Information for Community Archives: Introduction

Information for Community Archives

Introduction / Brenda Marston

PRELIMINARY DRAFT

Records of people's lives tell us about conformity and counter-cultures, how counter-cultures form, and under what conditions they survive and grow. They tell us that people of all sexual orientations make contributions to our society that may have little to do with their sexuality. They show us how individual lives were affected and restricted by society's intolerance of sexual and gender minorities, as well as how people coped with these pressures. They show us glimpses of unexpected tolerance and freedom and how they might have been obtained. They show that society's views about sexuality are not static or entirely predictable. Records like these also tell us about the connection between academic views of sexuality and people's individual lives. How fast did average people start using the terminology developed by Sigmund Freud or Alfred C. Kinsey or other sexologists? Can we see what impact the widely distributed Kinsey reports on male and female sexual behavior from 1948 and 1953 had on society? Records of different kinds of people with different sexual and gender orientations answer untold questions about our history.

Scholars interested in the construction of sexual and gender norms find documentation of people on the margins especially instructive. Sources about lesbian and gay identity help us see how society constructs heterosexuality . Sources on transgender people help us see how our society creates what is masculine and feminine. Our society sees many issues simplistically in either/or terms and establishes the “norm” by pointing out the “abnormal.” For all these reasons, historical documentation of LBGT lives is especially valuable.

LBGT people have been made invisible in history. Their lives often were led partially in secret and their records lost or destroyed. The absence of a history can make LBGT people feel unnecessarily alone or rootless. While LBGT records are not dramatically different from others in regard to privacy, LBGT people's distress at being denied a history is particularly strong. Society and history are diminished when the stories of certain groups and individuals are lost or overlooked. Community archivists can play a role in ending the unnecessary invisibility of LBGT history and help restore a fuller and more accurate historical record for us all.

As members of the Lesbian and Gay Archivist Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists, we are eager to share our knowledge and experience with community members who are investing their time and energy to guarantee the history of queer communities.

The intent of this webpage is a very basic primer of an archivist functions for those not professional trained who would like to or have already started collecting their local queer history. We hope to provide general knowledge while being brief and concise so implementation can be simultaneous with reading this webpage. Links and a bibliography to more advanced topics for those interested are provided.

“Archivists commit their time and their talents first to saving the permanently valuable records of individuals and groups, then to organizing those records in a systematic and coherent way, and finally (and most importantly) to making those records and the information they contain available to users.” ( Understanding Archive and Manuscripts , James M. O'Toole, 1990).

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