Growing up on the southern coast of Maine, senior Oscar Brown learned to see the past in the rivers his father pointed to and the trails his classes walked in Boston. That instinct to find history close to home followed him to Colgate University and eventually shaped one of the most personal research projects in his undergraduate career.
Brown arrived at Colgate as a transfer student, having spent his first year at a school in Boston that wasn’t the right fit. The tight-knit community and research opportunities here were what drew him in.
“I came to Colgate in a non-traditional way,” Brown said. “I was really excited to be part of a very tight-knit community, and was really excited about the research opportunities and the club involvement here. That’s [what] made it a really special experience.”
He came in certain he wanted to study history, a conviction he’d developed in high school through the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. What he didn’t anticipate was the pivot that would define his Colgate years. In his HIST 199 workshop, Associate Professor of History Monica Mercado encouraged him to explore Colgate’s queer archival collections alongside his original plan to study medieval manuscripts. He was also working to revive Lambda, one of the campus’s queer organizations, and the archives offered something he didn’t expect: a practical education in building a community institution.
The deeper he went into the collections, the more his scholarly identity took shape. Brown picked up a minor in LGBTQ Studies, took on roles at the Picker Art Gallery, Longyear Museum and the Office of LGBT Initiatives and began conducting research that braided together his regional roots and identity.
His honors thesis centers on Ogunquit, Maine, a coastal town about 45 minutes south of where he grew up, long known informally as a queer destination. He remembers driving through it as a kid and being struck by the density of pride flags, something uncommon in Maine at the time.
“One day, my dad finally explains the history of the town, and he’s like, ‘Oh, even when I was a kid, this was known as a gay town, like this is where queer people go,’” Brown said.
The thesis, developed over two years beginning in Mercado’s HIST 304 course, pushes back against a version of queer history that centers only on visible activism. Brown traces Ogunquit’s roots as an artist colony in the early 20th century, where figures like Hamilton Easterfield, a flamboyant artist who once dueled a rival teacher, built queer community outside of explicitly political frameworks.
“I’ve always wanted to push the idea that queer spaces don’t solely exist within the activist spheres of the 1960s and ’70s,” Brown said. “Because I think that can actually be pretty harmful to — this isn’t a word, but — invisibilize. Queer communities that exist outside of people who are willing to be on the front lines.”
Brown took the research beyond Colgate, presenting it at a conference in Chicago this past year. He had attended the previous year as well, and returning meant stepping back into a community of scholars who had already watched his work develop.
“It was one of the most exciting things that I’ve been able to do,” Brown said. “I presented at the conference a year before with my Colgate research, so I had people there that I knew and were excited about seeing where I was going to go next, because I was one of the few undergraduates at that conference.”
The reception in Chicago exceeded even that. During a two-hour poster session, Brown said he barely stopped talking. Attendees didn’t just engage with his argument — they brought their own memories of Ogunquit to the conversation. The same thing happened during his internship last summer with Queer History Boston, where he helped lead tours on Boston Common.
“When people on that tour would ask me about my own research, and I’d bring up Ogunquit, they would get so excited,” he said. “They would be like: ‘In the ’70s, in the ’80s, I would go to Ogunquit all the time with my friends, we would take the bus.’ They would want to know everything that I knew and what analytic frame I was going through for my research, because they’re like, ‘this has been my life, and I’m so excited that it’s being studied and being remembered in the ways that it should!’”
The project is, in many ways, a culmination. Brown described his thesis as drawing together nearly every area he has studied at Colgate, from art history to education policy. Doing that work at this particular political moment carries its own weight.
“It’s very scary sometimes, because — looking at jobs and internship opportunities — there are times where I wonder if I’m making myself unemployable,” Brown said. “But then I look around, and I see the people whose lives I’ve been able to impact on campus. I’ve become, in some way, a person that queer people — whether you’re out or closeted — can come to and talk about their feelings.”
For Brown, acting as a resource for others has reaffirmed the importance of his work and research and made him much more committed to pursuing it in whatever form he can after graduation.
After graduation, Brown plans to stay involved with Queer History Boston’s Public Historians Board and is eyeing roles in public history and museums along the Maine coast and in Boston. Graduate school, he said, is on the horizon too, with help from the Graduate School Access Fund.
“More research,” Brown said. “It never ends.”
For students just starting out in historical research, his advice was straightforward: get into the archive and stay curious when things don’t go as planned.
“Take any dead end and any roadblock not as a point of stoppage, but as an incentive,” he said. “Be excited, because it means that there is more to learn, because it doesn’t matter where you are in the career field, you are always learning, and you can only get there by doing it first.”
