Queer Cities and Their Temporary Monuments
By Emily Budd
On November 2, 1986, the Stonewall Park group held their first town meeting in Queer Rhyolite. Fred Schoonmaker and Alfred Parkinson, a gay couple with a small following, had just moved here as they began the process to purchase the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Located on colonized Western Shoshone land between Death Valley National Park and the Nevada Test Site, the abandoned mining town was the new prospect for their queer utopian vision.
Stonewall Park, named for the Stonewall uprisings of 1969, was to be a place where queer people could live safely, free from discrimination during the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the 1980s, when illegal sodomy and rampant homophobia from the state kept the Nevada LGBTQ community effectively closeted, Rhyolite offered them the possibility of owning an incorporated city where they could elect their own leaders, pass their own legislation to decriminalize homosexuality, and therefore become a peaceful, inclusive, openly-queer community.
Images from The Stonewall Park Collection at UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Images left to right: Alfred Parkinson and Fred Schoonmaker in Rhyolite, Nevada, 1986. Rhyolite Town Meeting flyer, 1986.
I was inspired by the courage and passion of the Stonewall Park group to reimagine their queer existence, despite hardship and the dangers of publicly outing themselves. The need to locate a radically queer space reads between the lines of their statements in local publications, such as this one in Gay Life, Reno, April 1985: “Change can no longer come in bits and pieces as predetermined by a larger society, but from a strong new vision of our future.”
In the ruins of Rhyolite they saw potential for queer renewal, but were met with racist and homophobic protest and violent harassment from the surrounding area. After suffering relentless attacks and ultimately failing to raise the critical funds needed to complete the purchase, they left Rhyolite by late-December. Fred, the idealist leader, was subsequently diagnosed and passed away from complications due to AIDS less than six months later.
The Stonewall Park story exists mostly in marginalized queer archives. Histories of Rhyolite centralize its Wild West machismo and ignore its queer history— and therefore its queerness. I wanted to explore a sculptural answer to this gap in queer representation, place-making, and futurity, and what that means for shedding light on the queer past while planting the seeds of a queer future. Recalling the ancient words of Sappho, written in the 6th century BCE: “You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us.”
Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust, is a column of packed desert sand and mine tailings. Held together only with water, it gradually crumbles over time. Inside is a radically small monument which states: here lie dreams of Stonewall Park, 1986 / “a safe and peaceful place” ded. 2019. When the pillar collapses, it will leave the nugget-sized cast aluminum artifact buried in Rhyolite; a reminder left for the future that these dreams lie here.
Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust. Shown with a copy of the buried monument, “a safe and peaceful place” is a direct quote from the archive, describing their dreams in 1986. Images/Emily Budd.
If the job of a monument is to carry an important message into the future, what is the role of a temporary monument? Memorial for Queer Rhyolite isn’t temporary because it will fail, but because that failure will provide the opportunity to be rebuilt if so desired. By embodying this opportunity for renewal, reimagined interpretations, and new voices to contribute to the proactive rebuilding of generational iterations, temporary monuments speak to the future while also welcoming change.
I’m tired of monuments that intend to establish, or that look like a guy who named a stolen place after himself. I would prefer a monument to diminish, to eventually become absorbed into the land or toppled by the weather, its particles gently tamped down by time into the desert sand along with my ancestors’ dreams of a queer city. Instead of establishing the town of Queer Rhyolite, it establishes the dream of Queer Rhyolite. A dream is fluid and temporary; it is nowhere but it is also anywhere, because it has the power to become real. A dream may yet come true because it is a possibility, a dream is a goal of a better place that we move towards, as we overcome the many struggles and sadness along the way.
My hope is that Memorial for Queer Rhyolite prolongs the dream of a queer future while also performing an act of queer place-making, claiming space for remembering our history in the present while it stands. The dream of a queer city will always lie here, along with the reminder that we can invent new queer worlds from those dreams when we choose.
“You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist.
But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
-Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, 1969.
Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust. Goldwell Open Air Museum, Rhyolite, NV. Image/Emily Budd.
Emily Budd is a visual artist and sculptor based in Las Vegas. Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust, was originally installed for the 2019 Bullfrog Biennial, curated by Sierra Slentz. It remains at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in Rhyolite, Nevada, for as long as it lasts.
Emily Budd will be participating in A Virtual Salon: Nevada’s Public Monuments on Thursday, September 17, 2020, at 12 pm PT on the Nevada Humanities Facebook page at facebook.com/nevadahumanities.
All research, quotes and images of Queer Rhyolite sourced from The Stonewall Park Collection at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Library Special Collections and Archives, Las Vegas, Nevada, and also Dennis McBride’s book Out of the Neon Closet: Queer Community in the Silver State, 2017.
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