(tense dramatic music) - It is a cool overcast day.

And in front of us is a white wall covered in multi-colored messages of support, and love, and sorrow.

This is the site of Hershee Bar and Lounge, which until November 1st, 2018, was the oldest continually operating lesbian bar in Virginia.

So my name is Kira Kindley and I created and run the Our Own Podcast which is a podcast about the LGBT history of Hampton Roads.

We started the podcast in July of 2018.

My biggest inspiration for creating the podcast was definitely my professor, Cathleen Rhodes.

She had us researching LGBT history for Queer Studies class and that's where this all came from is that research she had us doing.

I was featured on the front page of Virginian Pilot back in August for the work that I do with Our Own Community Press and Our Own Podcast, which was amazing.

I was also interviewed by HearSay with Cathy Lewis about the work that I do with the podcast.

So Our Own Podcast was named after the paper that I used for my primary source, it's Our Own Community Press.

It was a local LGBT newspaper that ran from the '70s until the mid '90s.

I think Our Own Podcast is unique because a lot of LGBT history podcasts focused on broad countrywide events, but they don't get into the nitty gritty of what it was like to live day to day as an out gay man or as a trans woman in the 1980s.

(bright upbeat music) I go through Our Own Community Press, the newspaper, and I just read through it (chuckles) until I find something that I think is interesting and I start writing notes.

So I keep physical notes of all of my work.

The reporting that was done in Our Own is sometimes really, really complete.

Often though, I find that there are pieces missing because there are things, it was just assumed you knew if you were living in the '80s in Norfolk.

So I have to track down a lot of small bits and pieces.

So sometimes, it's really quick but like the episode I'm working on now about Hershee Bar, that's taken months because a lot of what I'm doing research on is stuff that has happened recently.

So tracking down what exactly happened when, and who did it happen to, and do I have their permission to talk about it, that's taken a long time.

(gentle uplifting music) So in addition to the Queer History research that I do, I also am an artist.

So I do a lot of painting, I do sketching, and acrylic painting, and watercolors.

I tend more often to draw and paint people.

People are so unique and dynamic, and I love paying close enough attention to somebody that I can recreate them in paint.

(gentle uplifting music) The second episode I ever put out was an episode called Gay Danny.

It's about a piece of sidewalk graffiti in the parking lot of 7-Eleven.

So when I put that episode out, I included a picture on the podcast's Instagram page of the graffiti and I had chalked over it with the gay flag.

So a few days after I had released this episode, a listener contacted me to let me know that he had gone out to this graffiti and he had chalked over it and sent me a picture.

And it meant a lot to me because he chalked over it with the bisexual pride flag and that's my identity.

So it meant so much to me that a fan of the show would go and pay tribute to the work that I did and the work that J.R. Ellis did.

So I'm working on a story about the last year in relation to Hershee Bar, which until it's closing on November 1st was the oldest lesbian bar in Virginia, potentially one of the oldest lesbian bars in the East Coast.

(gentle uplifting music) My research is focused on how did the land that Hershee occupied get sold in the first place, and why did we lose this 35-year-old piece of LGBT history.

And I was involved in a lot of the push to save Hershee Bar for the last year.

So it's a very personal story for me, 'cause I was going to city council and talking to them about trying to get them to change their minds On this year's tour, we went to Hershee Bar and this was after Hershee had closed.

And Cathleen gave all of us pens and invited us to write something on the walls because people had been doing that since weeks before the bar had even closed when we were still trying to fight and save it.

So I took up a Sharpie and this is what I wrote on the wall of Hershee Bar, "We will not forget the people "who stood beside Hershee and Annette "and neither will we forget those that stood against us.

"Our history lives inside of us, "but it also lives here, "in these walls that have witnessed our sorrows, "and our triumphs, and our struggles.

"This is not the end.

"We will not forget."

(tense dramatic music)