Come join us for an evening with Harlan Greene – where he’ll take us on a chronological tour through of The Real Rainbow Row, with a lens toward illuminating that gay, transgender, and nonbinary people, as well as gender fluidity, that has been as ever-present and formative as the oyster beds that shape this land by the first settlers. Greene will be in conversation with History Professor, Dr. Stephanie Yuhl.
About the Book:
Though Charleston has a reputation for holding onto the past longer than most other places, it could not avoid the shock of change. Much has been written of the city’s history of civil rights, and its rich African American, women’s, ethnic, and religious past. One of the minority groups long left out of the club has been Charleston’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and other sexual minorities community. It’s not that they haven’t been here all along, making history, contributing greatly to the creation of one of America’s most distinctive cities. But, even now, with so many people out and acknowledged, marching in the streets, being elected to public office, and marrying, there are still discrepancies. There are no statues to LGBTQ people (while some discriminatory statutes linger), and very few official mentions anywhere. While other pasts blaze brightly, there is just a flickering of knowledge about local LGBTQ history.
About Harlan Greene:
An award winning author of fiction and nonfiction, and historian, Harlan Greene created a body of work that thematically centers on Charleston, homosexuality, and Jewish identity. Dripping in historic details and intricacies, Greene’s fiction and nonfiction benefit from the skills and expertise honed in his professional life as an archivist, researcher, and historian.
Greene has served as assistant director of the South Carolina Historical Society, director of the North Carolina Preservation Consortium and the Charleston Public Library. He is the author of Mr. Skylark and the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston and What the Dead Remember – that won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 1991. He was nominated for the same award for his 2005 novel The German Officer’s Boy.
In addition to his writing, Greene has worked as an archivist for the College of Charleston, including collection materials relating to Jewish history in Charleston region. His most recent work, The Real Rainbow Row, digs deep and uncovers a wealth of knowledge about Charleston’s LGBTQ past and present in this fascinating and informative book.
About Dr. Stephanie Yuhl:
Stephanie E. Yuhl (BA Georgetown, PhD, Duke) is the W. Arthur Garrity, Sr. Professor in Human Nature, Ethics and Society and Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and former Associate Faculty in the Critical Conservation program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, with emphases in Southern history, public history, memory, gender/sexuality, and social movements. Yuhl is the author of the award-winning book A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, and “Hidden in Plain Sight: Center the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History” (2013) on Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Museum,” among other publications. She is a practicing public historian who has most recently served as the project lead and co-curator for the major exhibition and archive-building initiative, LGBTQ+ Worcester For The Record (funded in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) at Worcester Historical Museum. Yuhl also served lead scholar and organizer with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (College of Charleston)and the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC) of Revisiting Prop Master: A Digital Exhibition and Catalog at the College of Charleston (2019), the digital recreation of a provocative 2009 anti-racist art exhibit at the Gibbes for which no physical catalog had been created. She currently directs the ongoing LGBTQ+ Worcester Oral History Project.