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Project Description

About Our Project: Archives vs LGBTQ+ Content 

Our Archival Intent (Documentary Focus/Consideration of Archival Content and Practices)

  • This archive is an effort to practice feminism and archival activism in the information field. According to the article “Critical Feminism in the Archives”, often historical education in the U.S. leaves out voices of people in marginalized groups (Cifor, p.2). Our archive takes queer content out of archives that may not value or highlight the pieces, and gives it new context for students studying LGBTQ+ history. 

  • Because we are independent from university or upper management directives, we can create our own rules and policies to ensure that these materials are represented in a way we deem appropriate and respectful. These efforts reflect those of archive managers attempting to practice Alexandra Juhasz and Ann Cvetkovich's model of “Queer Archive Activism,” which is a form of archival practice that “requires space for active engagement with materials and a space for housing materials that push against traditional archival notions of evidentiary value” (Cifor, p.7).

  • For more information or more queer-archival content, we encourage you to check out the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society; Lavender Library, Archives; Lesbian Herstory Archives; and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. Several of these archives are also recommended in the journal article, “Archivist as Activist: Lessons from Three Queer Community Archives in California.” Every page about each couple should contain links to more information, as well. The Reference page may be helpful, too! Our archive is mostly meant for initial education/entertainment purposes, but these archives have a more extensive collection of LGBTQ+ content and could be helpful for students looking to do deeper research into Queer history. 

Target Users/Secondary Users:

  • Primary users/Target Users: High-school students and other teens interested in researching LGBTQ issues.

  • Secondary users may include: LGBTQ+ Studies Scholars, LGBTQ+ members looking for historical representation, and people casually interested in personal correspondence between romantic partners.

Issues that Complicate Finding Queer Content in the Archive:

  • Because of the possible danger associated with outing yourself in the past (and even now), historical accounts of homosexuality are not always straightforward. Often, there aren’t clear-cut expressions of affection between LGBTQ+ couples to find, because they would have faced societal (and sometimes legal) discrimination for being openly in love.  This results in suppressed or distorted archival interpretations of historical sexuality. Cisgender male couples were sometimes reduced to sodomites or criminals in government documents because of their love for each other – and their shared correspondences were used as evidence used to implicate them in court cases. On the other hand, women’s relationships often flew under the radar as “close female friendships.” It is also possible that family members could have destroyed or hidden letters that they felt would provoke societal judgement.

  • Historian Lillian Faderman offers a nuanced analysis of some of the issues involved with researching and writing about older queer narratives. Some of the couples in our archive, like Jack Bloch and Max Gundy, were very clearly part of the LGBTQ+ community. The relationships of other couples like Dr. Elizabeth Cushier and Dr. Emily Blackwell are not as easy to define, and Faderman's perspective strongly informed our work on their page.   As Faderman writes in her book To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America--A History, there is a portion of the scholarly community that "might point to the precarious status of identity - the instability, indecipherability, and unnameability of sexualities - and conclude that lesbianism cannot really be discussed, particularly in regard to history" (1999,p 2). However, while Faderman acknowledges that these are valid points, she outlines a specific definition of the term "lesbian" that applies to the argument in her book, separate from modern understandings of the word (1999, pp 1-3). Without this more flexible definition of an admittedly imperfect vocabulary term, it would have been difficult for Faderman to clearly communicate her argument about the contributions of women who chose nontraditional familial support networks to American society (1999). Her book is a public history, and our archive has a public (rather than scholarly) audience. We have attempted to avoid presentism or simplification of the lived experiences of the historical figures we cover in this archive while celebrating their possible places in the history of LGBTQ+ Americans.

  • One point that informed our decisions about which letters to focus on is the ‘Kelman Test’ described by Eric Ketelaar which asks “which risk accrues to human dignity through the disclosure of confidentially imparted data? Is that risk acceptable in the light of identifiable advantage for the individual or for society?”  (“The Right to Know, the Right to Forget?” 13). While Ketelaar’s is discussing archival processing,  this question was also important for us to consider as we sometimes weighed hypotheses made on the strength of hints and assumptions against the importance of highlighting underrepresented narratives in the historical record. Sarah Hodson’s personal experiences, recounted in her article “In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities” reveal how dealing with recent collections belonging to LGBTQ+ individuals can be a difficult balance between providing access and protecting individuals mentioned in the collection who have not consented to share their private lives with the public (Hodson).  Because of this, we made the decision to focus on older letters that have already been published online or in print. Our most recent letter was published with possible pseudonyms in the 1960s, and the rest are from the 1940s and before. 

Perspectives:

  • The main perspectives included in our archive are western, English-language, White, and middle-upper class.

    • Unfortunately many voices are noticably missing, such as non-western voices, voices of people of color (POC), and non-cisgender voices. Even within a field that studies marginalized narratives, (unsurprisingly) there are groups without equal representation in the archival record/archival administration -- perhaps they are there, but not marked in finding aids or not digitized in a way we could find.

  • Unfortunately, for many couples (both famous and less recognized) we were interested in highlighting, there weren’t any records to be found. Their correspondence might have been erased by “well-meaning” loved ones, not saved, or destroyed. It is also possible that some sentiments might never have been put to paper out of fear of being (what we know now as) “outed”.

Criteria for Record Selection:

  • Two central categories: letters (correspondences) and images (usually photographs).

    • Correspondences must be between queer couples, and must be written before the 1970’s.

      • Each couple needed to have at least one digitally accessible letter held in an archival repository. 

      • If this letter was not clearly a “love letter” (ie. explicitly romantic), it needed to include some evidence of the couple’s bond (like pet names, words of endearment) and be supported by other primary and/or secondary sources that provide insight about the nature of their relationship. 

      • Letters should be easy to transcribe or already be transcribed, because we did most of the transcription ourselves. (We are not professional transcribers and have limited experience in the area.)

    • Pictures were sourced from other archival repositories or books (no random sources from the internet).

      • We attempted to find at least one picture of the couple or a picture of at least one member of the couple.

  • Additional primary or secondary sources that are discussed on the couple’s pages but not included as items in the collection are cited and hyperlinked for easy access if they are available on the internet. We wanted to streamline the contents of the archive and focus on correspondence, but still provide supplementary educational tools and offer examples of types of sources that our user set could use to make historical arguments.

Searching for LGBTQ+ Material in the Archives

  • This webpage, put together by the National Archives in the UK, is an extremely good starting point for researchers struggling to find LGBTQ+ material in archives. They discuss the kinds of collections that might hold LGBTQ+ content (think beyond personal papers to government documents, criminal records, etc), and provide a long and detailed list of suggested historical search terms.

  • If you want to explore American collections, the Library of Congress has put together a resource page  and a research guide that could be helpful. Not all of their LGBTQ+ content has been digitized, but they have gathered lots of links and collections together that could inspire a new project idea. 

  • This Brainpickings article on "The Greatest LGBT Love Letters of All Time" is a great resource to explore if you want to learn more about other famous love letters between LGBTQ+ couples. The article provides information about the archives or published books where these letters can be found, too. 

References for this page can be found here