Emilie Alcock LIS 775 June 9, 2012 Queerly Invisible: LGBTQ Archives Looking at the archetypal representative of the

queer community in todays society, it is easy to forget that gay men were not always viewed as the effervescent Jack from Will & Grace and lesbians did not always have a quaint center of operations at the Home Depot. Harmon reminds us: Gay history is elusive. Its pioneers are dying, taking with them the truth about events now mythologized or forgotten. It has no famous faces . . . Rarely are its traditions passed from parent to child. What survives is a record of the past century pieced together through books and news clippings, posters and paintings, letters between lovers and home movies of commitment ceremonies.1 These sentiments cannot be overstated when putting queer history into the context of libraries and archives. These collections often come together piecemeal through the pack rat tendencies of some major advocates.2 The institutions themselves are usually volunteer run with limited funding.3 Access to queer archives is a major issue for a subject area whose history is rooted in invisibility. In order for these archives to be viewed as relevant for years to come, they need to be better managed, with a distinct need for national collaboration and digitization. Any comprehensive overview of queer history begins with a clarification just what do all the letters in a queer acronym stand for? Personally, I think there are too many letters, they are too confusing (Q can stand for either Questioning or Queer, and can also be used twice
Andrew Harmon, Buried Treasure, Los Angeles 50, no. 6 (2005): 58. Aimee Brown, How Queer Pack Rats and Activist Archivists Saved our History: An Overview of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Archives, 1970-2008, in Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users: Essays on Outreach, Service, Collections and Access, ed. by Ellen Greenblatt (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011), 121 [hereafter Pack Rats]. 3 Bill Lukenbill, Modern Gay and Lesbian Libraries and Archives in North America: a Study in Community Identity and Affirmation, Library Management 23, no. 1/2 (2002): 98 [hereafter Modern Gay].
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to represent both terms), there is not unanimity on order of acronyms (e.g. LGBT vs. GLBT), and it generally gives me a headache. In this paper, I choose to use the term queer to encompass any aspect of human sexuality that is not traditionally heterosexual. One event in queer history can singularly be seen as an impetus for social activism, and that event is the Stonewall Riots of 19694. Lukenbill succinctly sums up the events of these riots: The riots resulted from a series of raids on a popular gay bar called Stonewall [Inn] located in Manhatten [sic] by the New York City Police Department. Depending upon ones point of view, the bar was subjected to a series of police raids for allegedly selling liquor illegally; or the raids were the results of minor liquor violations and a generally loud and young customer group who were causing neighbourhood complaints . . . After several such raids had occurred in rapid session over a short period of time, some patrons of the bar . . . perceived these as police harassment and fought the police. The rioters or protestors and their supporters took to the street, with a series of confrontations with police lasting for several days. Stonewall and the Stonewall flag have now become wellidentified symbols of both gay pride and gay liberation.5 Immediately prior to and around the time of the Stonewall Riots, the turbulence of the civil rights movement seemed to influence the early stages of the gay liberation movement. Both crusades stemmed from a strong emphasis on justice and equality,6 and after the riots, a desire and need to document and preserve the cultural history of the queer community grew. As stated earlier, a huge characteristic of queer culture is its assumed invisibility, which causes the history of preservation of materials to be fraught with complications. This is evident in many collections of archival materials that contained queer materials, but of which the staff was either ignorant or intentionally suppressing it. Early archivists often left out mention of same sex behavior at institutions or they failed to encode speech that may have a hidden meaning, such as use of the

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Pack Rats, 121. Modern Gay, 93-94. Modern Gay, 94.

