Bringing Lesbian Herstory to Life: A Discussion with Filmmakers Meghan McDonough and Rengim Mutevellioglu

In March 2024, the Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies Program (MWGS) at Texas Woman’s University screened the film Old Lesbians and was able to bring to campus the film’s director and editor Meghan McDonough and cinematographer and creative director Rengim Mutevellioglu.1 The event was moderated by Dr. Agatha Beins who teaches in the MWGS Program and edits this journal. Anyone interested in watching the film can do so through the Guardian Documentaries platform.

The conversation below is based on an edited transcript of the post-screening conversation.

Question: Could you describe how you developed this project? What inspired it? How did you find these women’s stories?

Meghan McDonough:

Rengim Mutevellioglu:

Meghan: Yeah, and the animation was really inspired by some of the transcribed and bound herstory books themselves, which we show in the film. As part of the interviews, OLOHP volunteers would often scan photos that interviewees provided and then mount them on purple paper in these books. You could just see how much love and care was baked into each one of these herstories, and that was something we wanted to get across.

Question: Have you ever done any animation before?

Meghan: Yes. The animation was done by Marcie LaCerte, who’s an animator I worked with when I was doing stop-motion animation. We were experimenting with a few different styles in this film. Dani Nunes also worked with Marcie, and they both did an amazing job.

Question: I’m interested in how you figured out the shape of the film, what to talk about, and whose voices to include. Did you start by just saturating yourself with information and then decide, “We’ll do this, this, and this”? What was your process?

Meghan: I found out that I’d been awarded Audible/Aesthetica’s 2023 Listening Pitch last spring. That meant I was able to bring in an entire team to work with me, but we had to finish the film by that October. So we sort of had to truncate the research process, which involved going through hundreds of oral herstories that had been digitized as audio files. Many were recorded on cassette tapes, so digitization was necessary to making them accessible. I used an AI transcription website that quickly transcribed the interviews, then checked it against the transcriptions that the OLOHP team had done by hand in the completed herstories (for example, I discovered that what AI had originally interpreted as “handsome cab” was actually “hansom cab”). I then worked with a team of research interns to go through the interviews and highlight the parts that were most resonant, parts that were especially visual and would translate well into film, and any parts that made us laugh, that made us feel emotional. Then we separated the highlighted parts by theme. We noticed some topics kept coming up—activism, finding community, heartbreak, these kinds of things—that gave us a sense of the sample we wanted. Obviously, we couldn’t cover everything, and we don’t claim to be comprehensive in any way as there are more than 800 interviews. But we were basically trying to do a survey and be as representative as possible.

Ren: Something else that helped shape it was Arden—the way she saw her own life in three acts. We kind of figured out that all of her stories somehow fit into those three acts and based the script around that.

Meghan: She said in her herstory that in recording so many of these stories, she’s had a lot of opportunity to think of how she conceptualizes her own life. She thought of her life in three acts: the first act included childhood, up to coming out; the second act was her first long-term relationship; and activism and finding community was the third act. We saw that a lot of the herstories followed similar trajectories so that gave us a template for structuring the film.

Ren: It allowed us to tell small stories within a larger framework.

Meghan: One challenge was that I feel like we could have made a feature documentary about every single one of the women interviewed. Maybe that’s the next project.

Question: There’s a wealth of information in these oral herstories that Arden recorded. Is there someone who is stepping up to fill her shoes and take the mantle and continue that effort to collect the stories that are still out there waiting to be told?3

Meghan: Yeah, that’s a great question. The spring of 2023 marked the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project’s twenty-fifth anniversary, and the project manager said that they were wrapping up collecting herstories. They’ve since gotten a bunch of requests and found people that they want to interview, so it hasn’t been neatly tied up yet. I think they interviewed some softball players recently but didn’t get a chance to transcribe them. Plus Zoom makes the interview process so much easier nowadays. Arden ran the project with Margaret Purcell, who lives in Washington state. I wanted to interview her for the film, but she prefers being behind the scenes. She does really great work and has been running the project in Arden’s absence. Barb Kucharczyk, who is in the film, is very involved too.

Ren: I think Barb had said they are still continuing the project, since people are interested, but are slowly going to phase it out. Most of the interviews, over 500 stories, are archived at Smith College at the Sophia Smith Collection.4

Meghan: According to Margaret, there are still about 75 boxes they plan to send to Smith. The rest are at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque or waiting to be digitized.5

Question: Did Arden ever say anything during the process, especially as she got well into it, about lessons learned or things she wished that she did differently in how she approached the collection efforts and inspiring people to want to tell their story? What she would do differently if she were starting all over?

