Desperately seeking LGBT memories of World War II incarceration

May 10, 2011 By TINA TAKEMOTO
Two years ago, I was invited to participate in E.G. Crichton’s project “Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archive” in which artists, writers and musicians were asked to respond to personal collections in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society archive. I was “matched” with Jiro Onuma, a gay Issei who moved to the U.S. from Iwate Prefecture, Japan in 1923 at age 19. Compared to some of the other collections in the archive, Onuma’s is rather modest. It consists of a few photo albums, some personal documents and papers, and a small collection of homoerotic male physique magazines and ephemera.

As I looked through pictures of the elegantly dressed Onuma posing with his male friends and lovers around San Francisco and other travel locations, two photographs captured my attention. Both were taken while Onuma was imprisoned at the Topaz concentration camp in Central Utah during World War II. The first is a group portrait showing Onuma and his mess hall workmates in front of Block #3 Dining Hall. The second shows Onuma, his close friend Ronald, and another man casually posing together on barren prison ground with a guard tower and barbed wire visible in the distance…

Read more at NichiBei.org.

---