This is queer history: A game of telephone played down the decades, preserved by passionate individuals and community institutions working on the margins; half-forgotten documents telling of wholly forgotten times, of lust and fear, shame and pride, butches and femmes, lovers and fighters.
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The Assemblage of Norman Hasselriis
I first encountered Norman Hasselriis in the summer of 1987. Barely nine years old, I was far too young to understand his work. A child of the suburbs and the city, I found rural life freaky, and didn’t get my parent’s perverse desire to spend our summers traipsing around the Catskill mountains visiting one potential death trap after another. Inevitably, there were no serial killers in the barns we toured or monsters in the campgrounds we slept in, but that always felt like a lucky accident. When we stumbled across Hasselriis’ store in the hamlet of Oak Hill (population 277, as of the 2010 census), I was convinced that we’d finally found our local Ed Gein.
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