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Our Stories Our Selves:
An Archive for the LGBT Community
Have you ever felt left out in the various versions of history presented
in books, museums and documentaries? Have you ever tried tracing family
history and found that we are not there, we don't figure, we are
invisible? If so, you'll be interested to learn of a new project
that aims to gather and present the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender people.
At the Glasgow LGBT Centre, we are starting up a project to record stories
and images from the lives of our community. Oral history and reminiscence
work has been carried out with many communities, but it is rare with LGBT
people. The last century has seen extraordinary changes in the way we
live our lives, and older people in particular have priceless experience
of what it has been like to live through those changes. We are interested
in stories of LGBT people at all stages of their lives, but we are making
a special effort to contact older people who have so much to tell us about
their experiences over a lifetime of remarkable transformation.
Collecting people's stories is not a simple task. We shall need
volunteers who are willing to undergo training in this kind of work, to
ensure the safety and security of everyone involved, to operate recording
equipment, to develop skills and sensitivity in interviewing, and to establish
awareness of the issues of ethics and confidentiality that are inevitably
raised by work of this kind - especially in our community.
A collection of stories is a fundamental part of representing our lives
for ourselves, by ourselves, but how can we make sure that the stories
are preserved and accessible? Taped interviews will require indexing.
Ideally they would be transcribed. There is also a need for safe storage
of the material that we collect - whether stories, images or artefacts.
Photographs can be a powerful way of conveying the atmosphere of a place
and time, and there are many other personal items that can give the sense
of a location, event or era: badges, hats, T-shirts and items of fashion
that might express an identity through the styles and conventions of the
time.
One of our first events will be an exhibition with a strong visual aspect,
that is further emphasised in the theme devised by Glasgow artist Jim
Campbell: Becoming
Visible. Participating in the exhibition would involve submitting
a photo or object that represents an important event in your emerging
sexuality. Rather than simply hanging the works on the wall, the exhibition
will take the form of an installation and will encompass several art forms,
including music that brings back memories of a particular time and place.
Part of the inspiration for this type of exhibition comes from the work
of the French artist Christian Boltanski. The notes for a recent Kansas
City project Our City/Ourselves: Portrait of a Community describe Boltanski
as spending his artistic life working with the most ephemeral of materials
- newspaper clippings, photographs, found snapshots, clothing, candles,
light bulbs, old biscuit tins - to examine and to mark our transitory
lives. The aim is to form an expanding, growing, living archive, that
makes a profound statement about community identity. The Kansas City exhibition
focused on the idea of arrival - how we came to belong to the community.
For us this is often seen in terms of our coming out, becoming visible,
arriving as a recognised member of our community.
For archiving projects with the LGBT community, North America also provides
some excellent examples, as in the National Archive of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
& Transgender History in New York and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay
Archives.
Closer to home, there are several projects in the UK (see
links). One of the most highly developed of these is the Brighton
Ourstory Project. They collect stories, photographs and artefacts, and
have informative, fascinating and beautifully produced publications. One
of these is Daring Hearts: Lesbian and Gay Lives of 50s and 60s Brighton.
In this book forty lesbians and gay men speak openly about their experiences,
whether amusing, sad, erotic, poignant or defiant. They remind us of an
era when disclosure was especially difficult and risky. For gay men, even
living together in private could land you on the wrong side of the law:
your own house could be raided, rooms examined to check that you had single
beds, and bed-linen taken away for forensic examination. The Brighton
Ourstory Project has brought stories like these to light, and has not
only published them in book form, but has also organised themed exhibitions
and theatrical performances based on episodes in the lives of the LGBT
community. The performances have been enormously effective and often deeply
moving.
In Scotland we are very fortunate to have the Lesbian Archive &
Information Centre. This was originally set up in 1984: after many years
as a London-based resource the collection moved to the brilliant Glasgow
Women's Library in 1995 where it continues to develop and expand. A local
project on LGBT lives is just beginning in Edinburgh in association with
City of Edinburgh Museums and the Living Memory Association. This is a
reminiscence project, and connects with the kind of work undertaken by
the Age Exchange Reminiscence Centre in Blackheath, London. This Centre
is itself starting a project with their local LGBT community, with the
aim of bringing stories to theatrical performance through the Age Exchange
Theatre Trust.
These projects in Scotland and England are highly supportive of our
work, that has its base in Glasgow and will develop into national archive
resources for Scotland. A crucial area for cooperation is simply the exchange
of information, so that different projects can learn from each other,
can move towards computer software compatibility in information storage
and retrieval, and can collaborate in archiving, publication, exhibition
and performance.
A further area for collaboration is research. Through research on LGBT
archiving and reminiscence projects, we aim:
- to investigate what LGBT archiving work has already taken place in
Scotland, and to encourage links and exchange of information between
different projects
- to explore the benefits and difficulties of setting up LGBT archives,
and to put together practical advice and guidance for similar projects
- to apply this research in the practical development of LGBT archives
in Scotland
- to consider how identities and relationships are managed in situations
of social exclusion, especially where disclosure threatens to exacerbate
such exclusion
- to consider the forms in which accounts of lives can be expressed
and published: this involves working on the forms of recording, interpreting,
expressing, publishing, exhibiting and performing accounts of lives.
Archive projects with the LGBT community are particularly important because
we have not only been excluded from full participation in our society,
but we have also been written out of history - silenced and made invisible.
This is apparent not only in the state records, figures, statues and museums
of official history, but also at the family level. Our relationships have
mostly been omitted from the family photograph album, from the monumental
inscriptions and from the family tree. Indeed, if you try to put a same
sex partner into computer software used to draw up a family tree, you
will find that the partner has to change sex to be included! Only heterosexual
partners are admitted, and even they are termed spouses. One way of subverting
this is to draw up alternative family trees, recognising all the wonderful
diversity of our friendships and connections, whether actual, historical
or mythical, including the relationships that have achieved recognition
alongside those that are deemed illegitimate - all the support we have
achieved from our community and beyond. In this way we can construct a
new sense in which 'we are family' - heretics beyond the bounds
of heredity. We plan to have workshops on alternative family trees, which
could be the subject of a fascinating exhibition.
Having our stories and ourselves recognised can have great benefits.
Some individuals find that, for the first time, their stories are heard
and their value acknowledged. This in itself can be self-affirming or
even therapeutic. Many beyond our community are unaware of the things
we have to go through. Our stories provide vital material for people training
in the social services and for those who aim to develop inclusive social
policy with genuinely equal opportunities for all. Personal stories can
have a wider social and political impact.
What can you do if you are interested in participating in our archiving
project? If you think you might like your story to be told, perhaps alongside
photographs that sum up a time in your life or that celebrate a valuable
relationship, then contact us. If you
would like to volunteer for any of the work of recording, transcribing
or archiving, or if you are just interested in discussing the project
with us, again do get in touch. If you know of others who might be interested,
please let them know and encourage them to contact
us. We especially welcome contact with people who might not figure
in the usual LGBT meeting places. Our stories will reveal ourselves as
a wonderfully diverse community.
Jaime Valentine
Revised version of article first published in CentrePoint, September 2002
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