Hello there!
Welcome to our archive, Unbury Your Gays*: An Excavated Collection of LGBTQ+ Content from the Archival Record. Our archive is meant to unconcover the hidden lives of LGBTQ+ people in 19th and 20th century America. We mainly showcase letters sent between romantic partners, but we also discuss why LGBTQ+ content is so hard to find in institutional archives.
Some of the people featured are fairly famous (you may be surprised to hear that they were/are part of the LGBTQ+ community), while others are just "normal" people. Not all of our letters are explicitly love letters -- many simply show the daily correspondence that two people in a relationship share together.
*The name of our archive is a play on the "bury your gays" trope -- where queer characters in popular media die more frequently than their heterosexual counterparts (TV Tropes, n.d.). Essentially, instead of a long-standing "happy ending" that many TV, movie or literary forms promise two love interests, many queer couples and queer characters are treated to their untimely ends (TV Tropes, n.d.). These deaths are especially devastating, because the deaths often remove the only representation of queerness in the piece of media (which is already an infrequent occurance) (TV Tropes, n.d.).
Our word-play teases both the exumation of queer content in archives built for a hetero-compulsive world and the reinforcement that queer people can also find and enjoy romantic happiness.
Feel free to explore our page!
- Our Collection of letters and photos can be found under "The Collection" tab on the navigation bar; each couple has their own gallery page.
- You can also browse all of the items uder the "Browse" tab.
- If you'd like to have a bit more fun and are a more casual visitor, check out our Scavanger Hunt!
- The "Terminology Clarification" tab might be good for those who may be confused by the acronyms we use or who want to learn more about the language associated with the LGBTQ+ community.
References for the pages in this website can be found here.