Meghan: One thing really struck me about their process that is different from the way a lot of people do interviews and oral histories. After they transcribe an oral history, the OLOHP sends a copy to the interviewee to make sure that they’re happy with everything that’s in there. In case there’s something that they’re not comfortable with, the interviewee has the chance to cross it out. I think that might have been something that they decided to do later on, as they got feedback. I’m not sure if they were doing that from the beginning. So that was definitely a lesson. There’s also been some back-and-forth about whether to transcribe every “um” and pause and how closely the transcript needs to reflect the actual conversation while still retaining the meaning and being clear and legible.

Ren: Yeah, recent changes have more generally been technical things. I think, overall, Arden and others have been following the same recipe, more or less.

Meghan: Additionally, at the beginning, it was lesbians over age 70, but I think they loosened those rules a bit. They wanted to interview more people rather than less.

Question: I really enjoyed the humor woven throughout the film and the focus on storytelling and memory. Having a crush on the Statue of Liberty was gold.6 So many gems. Were there any stories or experiences that stood out to you?

Meghan: One that I heard really early on, that we included at the end of the film, was Arden talking about the death of her first partner, Tommie, and what that was like to let go. I think as soon as I heard that, I knew I wanted it to be in the film just because of how I felt. It just, to me, represents how much love was in their relationship. Part of the reason I wanted to make this film to begin with was the representation of what that love and commitment looks like later in life, so I think that was a really important part that I wanted to include.

Ren: We love all of the stories so it’s hard to choose. In making decisions, we had a lot of fights about what to include and what to not include. I think it was painful for all of us to have to cut it down to the ones that we selected. It’s also worth mentioning that this was a very collaborative project. Meghan is a very gracious person who lets everyone around her have opinions and just lets the creativity flow. I think we ended up with a really good product. We really wanted to push forward the joy of being queer, the absolute creativity that comes from that.

Meghan: Yeah. The chant “2, 4, 6, 8, how do you know your grandma’s straight?” is definitely one I want to use at marches in the future.7

Question: What surprised you the most?

Ren: I think what really surprised me, and maybe it shouldn’t have, was how many nuns participated in the project. I don’t think we ended up including parts of their interviews, but Barb mentions it. We had a few recurring professions that would come up like teacher, nurse, and nun.

Meghan: I didn’t know about a lot of the history. I didn’t know about purges that would happen at colleges. Interviewees also talked about diagnoses that they received that is sort of inconceivable today. Then again, also not inconceivable.8 The importance of women’s music—I also didn’t really fully know that history.9 I feel like because we had to finish the film in such a short amount of time, I am playing catch up with a lot of this stuff, going back and reading lesbian pulp, reading The Well of Loneliness (Hall 1928), and a lot of these references that kept popping up.

Question: What’s next?

Meghan: Great question. I think my next project definitely will be about queer history, whether it’s a short film or a series or a feature film. We’re also figuring out which aspect of history we might focus on or whether to focus on one individual or a few.

Ren: There are a lot of branches that spread from one project.

Meghan: Yeah, there are so many areas that we wanted to dig deeper into. Old Lesbians is a long short, so I think if we went any longer it would not be considered a short anymore. If people want to keep up with our news, we have an Instagram profile (@oldlesbiansfilm), and people can subscribe to our newsletter at oldlesbiansfilm.com. We would love to connect with anyone who’s interested in this project.

Question: I would just like to make a comment. One of the main things that I picked up on throughout the film was that—from a female standpoint, a lesbian female standpoint—that interviewees had to overcome the idea that our stories are not that important or not worthy of having a film made about them. Anything that you do that challenges that idea I think is so important.

Meghan: Yeah, I just think there’s so many untold stories because of that. Arden said that almost everyone she interviewed told her something like this.

Question: We have to believe that it’s important that they’re told.

Meghan: I think that was really the beauty of Arden’s work. To emphasize the value of every woman’s life, she always said “You don’t have to climb Mount Everest.” Her interview wasn’t the only time she said that. I think she’d repeat it a lot in everyday life, and I so agree with that statement.

Ren: She knew the importance of having women tell their stories so that they could be preserved and documented because they will otherwise disappear.

Meghan: We did have a line in the film at one point that describes an experience she often had when giving women a copy of their herstory after the interview. I think a lot of them after reading through it would say, “Oh, I actually have done a lot. That really helped me.”

Question:  I’m not sure that’s a lesbian thing. I think it’s a woman thing. I’m about to retire. A lot of things that I’ve done I’ve had to put together for the next person coming along. I guess I did a lot, but you don’t think that way necessarily because women are supposed to be quiet, raise the children; you’re not supposed to toot your own horn.

Meghan: Yeah, definitely. That’s why I appreciated that Arden used the term herstory, which I hadn’t really heard before. It draws attention to the fact that history has largely been told by men, leaving a lot of people out. It was a very conscious choice to use “herstory” in the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project, just like it was a conscious choice to use the phrase “old lesbians.”

