at Los Alamos. In Wide-Open Desert, historian Jordan Biro Walters shifts focus away from the urban gay meccas that many out queer people called home and brings to life a vibrant milieu of two-spirit, Chicana lesbian, and white queer cultural producers in the heart of the US Southwest.

Drawing on oral histories, documentaries, poetry, and archival sources, Biro Walters demonstrates how geographic migration and creative expression enabled LGBTQ+ people to resist marginalization and forge spaces of belonging. Significant figures profiled include two-spirit Diné artist Hastíín Klah, literary magazine editor Spud Johnson, ranchera singer Genoveva Chávez, and Cherokee writer Rollie Lynn Riggs. Biro Walters also explores how land communes, art circles, and university classrooms helped create communities that supported queer cultural expression and launched gay civil rights activism in New Mexico. Throughout, Wide-Open Desert highlights queer mobility and queer creative production as paths to political, cultural, and sexual freedom for LGBTQ+ people.

From the Introduction

Uncovering the lives of sexual and gender nonnormative New Mexicans was a challenging task because of the paucity of written sources on queer history in the state. My project began with a series of thirty oral histories. Since the 1970s, oral history projects with queer people have been a critical resource for excavating the queer past. I collected oral histories in cooperation with the LGBT Educational Archives Project, devoted to preserving LGBTQ+ voices, particularly in the Southwest. Many of the interviews have been preserved and are available at the Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico Libraries, as part of the Bennett Hammer LGBT Collection. By design, these interviews are constructed to yield diversity in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and region.¹ To rectify gaps in my oral histories, I also draw on interviews conducted by others. Taken together, I examine the lives of well-known queer people such as homophile activist Harry Hay and queer author Paula Gunn Allen as well as the experiences of ordinary queer folks, such as the Chicana lesbian couple Nadine Armijo and Rosa Montoya.

My initial conversations with participants began with a simple question: What was it like to identify as queer and live in New Mexico? I used “queer” in my initial question to encapsulate the wide spectrum of sexual and gender identities, but participants self-identified their sexual orientation and gender identity, and I employ their own terminology here. I teased out this large question with three overlapping themes: living conditions, social life, and forms of organization against discrimination. As I listened to their intimate life histories, I realized that interviewees narrated their lives through movement and pathways. Most had a mobility narrative, but their tales of movement were different from the typical rural-to-urban migration stories embedded in LGBT literature. Their stories also illustrated an unruliness of racial, class, and gender dynamics that transgressed an easy understanding of New Mexican queer lives. I needed to be committed to making race and gender as central as sexuality.

The oral histories that unfolded made me focus less on spatialized settings and more on the circulation of sexual subjects and knowledge. I puzzled over how to reimagine traditional ways of uncovering queer lives—using cities themselves as a documentary source for interpreting queer pasts, police records and jury trials to uncover same-sex acts, and vice culture, particularly bars, for revealing publicly visible queer cultures and as agents for resistance. I consulted a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the “rural turn” in gay and lesbian history that elucidates how queer sexualities and subjectivities manifest in rural locations.² I structured my own project without the geographic dualisms of urban and rural, opting for a state-based approach that views the varied landscapes of New Mexico as interconnected—though, admittedly, much of the queer past I have documented takes place in the northern part of the state. I also take geographical detours to Arizona, Nevada, California, and elsewhere. When people or ideas moved, I followed them.

As I searched for evidence that might reveal flows, practices, and dimensions of an alternative mapping of sexual geographies that linked disparate locations, this line of inquiry led me to art and literature. Personal narratives and visual and textual queer evidence, some public but most private and unpublished, represent a site wherein queer people conceptualized their place within a homophobic nation and found a means for spreading sexual subjectivities. For most of the twentieth century, LGBTQ+ Americans lived in a homophobic climate where disclosing their sexual identity in mainstream society brought fear of persecution, an environment that prevented the development of an art movement centered on overt homoerotic content until the 1970s with the birth of the modern gay liberation movement.

Queer artists and writers, through various forms of creative expression, indirectly conveyed sexual difference and gender variance. As queer art historian Jonathan D. Katz argues, portraiture alone is a rich “untapped” archive. Katz explains, “we have literally thousands of images—paintings, sculptures, watercolors, prints, films, and photographs—that eloquently attest to forms of sexual desire and association long before the advent of our modern lesbian and gay identity.” Many artistic works have queer themes, but such themes often pass undetected.³ I scrutinized poetry, fiction, little magazines, documentaries, and queer male erotic photography as expressions of self-love, points of connectivity to find other queer people, and spaces to imagine belonging. My use of art and literature as evidence provides a useful corrective to dominant narratives of twentieth-century American LGBT history—white, urban, and male—and recovers the experiences of lesbians, queer people of color, and, to a lesser extent, bisexuals, asexuals, and nonbinary people.

Oral histories and queer creative evidence consulted for this project offered only a partial history of New Mexico’s queer past. Not until I paired such materials with archival collections, government documents, university records, and newspaper articles was I able to uncover how queer cultural development overlapped with and inspired the beginning of sexual politics in the American Southwest and, to an extent, the rest of the United States.

This is particularly evident during the Cold War, when the security state effectively shut down sexual politics in New Mexico and stifled queer aesthetics. World War II ushered in a different kind of mobility, as millions of Americans moved toward the centers of an advancing nuclear industry centered in the American West, including New Mexico. Newcomers to the state prioritized an appreciation for high-technology enterprises over artistic sensibilities and embraced heteronormative conceptions of settlement—homeownership, men as the primary breadwinners, and the nuclear family ideal. Nationwide, queer people came under attack, and the perception of “homosexuals” as security risks transformed queer openness in the art world. Pervasive homophobia and concerns about gay people in the arts eroded visible networks of support for queer artists.

Nonetheless, LGBTQ+ artists’ and writers’ creation of works despite a national climate of homophobic censorship is a significant and overlooked aspect of the burgeoning sexual equality movement. Queer New Mexicans produced a body of work on queer expression. The stark and beautiful landscape of the state has long inspired the region’s peoples to make art and literature that evinced their sense of sociocultural distinctiveness. Two-Spirit Pueblo potters and Navajo weavers created the earliest pieces of queer art. By the 1920s white gay and lesbian artists and writers who migrated to northern New Mexico produced queer art and literature that tackled themes of their emotional lives. Latinx queers added their representations beginning in the late 1970s, when the first wave of Chicana lesbian writers, as they called themselves, wrote their formerly silenced histories. Over several decades, both subtle and explicit queer cultural production opened sexual discourse, which served as a foundation for the later triumphs of the modern gay liberation movement.

Santa Fe was a particularly vibrant site of the artistic expression essential in the construction of a southwestern queer identity politics. In contrast, other desert states, such as Nevada and Arizona, took first steps toward establishing queer community in the postwar era through their bars, nightclubs, and, beginning in 1976, through gay rodeo circuits that offered a space for rural LGBTQ+ people. The political histories of queer New Mexicans began much earlier and reveal an alternative way to understand the creation of a different type of identity politics focused on cultural activism—blending creative activities with activism to advocate for sociopolitical change in society. When cultural activism is knit together with other forms of conventional political activism, New Mexico emerges as a critical site of the national fight for gay and lesbian civil rights.

1. For a further discussion of my methodology, see Jordan Biro Walters, “Uncovering Queer Voices in New Mexico through the Process of History” (paper presentation,
   American Historical Association Annual Meeting, New York City, January 2–5, 2015).
2. See, for example, Colin R. Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).
3. Jonathan D. Katz, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010), 16, 14.

Jordan Biro Walters is associate professor of history at the College of Wooster. For more information, visit her website.