Queering the Calendar

Project Description Page

Welcome to Queering the Calendar! Find information about our project below. You can use the browse option to see all of our resources, or sort them by calendars and event flyers. You can also peruse a timeline of events, or read a little more about all the organizations that were behind these events.  We hope you enjoy learning about the queer and trans history of Washtenaw County! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Documentary Focus: What is the documentary focus of your online archive? Consideration of archival concepts and practices: How does the design of your online archive reflect and/or challenge core archival concepts and practices?

The documentary focus of the archive is event calendars and flyers of LGBTQ+ events in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. While not specifically focusing on a specific time range, attempts have been made to find sources spanning a range of time to give a fuller look of what the queer community has hosted/been involved in the past decades. The dates of the events range from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The online archive makes use of Omeka’s timeline feature that allows us to have the archive appear as a large timeline/calendar of events. In following this practice, the records in the collection are further removed from the context/connection of the original collections they were found it and become more connected with the timing of the events and what other events were happening in the area, even if the group/organization was not in charge of them.

Target User Group: Who are the primary users of your archive? What are their specific user needs? Who are the secondary users of your archive?

The primary users of this archive are queer and trans adults in the Ann Arbor area. It is assumed that a majority of these users are not transient college students, but instead are permanent residents of the Ann Arbor area that have a stake in the long term community building that happens there. Users of this archive would primarily be searching for information on their community’s history - to find and understand history of people who share their common identities of being queer and/or trans. 

In terms of their needs, language is constantly changing, and the words we (as queer and trans people) use to describe ourselves now may not translate directly to words people used in the past, so it has been necessary to develop a certain amount of domain knowledge to translate between the different eras. In addition, users who haven’t seen themselves and their community reflected in historical narratives may be hungry for more information beyond the scope of the archive. Finally, it is important to take into consideration the various levels of computer literacy, as it is possible that older adults/seniors and/or populations with low computer literacy may want to access the archive.

Potential secondary users of the archive include: researchers studying the history of LGBTQ experience and culture in the Midwest; descendents of prominent queer and trans people in Ann Arbor area history looking for information on their ancestors; and LGBTQ+ allies looking to better understand and educate themselves about queer and trans history in the Ann Arbor area. 

User engagement is vital to our archive, which takes lessons from the community archiving movement to ensure that LGBTQ people can “access their history ‘on their own terms'" (Wakimoto, Bruce, & Partridge, 2013).

Consideration of archival concepts and practices: How does the design of your online archive reflect and/or challenge core archival concepts and practices?

Our archive, like many other archives of our time, challenges a historical view of archives simply by being targeted toward the public. “For thousands of years, archives were considered the property of the particular organization that created them, be it church, state or sovereign. Whether on papyrus, clay tablets, stone, leather or bone, early records were preserved for their owner, most assuredly not for the public” (Millar, 2010). While most archival collections now are curated for public consumption, historically, it’s important to acknowledge that this was not always the case. 

By pulling from multiple different archival collections, we are not abiding by the provenance of the individual collections we pulled from. “The overarching principle was not to intermingle the archives of different creating agencies but to keep each creator's documentary evidence together, in the order in which it was created and used by that creating agency” (Millar, 2010). Our project aspires to provide calendars of events related to LGBTQIA+ organizations in the Washtenaw area. We could have focused on a specific LGBTQIA+ organization, but in doing so, we would have a much narrower scope, and there would have been more voices excluded from the archive. We wanted to include as many calendars and flyers as we could find, so the picture we paint would be as vibrant as the organizations we showcase

Criteria for record selection: Where and how did you locate your archival material? What criteria did you use to select your materials?

We decided to focus on calendars and calendar events in the Washtenaw area. We located our archival material in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, the Bentley Library, and the Eastern Michigan University archive collection. We located them by making appointments and accessing collections.

Perspectives: What perspectives are explicitly expressed in the records? How are they expressed?

The perspectives in these records are primarily those of queer organizations administered by queer people, and whose intended audience are other queer and trans people. The perspectives of said organizations are expressed through calendars of events and flyers that represent events that occured. These calendars and flyers can in turn express what events queer organizations and people were interested in or supported.

These records only reflect what events the queer community were engaging in within the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area, and does not necessarily reflect on the wider queer community in Michigan, or even the United States. We as the authors, however, do understand greatly that "one's presence—or absence—in. . . archives" is greatly influential in the way communities can see themselves, but also how others see them (Cotera, 2015, 784). 

It should be added that although it is assumed the people who administered the organizations represented in this archive were queer, we also do not necessarily know the gender or exact sexual identity of everyone mentioned or expressed in these calendars and events.