Agatha Beins: We now have two questions from folks who have joined virtually, so I’m reading from the chat thread. What stories stand out that folks have told when you present the film, such as the stories that might emerge after a screening from audience members? And can you share some of the challenges you had while putting the film together?

Ren: Challenges-wise, I think the timeline was a big one. The deadline being so fast was our biggest challenge. It was a lot of work to do all the research. It was quite a lot of work for everyone involved. And then—it sounds kind of silly—but there’s the technical aspect of listening to everyone. Different interviews had different audio quality, and I don’t think I would have thought about this before working on audio-driven work.

Meghan: Yeah, and cutting down the film was difficult because we just couldn’t include all the stories we wanted to. I think in terms of the stories that come out after showing the film, yesterday I was talking to a woman after a screening who said she used to play with those paper dolls that you saw at the beginning of the film. All these things were very new to us.

Ren: That was new for Meghan. I used to play with paper dolls.

Meghan: We ordered some from eBay. We ordered a bunch of the other objects you saw in the film from eBay. And some of the activist buttons were from Arden’s collections that Sara Fernandez, a Houston activist who volunteered with Arden, sent to us.

Ren: We’ve connected with a lot of old lesbians who have a lot more stories to share.

Meghan: We had a Zoom call with Lillian Faderman, who’s a lesbian historian, as part of our research process, and she said something that I thought was really interesting.10 She said she always asks people my age when she talks to them how they identify, and she’s noticed that a lot of people in the younger generation don’t identify as lesbian, whereas in the older generation, it’s more common. She was basically saying that in the past “lesbian” was considered more of an umbrella term, similar to how we think of queer today. Maybe that’s the reason, but it was interesting to think about how language has evolved.

Question: Do you have plans to draw from the interviews in other projects?

Meghan: I think a lot of the interviews would be very well suited to a podcast. That could be another interesting format. But it would depend on getting permissions to use interviews in a different type of media. Adding to the challenges was making sure that we could get release forms from everyone who is in the film and everyone who had their stories reported. They signed waivers when they first participated in the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project and then another release when it was handed over to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, but we needed additional permission before we could use them in a film. I think if we did another project tied to the Oral Herstory Project, it would go through a similar process, but maybe it would be easier now that we know the drill, we have the forms.

Ren: I think all of these stories are publicly accessible at Smith College.

Meghan: Yeah, researchers can email Smith’s special collections to access them and ask for certain herstories to be digitized.

Ren: I’m also trying to encourage people to check out queer and lesbian archives if they’re interested.

Question: You mentioned AI and the ability to do the translation from audio to digital. Do you know if the Herstory Project has changed the way that they’re digitizing them? For those that haven’t been yet transcribed, I’d think that would have been an easier way to do it. You probably still need a human to make sure that it is representative of the original. Do you know if that was something Arden contemplated?

Meghan: It is. I think they first experimented with that five or ten years ago and weren’t super happy with the results. I know the technology has improved and the way that I would go about it is using an AI transcription site and then have someone go through the text. I think that makes the process much, much faster.

Ren: I think Barb was talking about maybe going that direction.

Meghan: A lot of the interviews are like four hours long, so transcribing them is a lot of work.

Ren: Oh yeah, all of these herstories are from two to four hours.

Question: We are a queer group at Texas Woman’s University and we’re trying to foster community. Was there anything important that you learned about community from these women?

Ren: I think these women specifically just went about it fearlessly, with more of a “do first and ask questions later” mentality in a lot of aspects. I definitely noticed that they didn’t let anything stop them. As long as they had each other, that’s what was important.

Meghan: I know that with LOAF (Lesbians Over th Age of 50), when Arden started it, for many years they had a standing meeting at the same time and in the same place every week. That really helped, and they always had people that came to those meetings. I think they’re at 150 members now, and it started with 5 or 6 people. OLOHP also has a newsletter and since they’ve collected interviews from all over the country, that’s very helpful to keep that sense of community.

Ren: Consistency. I think that’s a huge part of building community. Even if it’s just 5 of you guys, just keeping at it, at some point it could be 100.

Meghan: Yeah, and sharing your efforts as much as possible. What I learned from Arden’s work is if you build it, people will come, so you’re doing exactly the right thing. People will join. It just takes someone to take the initiative to start and keep it going.

Question: How would you encourage educators to integrate Old Lesbians into a classroom? What questions, topics, and/or issues could be opened up for discussion by screening the film? Are there any educational resources that could be paired with the film or used if someone screens it?

Meghan: We have a new discussion guide (printer-friendly version) compiled by our amazing team of interns from Smith College and Wellesley College!

