Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, renowned Twin Cities LGBTQ archivist, dies at 76
Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, who was involved in the launch of Twin Cities Pride and began one of the few Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender archival collections in the country, has died. The St. Paul resident was 76.
Tretter played an active role in the Twin Cities GLBT community for decades. He hosted "Night Rivers," the only regularly broadcast Gay and Lesbian classical music show in the country, for 16 years on KFAI.
He co-chaired Minnesota's Gay/Lesbian Olympic Committee and served on the board of Twin Cities Pride.
But he’s best known for the Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies that bears his name at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library, one of the largest LGBTQ-specific archival repositories in the country.
Create a More Connected Minnesota
MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.
“When everybody else in the world was saying ‘Being gay was bad and sick and evil,’ Jean was celebrating the GLBT community and saying, ‘We are a community, we have a history, we are worth studying, we are worth documenting. We are worth preserving and honoring,” said Lisa Vecoli, former curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT studies at the University of Minnesota.
“And when everybody else was throwing things away and saying, ‘We don't need to hang on to this,’ Jean was saying, ‘No, this is proof of our existence. This is proof of our community. This is proof of who we are and what we're doing. And we need to hang on to it.’”
Tretter studied anthropology at the U of M in the early 1970s. He wanted to specifically research the gay community, but he was told that wasn’t a legitimate course of study, Vecoli said.
That didn’t deter him. In the early 1980s, while serving as unofficial historian of the Pride festival, he would wrap poster boards of material in plastic wrap to protect it from rain and hang them on fishing line strung up in Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis.
That’s where “he realized that things were disappearing, that people weren't saving things, that people weren't documenting the activities in the community,” said Vecoli. “And that became his mission. That became his life's work.”
He began collecting everything he could find — brochures left on tables, flyers stuck to telephone poles, books, T-shirt, photographs, posters, buttons — anything that was related to the LGBTQ community.
Almost 20 years later, his collection filled nearly 600 bankers boxes.
“He couldn't sleep in his bed because it was covered with material. He slept in a bed roll on the floor,” Vecoli said. “That's one of his famous quirks. His apartment was so full of stuff that he had no space left for himself.”
In 2000, he agreed to donate his collection to the University of Minnesota — the same institution that had denied him the chance to study Gay and Lesbian anthropology.
“The university had just started offering courses in gay studies,” said Vecoli. “So the argument was, ‘You're now offering courses in this new area of study, so you should accept this archive as a way of supporting this new area of study.’”
Tretter himself was hired to oversee the collection until his retirement in 2011. Vecoli then succeeded him for nearly seven years.
The collection now holds the equivalent of more than 3,500 bankers boxes, from the Twin Cities, the Upper Midwest and around the world, in 58 languages.
Aiden Bettine, current curator of the Tretter Collection at the University of Minnesota Libraries, said it’s remarkable Tretter had the foresight to amass the collection, long before any institution was intentionally preserving LGBTQ material.
“I've personally been very enamored and enthralled by this obsessiveness of Jean and others like him in the 70s and 80s from the queer community,” Bettine said.
Bettine thinks that motivation came partly from a visceral fear that LGBTQ history would be erased, that things would be “destroyed … or just thrown away, by archivists, by family members, when somebody passes away, that other people would not see the value in keeping this material.”
On the positive side, he said Tretter and others took a lot of pride in collecting materials that represented their identity. “There was this need and desire for legitimacy,” Bettine said.
The University of Minnesota Libraries plans to celebrate Tretter’s life in June, before Twin Cities Pride.
Vecoli said she wants people to remember Tretter for being “so proud of being gay. He claimed that at a time when most people were still hiding. And he documented that. And that is a gift to us now and it will be a gift to people generations in the future.”