Queer community archives

[2] They involve communities collecting, preserving, and sharing materials which they deem to be significant in ways that are not necessarily subject to professional oversight or located in formal institutional settings.

Less important than a queer community archives’ position inside/outside of official institutions is a commitment to the wider strategy of promoting visibility, equal rights, social respect, and cultural space for 2SLGBTQ+ people.

Primarily, due to a lack of funding, there is a dependence on significant personal sacrifice, be that financial, physical or mental on behalf of key activists and a network of volunteers whose commitments arise from great emotional and political investment in queer community archives and their impact.

[11] Dedicated queer community archives originated within and are considered an outgrowth of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the first groups, organizations, and institutions solely committed to maintaining such collections were formed.

These archives were founded as conscious, political acts vital for presenting their communities positively to the dominant culture of heteronormativity and homophobia, while preserving their history for future generations.

[23] Cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich describes how traditional archives have difficulty documenting intimacy, love, sexuality, and activism; experiences fundamental to queer people.

The process of bringing together geographically scattered material into a digital collection is called "virtual reunification" and creates empowering views of communities that are dispersed, decentralized, and heavily marginalized even within their own social movements.

[32] For instance, Syrus Marcus Ware has critiqued The ArQuives in Toronto, Canada, for creating a "narrative of struggle and resistance that always begins with whiteness and that is used too often in the service of homonationalism".

[33] Conversely, a number of queer community archives founded in the 1970s and 1980s have directly and critically engaged with questions of race, gender, class, diversity of sexual cultures, language, citizenship and immigration status, and issues of intersectionality.

In practice, however, evidence of the experience of cisgender white gay men often constituted a majority of the collections, in part because systems of privilege meant that more such material had been produced and preserved in the first place."

Another example is the Historical Archive of the Latino GLBT History Project, started as a personal collection by José Gutierrez in Washington, D.C., in 1993 and incorporated as a nonprofit in 2007.