Project Description

Documentary Focus

Our archive focuses on documents related to LGBTQ+ activism in the 1970s throughout Michigan. A variety of document types are present to provide users with several ways to engage with the information. These documents include: news articles, photographs, posters and fliers, and interviews and oral histories. An emphasis is placed on documents depicting the advancement of LGBTQ+ people's rights, instead of their existence in the period more broadly. This is in part to align the archive more closely with the Michigan education standard USHG 8.3.4 Civil Rights Expanded (Michigan Department of Education, 2019, p. 116).

Consideration of Archival Concepts and Practices

Our archive is designed to facilitate the core archival functions of promoting access and use. Users can explore archival materials on our site from any geographic location  and at any time, without the logistical burdens of scheduling research appointments or visiting the physical repositories where the source materials are held. The "search" and "browse items by type" features enhance discoverability, as users can view thumbnail images and item-level descriptive metadata. Providing digital representations of archival materials also allows multiple users to access the same items simultaneously. A secondary preservation benefit of digitization is that it reduces the handling of and potential damage to source materials.  

These features support the needs of our primary target users, Michigan educators. Educators can now search and access primary sources directly, bypassing the minimally processed collection inventory finding aids that often require some archival research experience to navigate (Greene and Meissner, 2005). Further, educators can incorporate these primary sources into lesson plans without coordinating field trips during the hours repositories are open, or navigating repository restrictions that typically limit access to one student examining one item at a time. 

However, allowing users to search and browse items in our collection thematically challenges the core archival concept of respect des fonds. Millar (2010, p. 29), citing Natalis de Wailly, describes respect des fonds as requiring archivists to “keep together as one unit all archival materials from one creating agency, according to their provenance or external order of structure." Presenting digital representations of items from multiple collections across two different repositories, the Bentley Historical Museum and Ann Arbor District Library, disrupts the original order of the items and blurs the concept of provenance. Force and Smith (2021) discussed another challenge of presenting decontextualized digital surrogates on a single platform is that users have limited understanding that the items have a relationship to physical source material.

Criteria for Record Selection

The selection criteria for resources in this archive were that our resources were centered around LGBTQ+ activists in Michigan in the 1970’s, post civil rights era, and display a range of activist-focused resources such as fliers, photographs, or oral history interviews. Specifically, the items in our archive come from people and organizations who were based in Michigan and focused their activism in Michigan in the 1970s, especially in the Ann Arbor (University of Michigan), Detroit, and Lansing areas. Due to these criteria, our archival items were selected in majority from the Ann Arbor District Library and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Target User Group

Our archive was created as a place for educators in Michigan to find materials to help supplement their teachings on the history of LGBTQ+ people. Throughout the 1970s Michigan was one of the most progressive states when it came to the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The first openly LGBTQ+ elected official in the nation, Kathy Kozachenko, was elected to Ann Arbor city council in 1974 (Drushel, 2013). Ann Arbor and East Lansing were among the first cities in the nation to make discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation illegal in regards to housing and employment (Gallagher, 1986; WKAR Public Media, 2012). Despite this, the Michigan Standards for Social Studies scarcely allows for educators to highlight this part of the state's history. By creating this archive we aim to give educators a hub of resources so that when given the chance they are able to highlight LGBTQ+ history in the state. This archive contains several copyright protected documents; by targeting educators our users do not have to worry as much about the copyright restrictions of these documents as they can argue fair use (Fisher, 2020, p. 243).

Perspectives

When looking at who our archive documents, it mostly contains white gay and lesbians in Ann Arbor and Detroit. Many of our resources consisted of pride marches and protests against discriminatory practices from businesses such as bars. We found few resources documenting trans people and queer people of color, but they were from the 1980s and beyond. The lack of resources documenting marginalized queer people in the 1970s is surprising given the Stonewall Riots being led by two trans women of color. There are probably so many stories and experiences of queer people of color from the 1970s, but because of racism and transphobia, their existence wasn't deemed as important for preservation.

When developing our project scope, we aimed to highlight a wide range of voices from the LGBTQ+ community, but continually encountered purposeful and unintentional gaps in the historical record (Society of American Archivists, n.d.; Trouillot, M-R., 1995). Many mainstream information institutions have historically, and contemporaneously, chosen not to collect materials from LGTBQ+ communities because they did not view these materials as significant or having enduring historical value. Even as queer activism and advocacy grew in the 1970s, police and other state actors weaponized anti-obscenity laws to seize and destroy correspondence, organizational records, protest and other ephemeral materials. Despite growing activism in the 1970s, ongoing criminalization and social stigma meant some LGBTQ+ folks practiced self-censorship in an effort to protect themselves from legal prosecution, discrimination, and violence.