word friend.7 Another historical impediment of preserving archives has been intentional destruction of materials, either by owners, their relatives,8 or by government officials such as the Nazi party. Even before the Stonewall riots, there is evidence of collections of queer materials, as well as undercurrents of activist sentiments. Two early establishments are the Berlin Institute of Sexual Science, founded in 1919, and the library of the Dutch Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in 1912; the Nazis destroyed both collections.9 Many archives founded after Stonewall had their beginnings in personal collections dating before the riots, such as the collection of Jim Kepner, founder of the Western Gay Archives in 1971 in Los Angeles, which later became the Natalie Barney/Edward Carpenter Library of International Gay & Lesbian Archives and in 1995 merged with ONE, Inc.s library and archives to form the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives; another personal collection was that of Jess Jessop, which grew into the Lambda Archives of San Diego.10 Because many queer archives are not independent of larger institutions, it is not easy to know exactly how many exist; however, the ONE Institute estimates there are approximately 110 queer archives within and without the United States.11 Lukenbill discusses the Gerber Hart Library in Chicago, founded in 1981; the National Archives of Lesbian and Gay history in New York, founded in 1990; and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, also located in New York, founded in the early 1970s.12 An article in The Advocate highlighted the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive

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Pack Rats, 123. Pack Rats, 123. 9 Pack Rats, 122. 10 Pack Rats, 122. 11 Modern Gay, 97. 12 Modern Gay, 97.

Project in New York, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and many others.13 Across America, there is a mixed bag of far-flung freestanding repositories and university-based special collections,14 whereas other countries such as Canada and Australia have a complete national queer archive. Some of the access issues that plague queer archives have been previously stated (suppression of materials, failure to properly encode, destruction of materials), but there are even more significant issues these types of archives face. These include funding, space, staffing, preservation15 and deterioration, poor catalog access (an offshoot of inadequate staffing),16 and the reluctance of donors to part with their materials.17 Another issue is collaboration. In a special interest area such as queer studies, one would think that the relatively few information organizations in existence would be interested in and supportive of the others, as well as harboring a desire to work together to database their collections. However, Lukenbill writes of these organizations as not fitting this description and makes a few recommendations: Communication among libraries and archives seems to be meagre. Although gay and lesbian interest groups exist in the major library, archival, information science and historical professional associations, much work is needed to bring these groups and their interests together. A national database of collections and their holdings and other forms of networking are badly needed. Digitisation and mounting of documents on the Internet is also needed.18 It is important to have consortiums and conferences of queer scholars and organizations, like the International ALMS (Archives, Libraries, Museums, and Special Collections) conference, first held in 2006 at the University of Minnesota,19 with subsequent conferences in 2008 at the City
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Dan Allen, Where Our History Lives, The Advocate, November 22, 2005, 43 [hereafter History]. History, 43. 15 Pack Rats, 124. 16 Modern Gay, 99. 17 History, 43. 18 Modern Gay, 99 19 History, 43.

University of New York, and in 2011 in Los Angeles.20 Queer archives have begun to employ Web 2.0 technologies such as social media in the promotion and marketing of their organizations. One of the best examples of queer archiving online is OutHistory.org, a product of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.2122 Although a worthy undertaking steeped in a hidden history, queer archives are burdened with many problems, primarily those of access issues. These collections need many improvements in management, chiefly in forming beneficial working relationships with other similar organizations, and in digitization of their collections. The value of these types of archives cannot be understated, and for the sake of both the history and future of queer studies, I hope that some of these issues are able to be resolved.

Bibliography

Pack Rats, 129. Pack Rats, 132. 22 OutHistory, outhistory.org, last modified April 26, 2012, http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/05/.
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Allen, Dan. Where Our History Lives. The Advocate, November 22, 2005. Brown, Aimee. How Queer Pack Rats and Activist Archivists Saved our History: An Overview of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Archives, 19702008. In Serving LGBTIQ Library and Archives Users: Essays on Outreach, Service, Collections and Access, edited by Ellen Greenblatt, 121-135. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011. Harmon, Andrew. Buried Treasure. Los Angeles 50, no. 6 (2005): 58-64. Lukenbill, Bill. Modern Gay and Lesbian Libraries and Archives in North America: a Study in Community Identity and Affirmation. Library Management 23, no. 1/2 (2002): 93100. OutHistory. outhistory.org. Last modified April 26, 2012. http://outhistory.org/wiki/Main_Page.