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If you were at the Equality Begins at Home Dinner in Burlington on Saturday, March 27, 1999, you might recall the Archives Installation along the wall opposite the buffet. I do, especially because I was involved in mounting copies of newspapers, flyers, leaflets and pictures on the foam board and oak tag.
Part of being involved was seeing and handling many of the original documents. This was an unforgettable experience, particularly with the newsletters (now called zines) that came out of the late '60s and early '70s. There was one, "Gay Flames," that championed "Gay Liberation." Another, now a crumbling newspaper, had articles addressing the "revolution" and resistance to the war in Vietnam. Still another, a long feminist rant, had been published with blue mimeograph ink. It was typewritten, with rows of words covered in Xs. This kind of texture in revolutionary polemic is simply gone. The word processor has sent it the way of the Gutenberg presses.
Holding these things in my hands, reading their messages, tingles went up my spine and neck. I felt the hands of the first readers of these documents with my hands. I experienced a tiny bit of the rage and triumph of an earlier time. Ahh, so close! Not more than 30 or so years ago. Within my lifetime. But so far; there is no chasm that yawns wider than the chasm of time, and no bridge more fragile than memory.
A common refrain I heard during the nights we assembled the archive installation and mounted it was "nobody taught me gay history!" The people I was working on this project with were considerably younger than I, in their early twenties. And I've thought hard about this hunger they have to learn about their history. It is the same thing I felt when I was in my early twenties and coming out.
GLBT people have been made invisible and unmemorable. Consider the meaning hidden in the word 're-member:' to replace limbs/members - living parts - back where they originally were. A member of a community is a living part of that community, just as memory is a living part of a person. Without this vital aspect of ourselves, we as individuals and as a community are isolated from other if not in space then in time. We are separated from an essential perspective needed to place ourselves.
Consider how your individual life would unravel without memory. You would live in a completely chaotic world without continuity. You would be unable to learn from your mistakes. You would be unable to grow except for growing old. You could not plan for the future. It is the same way with a community.
An archive of GLBT history would function as the memory of our community. Such an archive is how we can each anchor our lives into history. Without being 're-corded' - woven in again for good measure into the tapestry of world events - we are lost to history.
If we were to tend to such evidence of our past, it would give our political struggles more credibility in the eyes of the world. People would have more respect for our movement merely if they knew we had such things as historical archives, even if they themselves never even visited them. Furthermore, our archives would motivate members of our community to work harder to achieve our political and cultural goals, because they will be shown proof that our community has a history that they can be a part of.
Finally, an archive makes our own beauty more accessible to us. We can use our own historical materials to create works of art. I saw proof of that hanging on the wall of a banquet hall on the night of March 27, 1999.
The RU12? Community Archives Project would be an integral part of the Community Center we are working towards assembling in Burlington. Nothing showed me more eloquently that such a project is essential to each of us than the bits of crumbling newsprint I brushed onto my pants after handling some of the documents we'd made copies of to mount for the Archives Installation.
In another 20 years, a lot of this stuff won't even exist for us to make copies of. Mould and water and the press of time make the revolutionary works of generations into stuff that makes you sneeze. Oh, yes, in the long term memories die as civilizations die, but it is your choice: you, holding this paper that will soon be dust, can choose to help preserve your pride and passions into history. This preservation requires will, imagination, bricks and bank accounts. RU12? One of the people whose struggles will be remembered?
