About Us

Dylan Michael Canterbury Baker is a history and education student at Cuesta Community College. He is working to become a history teacher with an emphasis on LGBTQ+, Irish and U.S history. While attending Cuesta College, he founded and was the first president of Cuesta Pride, the only LGBTQ+ group at Cuesta College. At the CCQAP, Dylan helps to conduct interviews and prepare the final interviews. Dylan is involved in local queer activism and is currently working to make the LGBTQ+ community more visible in San Luis Obispo.

Zachary D. McKiernan is a Professor of World History at Cuesta College. Trained as a public historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he worked extensively in the memory field of human rights in Chile and, following, civil rights in Virginia as a faculty member at Hampton University.  He uses publicly engaged scholarship to promote positive social change.  He is proudly supported by a loving spouse and three sons.  

Steven Ruszczycky (he/him) is an associate professor in the English Department and a teaching faculty member of the Women’s, Gender, and Queer Studies Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. He completed his PhD at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York in 2014. His research interests include 20th century U.S. literatures, Queer Theory, and Porn Studies, and his writing has appeared in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014), and Porn Archives (Duke UP, 2014). His book Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction was published by the University of Chicago Press in January of 2022.

David Weisman has been producing award-winning educational documentary and non-fiction film and video works since 1982, specializing in issues of social awareness and environmental concern. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he created a series of videos focusing on shelter and environmental issues in the developing world, including “ON BORROWED LAND,” set amid the shantytowns of Manila, and executive produced by Oliver Stone. Following this he co-produced a series of award-winning videos for U.S.A.I.D. on community development in the newly democratic South Africa and the old city-centers of Morocco. From 1995 through 1999, when David produced and directed a 28 part environmental education series, “PRESERVING THE LEGACY” for PBS and their distance learning affiliates. David is currently directing the video portion of the TEXAS LEGACY project of the Conservation History Association of Texas. This compilation of oral history interviews with prominent Texas environmentalists like Jim Hightower, Diane Wilson and author Daniel Quinn is being achieved by using digital video technology, and delivering the completed segments over the Internet as well as on on DVD. There is also a companion website at www.texaslegacy.org where the streaming video clips can be viewed and studied. A companion book, “Texas Legacy,” co-edited by David, was released by the Texas A&M University Press in October, 2010.