Archival Research - Part 3
If you are curious about Parts 1 & 2, feel free to go back and read them.
It started with a text question from a friend asking about where she could find some information on the Lavender Menace softball team in the late 1960s and 1970s. She was co-writing a piece about the team. It was 9 PM and I was already in bed streaming something on my iPad.
However, I do love a research question, so I used my phone to do some preliminary searching while continuing to listen to the episode I was streaming. As with most research questions, I needed to get a little more information before I could offer helpful suggestions. So I Googled “lavender menace softball” to see what would come up. I knew about the Lavender Menace and the National Organization of Women from my Feminist Studies education and reading Rita Mae Brown, so I assumed it was a lesbian softball team but I didn’t know if it was local to Portland or even the Northwest.
The second result in my Google search was for an oral history interview with Patricia Cach (who coached the Lavender Menace 21) in the Archives West database. Oral histories are wonderful sources of information and provide context and perspective. GLAPN (Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest) oral histories are housed at the Oregon Historical Society but are findable via the Archives West database. Researchers can listen to the actual digitized recording or read a transcript. I sent links to both to my friend.
Since I had now confirmed the team was local, I also sent her links for the GLAPN website and the Oregon State University Queer Archives. Both collections focus on Northwest queer history, which can be very helpful when researching local histories.
By now it was 9:15 and I decided to keep going. I paused my program and logged into the Multnomah County Library website so I could use the Historical Oregonian database. This database covers 1861 to 1987, so there was potential that the newspaper would have had at least one or two articles about the softball team. And they did.
Using “lavender menace softball” as a search term, 12 articles from the early 1970s were returned. Some were simply the reported scores of a game but a few others were broad pieces on queer culture in Portland including one titled “A Gay Community Catalog: Homosexuals in Portland are standing up in greater numbers, and there are many organizations to help them.”2 One of the articles even included photos of the Lavender Menace Too playing a game. I PDFed a few articles and told my friend where I found them so she could go back and look for more if needed.
By now it was 9:42 and I had to stop myself. It was fun research and again I learned about a part of history I didn’t know anything about before I was asked the question. And I had done all of the research on my phone.
Later I found out by looking at a photo of a player that “2” should have been “Too", nuances like this can be helpful to do a deeper dive.
The article listed other Queer organizations operating in the 1970s that provides additional search terms “Portland Counseling Center for Sexual Minorities”, “Metropolitan Community Church” and “Portland Town Council.”