In general, there’s so much that educators and students can dig into with Old Lesbians surrounding lesbian and queer identity, archiving, and erasure of herstory. We’ve gotten many thoughtful questions from people who have seen the film. People have asked about why it’s important to collect queer history and women’s history. And they wonder about how we as a community can continue to seek out and uplift queer history. Additionally, a teacher could discuss with students which herstories resonated most and which were harder to relate to and why. They could also explore what the term "herstory" means—to the people in the film and how viewers themselves interpret it. This could then relate more generally to students’ thoughts on how our language around queerness has evolved over time.

Another area the film brings up relates to building community across generations. A question for discussion is, how can we create truly intergenerational spaces for dialogue? I also love the question from TWU students about what younger generations can learn from LOAF and others about building and maintaining strong queer communities.

Queer historian J. D. Doyle was close friends with Arden and is based in Houston. He meticulously documented her efforts with LOAF in his archive of Houston queer history, which I found very helpful in the making of my film. So I’d recommend his Queer Music History 101 lesson plan to anyone interested in queer history and culture!

Question: Have you had conversations with educators about the film? If so, what have you learned from the experiences and questions they share?

Meghan: We’ve screened Old Lesbians at a number of colleges and universities, and at one high school. I’ve loved each of these experiences because the questions and insights are different every time. I think it’s especially valuable when educators pair the film with local resources, like what you did before the film screening.11 This can take the form of a list with links to share afterward or a panel featuring local LGBTQ+ historians and women’s and gender studies educators. I end up learning so much at each screening as a result.

Across the board, the film has served as a jumping-off point for audience members to unpack and share their own history and stories. At our recent Old Lesbians Organizing for Change virtual screening, attendees talked about the community spaces and experiences that were especially formative for them. The facilitator of another recent screening shared, “We even had some members who we’ve never heard speak openly about their sexuality or identity open up for the first time.”

At the Queer History South Conference in Dallas in 2022 and other settings, I’ve learned about the difficulties of making archival materials accessible, which motivates me further to keep doing that through documentary film.

Agatha: That is a really lovely place to wrap up. Thank you, Meghan and Ren, for this wonderful documentary and for sharing your time with us today.

Endnotes

1 This event received support from the Texas Woman’s University Libraries—with special thanks to Kimberly Johnson from the Woman’s Collection—the Department of Language, Culture, and Gender Studies, and the Division of History.

2 See, e.g., Enszer (2013), Simmons (1979), and Vicinus (2012).

3 Arden Eversmeyer died in 2022; her life and work is outlined in the Texas Obituary Project.

4 The finding aid for the Old Lesbian Oral History Project Records offers an overview of the collection’s contents.

5 Margaret Purcell explained in email correspondence that Smith College will end up holding about 750-800 of the OLOHP interviews. The others will be archived based on the wishes of the interviewees (e.g., some women from New Mexico approved their interviews to be housed at the University of New Mexico) and the conversations that Arden had with other institutions, such as her alma Mater (Texas Woman’s University) and Texas A&M, and with the June Mazer Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles.

6 One interviewee says, “I just had a huge crush on the Statue of Liberty. This enormous, magnificent woman. Starkly beautiful, out there in the middle of the harbor. Also unattainable, and that’s important when you’re a little kid” (6:06).

7 This part of the film is about attending the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights; two women share their experience, which included this chant (18:10). See also the “March on Washington” episode from the series about LGBTQ histories In the Life (the archive is available through the UCLA Library Film and Television Archive); and Smith (2013).

8 See, e.g., Drescher (2015), Hanhardt (n.d.), Kunzel (2024), “The History of Psychiatry & Homosexuality” (2012), McHenry (2022), and the Teaching LGBTQ History website.

9 Records from the most well-known women’s music festival, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, are held at Michigan State University and the Sophia Smith Collection. See also Currans (2020), Hayes (2010), and Jimenez (2009).

10 See Faderman (1991).

11 The Texas Woman’s University screening was accompanied by a slideshow with information about North Texas LGBTQ+ and Women’s Histories.

Meghan McDonough is a filmmaker and journalist who creates documentaries to better understand our world. She won Aesthetica/Audible’s Listening Pitch in 2023 to fund her documentary short Old Lesbians. “A Question of Sex,” her documentary series for Scientific American about how gender biases skew science, won a 2023 Telly Award and was nominated for the 2023 GLAAD Media Awards. Meghan was selected for the Atlantic Media Editorial Fellowship, and her work has since appeared in Quartz, NBC, Thomson Reuters Foundation, FiveThirtyEight, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Atlas Obscura, and has been supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Rengim Mutevellioglu is a Turkish portrait and documentary photographer based in Brooklyn. Mutevellioglu studied visual arts and received her BFA from Sorbonne University in Paris. Her latest solo photo exhibit received national recognition in Venezuela, where it was held at the Museum of National Art. She currently works as a freelance photographer in New York, collaborating with media organizations such as The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.