Arden Eversmeyer…
The Heart of the Project
The Heart of the Project
Arden, 1948
Arden Eversmeyer is the Director and driving force behind the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project. Now a 79 year old lesbian (she was born in 1931), Arden has lived most of her life in Texas. Arden's interest in collecting the stories of old lesbians began after two women in her immediate circle of friends died. Realizing their unique stories, told in their own voices, were now lost forever, she began thinking about how she might be able to help. Before she knew it, the OLOHP was born.
Having lived her whole adult life as a lesbian and facing its unique challenges, Arden was very interested in learning how other lesbians were able to find each other and find community. Her own experiences and interests provided some of the focus of the interviews, but she has always been adamant that these are their life stories, not just their lesbian life stories. While she asks a few questions about how being a lesbian has affected their experiences and choices, Arden encourages the women sharing their stories to tell whatever they feel is important.
More than 90% of the stories in the collection are interviews that Arden has done personally. In addition to the time and travel needed to do the interviews, Arden spends untold hours contacting women to see if they are willing to participate, arranging for the interviews to be transcribed, sending drafts to participants for their review, making any necessary edits, producing two copies of each transcribed story and all the supporting documents the woman has provided and putting together two copies of the book. (One copy goes to the woman who shared her story and the other to the OLOHP archives.)
All of this is squeezed in between time with her wife, Charlotte. They married in California before the passage of Proposition 8, after deciding that a 20 year engagement was long enough!
Arden is also very active in the lesbian community in Houston. Long before she began to think about collecting the stories of old lesbians, she helped form a social support organization specifically for old lesbians in the Houston area called LOAF, Lesbians Over Age Fifty. LOAF recently celebrated the 21st Anniversary of its founding in 1987.
It isn't unusual to visit Arden and Charlotte and find yourself in the midst of a potluck with 20, 30 or even more old lesbians!
Arden plans to continue her work with the project as long as her health allows and women are willing to share their stories.
As the work on the first book got underway, Margaret Purcell, the co-author, interviewed Arden to let us better understand her passion for this work. A condensed version of that interview is included in the first book, but we have added a link to a pdf of the full interview to this page should you care to read it in its entirety. If your browser doesn't handle pdf files, you can download Adobe Reader here for free.
Having lived her whole adult life as a lesbian and facing its unique challenges, Arden was very interested in learning how other lesbians were able to find each other and find community. Her own experiences and interests provided some of the focus of the interviews, but she has always been adamant that these are their life stories, not just their lesbian life stories. While she asks a few questions about how being a lesbian has affected their experiences and choices, Arden encourages the women sharing their stories to tell whatever they feel is important.
More than 90% of the stories in the collection are interviews that Arden has done personally. In addition to the time and travel needed to do the interviews, Arden spends untold hours contacting women to see if they are willing to participate, arranging for the interviews to be transcribed, sending drafts to participants for their review, making any necessary edits, producing two copies of each transcribed story and all the supporting documents the woman has provided and putting together two copies of the book. (One copy goes to the woman who shared her story and the other to the OLOHP archives.)
All of this is squeezed in between time with her wife, Charlotte. They married in California before the passage of Proposition 8, after deciding that a 20 year engagement was long enough!
Arden is also very active in the lesbian community in Houston. Long before she began to think about collecting the stories of old lesbians, she helped form a social support organization specifically for old lesbians in the Houston area called LOAF, Lesbians Over Age Fifty. LOAF recently celebrated the 21st Anniversary of its founding in 1987.
It isn't unusual to visit Arden and Charlotte and find yourself in the midst of a potluck with 20, 30 or even more old lesbians!
Arden plans to continue her work with the project as long as her health allows and women are willing to share their stories.
As the work on the first book got underway, Margaret Purcell, the co-author, interviewed Arden to let us better understand her passion for this work. A condensed version of that interview is included in the first book, but we have added a link to a pdf of the full interview to this page should you care to read it in its entirety. If your browser doesn't handle pdf files, you can download Adobe Reader here for free.
Traveling OLOHP display
Arden, in 2007, speaking about the Herstory Project