When Octavia Leona Kohner showed up to contract negotiations in little more than “two flaps of fabric … attached by string,” she wasn’t just making a fashion choice. She was embodying the tension between workplace discipline and individual expression — and daring the management of Babeland, the famed New York City sex shop, to call her bluff.
The oral history of Octavia Leona Kohner, preserved in the NYC Trans Oral History Project[1] in partnership with the New York Public Library and the Digital Transgender Archive, offers a vivid case study of how oral history has evolved as a practice—from documenting elites to centering the voices of those historically pushed to the margins. Kohner, a transwoman who grew up on Staten Island, recounts her coming-of-age, her struggles with depression and suicidality, and her experiences as a labor organizer at New York City’s Babeland.
Interviewer Michelle Esther O’Brien spends 9 of 30 transcribed pages establishing Kohner’s life story, her traumas and relationships — which at first seemed unrelated to the unionization of Babeland’s employees, but actually positioned Kohner as the narrator of her own history. This aligns with Portelli’s (1991) argument that oral history is not just about facts but about meaning, memory, identity, and voice (in a pointed moment at the start of the interview, Kohner even “plays” with her voice, trying to determine if the mic would pick up her high-pitched, soft-spoken voice or if she should “go with” the more “bombastic” (i.e. deeper-pitched) voice we hear throughout the recording). Kohner’s interview demonstrates the value of oral history not as a record of factual accuracy (Portelli, 1991), but as an illumination of how labor was lived and remembered by someone negotiating the intersections of gender, class, and work.
Kohner’s account begins with her working-class childhood in Canarsie, where the cruelty of family and classmates foreshadows the resilience and tenacity she would later bring to her role as a labor organizer and self-described “agitator.” Her organizing style is inseparable from her identity. Kohner’s own decision-making (e.g. which voice to use), her subjectivity, and reflexivity shape the retrospective narration (Portelli, 1991; Sommer & Quinland, 2024). In one section, Kohner discusses the “AEIOU”s of labor organizing: agitate, educate, inoculate, organize, unionize. She reflects that she overdid it on agitating and should have put more energy into inoculating.[2] Here, we see how oral history adds interpretive layers to labor history (Halpern, 1998).
O’Brien’s style also reflects the “art and science” of the oral history interview. (Sommer & Quinland, 2024, p. 4). O’Brien gives Kohner space to narrate freely, asking open-ended questions that invite reflection rather than dictate it. The result is a narrative that feels collaborative rather than extractive, shaped by care and attentiveness. But, of course, oral history also reminds us that memory is produced in context—framed by the questions asked, the setting of the interview (here, the NYU Department of Sociology), the knowledge that the account will be archived, and the institutional framing (here, by the Trans Oral History Project).[3]
In almost all ways, Kohner’s story stands as a direct rebuttal to the early vision of oral history articulated by Allan Nevins (1966) and Louis Starr (1977). For Nevins, oral history was born to preserve the recollections of “great men,” political leaders, and intellectual elites. Starr similarly associated the method with capturing authoritative accounts of public life. By contrast, Kohner’s narrative illustrates the democratization of oral history; Kohner’s is precisely an experience that Nevins’ traditional archives would have overlooked. This shift mirrors the broader trajectory of oral history’s role in recovering working-class perspectives (Halpern, 1998).
Another poignant experience highlights both Kohner’s tactical acumen and Halpern’s (1998) appreciation for how oral history renders organizers’ creativity and their lived strategies: Babeland’s employees very intentionally threatened not to show up to work over Valentine’s Day weekend, the busiest shopping “season” in a sex shop. Kohner’s take-away: “hit them in the pocketbook and they will fold.” That threat to Babeland’s bottom dollar was ultimately what got the union recognized. Lived human anecdotes and commentary like this complicate the official narratives of labor movements (Halpern, 1998).
And “complicated” is certainly one way to describe Octavia Kohner. Toward the end of the interview, I found myself questioning her credibility somewhat. She claims that she’s been retaliated against since the union contract went into effect, and this is something she’s arbitrating (through her union lawyer) with management. She relays that she’s been placed on probation after a poor customer service review on Yelp. Her account left me wondering whether retaliation and legitimate critique can always be so neatly separated — especially for someone who embraces the mantle of “loudmouth agitator.” But here, we see what makes oral history different: oral sources share their meaning with us, they don’t impart neutral fact (Portelli, 1991). So, maybe the “truth” isn’t whether Kohner deserved the Yelp review, but how she interprets and narrates [what she considers to be] retaliation.
While Kohner’s confidence in booty shorts is enviable for sure, the larger takeaway is that oral history expands labor history beyond contracts and strikes. It reveals the messy, embodied, sometimes unreliable, but deeply human side of organizing.
Works Referenced
Halpern, R. (1998). Oral history and labor history: A historiographic assessment after twenty-five years. The Journal of American History, 85(2), 596-610.
Nevins, A. (1966). Oral history: How and why it was born. In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 29-38). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Portelli, A. (1991) What makes oral history different.In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history (pp. 45-58). State University of New York Press.
Sommer, B. W., & Quinlan, M. K. (2024). Introduction to oral history. In The oral history manual (pp. 1-10). Rowman & Littlefield.
Starr, L. (1977). Oral history. In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 39-61). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
[1] https://nyctransoralhistory.org/interview/octavia-kohner/
[2] “Kohner: So I was really good at agitating, because I’m a very agitated person who is good at making other people feel agitated. I was good at educating, because I learned things the way that you are able to teach your co-workers, which is not through textbooks but by talking. And kind of sometimes I would skip the inoculate part, which wasn’t very good, which is essentially like, being like oh, they’re going to say this but really it’s this….And so I missed that part sometimes….And I would bring people to O a little bit too early. I wouldn’t have felt them out enough where I didn’t agitate them enough or — I wasn’t very good at that part. I’ll admit it, I’m much better now….I was good at getting people agitated, who then other people could be like hi, you’re really agitated, do you want to meet [with leadership at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union]?”
[3] Another notable example of interview framing comes in the WPA Slave Narratives (1936) Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Administrative Files.