Project Description 

Scholarship in the field of Queer Digital and Media Studies has seen a significant amount of growth in the past decade, spurring many publications, such as the journal Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, and two books in Litwin Books’ Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies series: Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, by Alana Kumbier, and Queers Online: LGBT Digital Practices in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, edited by Rachel Wexelbaum. It was recently the subject of a featured article in American Libraries (October 28, 2020), “Promoting LGBTQ Resources,” by Timothy Inklebarger.

There are a growing number of digital archive sites documenting various aspects of LGBTQ+ history, but none that we could find that focused specifically LGBTQ+ protests of students at the University of Michigan. It is our hope that this site will find a welcome home among similar attempts to document the history of this population. The items we used for this project far from exhaust all that is available at UM’s Bentley Historical Library; this site is intended as a supplement to existing online digital archives, and in no way represents an attempt to replace a need for individual study of archives. This site focuses largely on materials found in the James W. Toy Papers at the Bentley.

The Bentley was not yet open to the public at the beginning of the term, so our team began this project by perusing digitized newspaper archives, primarily of the Michigan Daily and the Ann Arbor News. At this point our focus was on the history of LGBTQ student organizations at the University of Michigan. Based upon the photographs we were able to find, we soon discovered that our subject was too broad and decided to narrow it to LGBTQ-related student protests at UM. Luckily, the Bentley opened to the public, by appointment only, and Andrew was able to arrange a visit to view a few boxes of the Toy Papers. He was able to find flyers related to student protests, and it is primarily these with which this site is concerned. While this was an issue of time and economy, it’s important to note that this decision further narrowed our subject and the perspectives presented through the material. There is no anti-gay protest flyers here, for example, but this isn’t to say that they don’t exist in other collections and archives. From the standpoint of our group of budding archivists, we find this no ethical conundrum. We make no claim to absolute objectivity or completeness. Here and elsewhere we make it clear that the voices that make themselves heard through the images presented in this site, both social and political, are those of an underserved and marginalized population struggling for even a semblance of the civil rights awarded non-LGBTQ populations.

The summer of 1997 found Andrew working in the sorting room at the Bentley, where he helped sort and organize the Toy Papers. Over the years he’d always meant to go back and look over the collection, and this project proved a great opportunity to do so. This collection is of Jim Toy’s personal papers, as well as the records of the UM office where he worked.[1] The collection as it is now is very much a work of archival practice; while the respect des fonds are kept largely intact, original order wasn’t an option. The creator, Mr. Toy, didn’t keep his files in any organized order; the donation consisted of many boxes, each of them in various states of chaos. As such, it can make no claim to keeping original order. The collection consists of six series. Authenticity of the records here used is verified by Andrew’s visit to the Bentley; reliability is assumed by virtue of its placement in a university archives. The collection has research value, as evidenced by its use in one book and one dissertation we were able to find, among likely others, and its artifactual value is posited by the presence of original posters, flyers, and photographs, among other unique papers in the collection. The metadata attribute sets of the items present here were created by our team.

The primary user group of this site consists of LGBTQ+ peoples and others interested in LGBTQ+ history, but also, more broadly, researchers interested in radical politics as it relates to student protests. In many ways, this group may be thought of as a ‘community of records,’ not unlike that of genealogists.[2] This term refers to a context in which historical records exist in the form of social memory and unpublished papers; in this way, history is passed down from older to younger members of the group. Family histories, largely the product of “labors of love,” are not likely to find a mainstream audience, but history doesn’t have to be written down and cataloged for it to be history; it can find passage over the years through this process of passing the torch to the next generation.

LGBTQ+ history is very much a part of social memory more than officially documented history, and as a result of this, history is passed down through story-telling. That an increasing number of books are being written on the subject in the past twenty years points to historians mining the archives of figures such as Jim Toy. The relative scarcity of archival material is due the fact that the papers of certain figures in LGBTQ+ history are still in the creator’s possession. The user group needs are related to an ongoing search for more and new books on lesser known figures in history, some of the material from which may come from recently unearthed archives. One of the rationales of this site is to create and preserve a documentary record of social and political aspects of the LGBTQ community at the University of Michigan and in Ann Arbor. The archive is also intended to draw attention to the Toy papers to bring them to greater public awareness.

Andrew Powers

Andrew is a first-year MSI student at UMSI. He has worked in libraries for more than 20 years, at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan for two summers as an undergraduate student, and at Eastern Michigan University’s Halle Library from 1998-2020. He received a BS in Philosophy and Written Communication from Eastern Michigan University in 2000, and an MA in Creative Writing from Eastern in 2011. His focus at UMSI is on archives and library science, and he has a career goal of becoming an academic librarian. His primary role in this project was as researcher and writer; this included customary library research, a visit to the Bentley to view and digitally capture images of flyers and photographs located in the Toy Papers, and writing the bulk of the text found on this site.

Shelbie Vilag

Shelbie (she/her/hers) is a first-year Masters student at UMSI focusing on Digital Curation. She has interacted wtih libraries her whole life, and interacted with the archive at Eastern Michigan University’s Halle Library during her undergraduate years at EMU. She is also currently working at the Clark Library at the Hatcher Graduate Library at UM under a work study grant. She received a BS in History from Eastern Michigan University in 2020. Her involvement in this archive was initated as part of the SI580 course, Understanding Records & Archives: Principles and Practices, and primarily included the assembly of the Omeka S site, as well as digital presentations. With this archive, she aims to further her understanding of how to construct a digital archive in a meaningful and easy-to-use way. 

References

  1. Powers, TE, Erlich, R. (1996-1997). James W. Toy Papers, 1963-2007: Finding Aid.
  2. Yakel, E, Torres, DA. Genealogists as a “Community of Records.”
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