Invisible No More: Saving LGBTQ History in The Deep South
IHP
The Invisible Histories Project (IHP) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit based in Birmingham, AL. We are actively locating, collecting, preserving, researching, and creating community and educational programming around LGBTQ history in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle. IHP acts as an intermediary between institutions/organizations and everyday folks. We strive to break barriers between organizations and their local communities to ensure that preservation and research exist in a co-productive and relationship centered way. In addition to direct collection and preservation, IHP is invested in providing scholars with direct access to materials as well as creating a network of people conducting LGBTQ Southern archiving, preservation, education and research to make scholarship more accessible.
We focus on providing education around the Queer South to those within and outside the region through speaking, exhibiting, online materials, and publications. Finally, IHP seeks to help develop a new generation of scholars working in the Queer South as well as work alongside other professionals in the field to develop best practices for this work. We also run the online network and in-person conference, Queer History South, that focuses on issues in Southern LGBTQ history and archiving.
Could We Do This?
In 2015, my friend Josh Burford and I reconnected at a conference in Birmingham, AL. Josh and I had known each other from our days at The University of Alabama working to ensure that the campus was more inclusive to its LGBTQ students, staff, and faculty. I was working at a local university that hosted the event and Josh was in attendance as a presenter. Josh’s session focused on his work in Charlotte, NC to preserve the city’s LGBTQ history.
After the session, Josh and I looked at each other and said “could we do this in Alabama?” We began to plot and plan about how an LGBTQ archiving and history project might look in a rural Southern state like Alabama. Josh and I are both from the state, he is from the military town Anniston and I am from a very rural town in the Appalachians where Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee meet. So, we are well aware of the challenges of doing such work here.
Josh and I began meeting virtually, in the time before Zoom, on Skype and working in Google Docs. We worked tirelessly trying to assess needs and create a model that we felt could work for community-based archiving and public history particularly for Queer and Trans people in the Deep South. Once we felt confident in our ideas, we began reaching out to potential partners and community members about the possibility. Silence. It looked like the answer to our question, could we do this, was a resounding no.
November 2016
In November 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. Despite The Simpson’s predictions from decades before, most people in my life were stunned and scared. However, immediately after, we started gaining more and more interest in our community archiving plans. Suddenly, people were acutely aware of the need to preserve marginalized and at-risk histories. The buy-in had begun.
How to Pay for It All
While the on-the-ground support was slowly building and our model was being formulated and tested, the primary concern on our minds was how would we pay for this project. We knew from previous experiences that volunteer, part-time organizations often struggle to fulfill their mission and burn out their volunteers quickly. This is especially true for work dealing with marginalized communities like LGBTQ people in the South. We also knew that Southern Queer and Trans history deserved the respect and support of an official and dedicated organization in order to ensure that these narratives were not lost to time and would be recognized in the halls of history. We would settle for no less.
In 2018, we began a conversation with the Mellon Foundation about the possibility of funding such a project. The Mellon Foundation’s enthusiasm, encouragement, and questions truly challenged us to think bigger and more deeply about the work we could be doing. We remain grateful for their guidance during this time and their continued support. After numerous emails and discussions, it was decided that our plan would expand from Alabama (where we had already begun collecting) to Mississippi and then to Georgia. We received a two-year grant through a fiscal sponsor to test our model and partnered with three universities in each of the states we were working in to locate, preserve, and research these histories. This grant plus a large start-up donation from a local organization allowed Josh and I to quit our jobs and begin working full-time on the project.
Pandemic
In February 2020, I had just returned from Dallas, TX to plan for the second Queer History South conference. We visited the University of West Georgia to kick off IHP’s expansion into our third state. We had collected nearly 100 new collections in Alabama and Mississippi and were excited to expand into Georgia. Days later, the world shut down. The trajectory for the work came to a jarring halt as we all tried our best to stay safe. During shut down, we created ways for people to go through their personal items at home and worked on creating educational virtual programs and supports until we could be together once more. During this time, many people were lost. Much like the AIDS pandemic, this virus stole from us an immeasurable number of stories, wisdom, and community.
Current Landscape
If history tells us anything, we should have known that after a great collective health crisis significant social movements occur. But it would not have prepared us for the level of vitriol and the harmful direction that is rapidly occurring not only in the South but across the US. The rising tide of hatred at times feels overwhelming and inevitable. People of Color, immigrants, LGBTQ, disabled, and poor people have become involuntary ammunition in a culture war that will destroy us all. The other day I remarked that the hyperbolic is now reality and the attacks on education, marginalized history, and inclusion initiatives are nothing short of fascism.
I have always been a staunch defender of the South and want to challenge notions of the regressive, 20 years left behind, and inherently broken region. The South is not and cannot be a scapegoat for other regions not to address their own issues. However, it must be said that we are hurting. We are struggling. The South is home to the largest percentage of LGBTQ people in the country. Despite this, we are at the highest risk with our state and local legislatures attacking our communities for their own political agendas. We are on the edge of losing so much. So much that people before us fought and died for.
This burden is not only on our political players who routinely use the marginalized for their own means, but also on individuals and organizations who have the means to support the critical work happening in the South. The South is the least funded region in the US and holds some of the poorest states. There is a long legacy of people coming to the South to try and do the work for us, but we don’t need your people. What we need is your money and your resources. Our folks are the best suited for this work and it is imperative that people and organizations who are financially able and are invested in social change and preserving the rich and diverse histories of LGBTQ people give with reckless abandon to support our efforts and the efforts of those doing similar work in other underrepresented communities. They have attacked our people. Now they will erase our histories if we do not stop them. We must.
The answers to many of our current issues can be found in our histories. That’s why the people who hate and fear us don’t want us to have access to them. Our stories, our lives, our existence is powerful. I call on all funders, individuals, and organizations to look to the South in your giving, in your social media follows, and in your conversations with others. Because, as I say too often now, as goes the South as goes the Nation.
