Interviewing Tim Ziaukas
- Al Preston
- Oct 1
- 4 min read
By Al Preston
Briefly, I’m concerned about the distance between where Tim is sitting and where Silas and I are sitting on the couch. There’s a huge glass coffee table between us, a decorative bowl on one side, and a purple scented candle on the other. I’ve placed my recorder on my portfolio, a gift from my sister, it’s thick and leather, soft enough to absorb any sound coming from the table and the high possibility of our glass cups hitting the tabletop.
Tim sits in his rocking chair setting his glass of Scotch or whisky—I don’t know enough about alcohol to tell which—on the table loudly (to me anyway). The chair creaks, there’s cars flying by outside, audible despite Tim closing the windows, and Tim’s husband, Chris, is in the other room moving around. Tim’s cat, a cute chubby white and orange short hair named Rory, is demanding Tim’s attention.
I know I’m about to be anxious about the recorder, the sound, my movements, everyone else’s movements, and about a million other things, but Tim smiles at us and asks where we are beginning, and I dive in anyway. Interviewing people, after all, is my favorite thing to do.
We actually met Tim long before this interview, shortly after I started at Duquesne. My Professor, Dr. Simpson, the Modern American professor in Duquesne’s history program, had put Tim on my radar. They were both going to the same conference that month and Dr. Simpson thought Tim’s topic, on Pittsburgh’s gay bars, would be of interest to me.
A quick search let me know he was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where Silas was an undergraduate. I figured Tim might be more vigilant to emails from within his own university and asked Silas to send an email. At that point, I expected little. Despite the few successes I had, throwing my name and ideas out into the void, I wasn’t about to start expecting answers from every attempt.
Tim answered, however, and I entered a Zoom call shortly after work and a painfully uphill cold walk to Duquesne. Tim was a wealth of knowledge; he gave us names of people we might want to interview and some idea of how and where to find them. He was very supportive and promised to send along his work once it was complete.
Neither of us knew much about him, where he was born, where he grew up. He was older, about my father’s age, and I had a fleeting thought if I should find some way to ask if he had been born and raised in Pittsburgh. Then Tim started talking about this and that and offhandedly mentioned a party he and his housemates threw on East Liberty that started relatively small and ended up too big for them to handle.
A throw away line there. Another over there. Tim was exactly who we were looking for. Someone born and raised in Pittsburgh, who knew the landscape, who walked the bars, knew the organizations. He was someone who was there, and he was a scholar to boot!
As the Zoom call ended, Silas and I started making a plan of who to contact, Tim near the top. My mind raced with the possible questions once I had a better hold of Pittsburgh’s history. Scholars speak and ask questions in a particular way. In a lot of oral history interviews, you’re not dealing with another academic or even someone in your field. Therefore, questions cannot be framed as if you were talking to another expert in the field. They are experts, just not in the same way you are.
However, an interview with Tim was set aside as we got different interviews and the school year moved along. Silas kept in contact with Tim the whole time. Then the summer hit, I’m bored out of my mind with no academic work to do, filling my time with reading and studying for many of the projects on this site, when I get an email.
The Heinz History Center was putting on a pride event: Live from the History Center…It’s Thursday Night Live!
A short lecture about a Pittsburgh gay organization that ran from the 1980s to the 1990s called Thursday Night Live. The speaker? Tim Ziaukas, a former member. Admission was free with an RSVP.
Well, free or not, I was going to that! I signed up my wife and I, marked the date and went right back to my studying with excitement.
Not long after that, my lovely wife (who puts up with far too much) and I moved into a much nicer and closer apartment. We moved all our possessions within twenty-four hours straight. My right arm—I’m right-handed—was in agony due to brand new chronic pain issues.
Needless to say, a few things fluttered out of my mind during all of that. Including a text from Silas happily letting me know that we had an interview with Tim the weekend following his talk at the Heinz. Wasn’t I lucky?
I arrived that night to the Heinz, happily greeted Tim and discovered I was supposedly going to his house the following Sunday. Regardless, this lecture had a lot more excitement to it before. Not only was I going to learn a piece of Pittsburgh queer history, but more possible interviewees were there! And we had an interview soon to follow!
I met a number of very amazing people, got a few contacts for future interviewees, and most importantly, Tim’s address and when we were supposed to show up.
After trying to sort out which house was Tim’s, we were happily let inside and we were right back to the couch, the glass table, and Tim’s very creaky chair. A new story uncovered.
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