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To be sure, I am not a formally trained archivist, nor a librarian or a curator. I'm an academic historian, but as nearly every historian will [End Page ] tell you, archivists, librarians, and curators are so vital in the preservation and cultivation of the historical record. Every historian—be it in academia, in museums, in public history institutions, or somewhere else—owes a huge debt to archivists who strive every day to maintain the documents, ephemera, and artifacts of our collective past.

Just a half a century ago, few institutional archives cared about collecting materials that dealt with the culture and experiences of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people. But with the growing political and social clout of LGBTQ people in the s, ordinary actually, extra ordinary LGBTQ folks began preserving their own materials, confident that their newsletters, clothing, letters, buttons, and other records might one day be able to prove queer people did exist in the past.

As Aiden M. Bettine and Lindsay Kistler Mattock explain in an article on the origins of queer archives, these grassroot institutions worked together and learned from one another in their hope to preserve queer histories; these archives did not "work … in isolation. Recent US Supreme Court decisions like Obergefell and Bostock marked significant changes to LGBTQ American life in recent years [End Page ] bringing marriage equality to the United States and a prohibition on job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, respectively.

It seems that Supreme Court victories in the first two decades of the new millennium have not quelled anxieties about the existence of LGBTQ people in modern life; so much work remains. In the following discussion, I talk to two scholars who are doing some of that hard work. The first archival studies scholar and archivist is Dr.

Jamie A. Lee, an associate professor of digital culture, information, and society at the University of Arizona.

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One of the most admirable aspects of Lee's AQA is its recognition that queer communities are incredibly diverse, often holding "complicated, contradictory, as well as complementary histories that can all come together [at the archives] as valid everyday knowledges and truths. The second is Dr. The payoff?

The Faulkner Morgan is an archive that, in Coleman's words, is 94 percent unique. What follows is a discussion about their experience in the world of community-based archives outside the queer meccas of San Francisco and New York. I loved hearing their thoughts on what led them to create these archival spaces, the challenges they confronted, the politics of archival institutions, and the diverse work that their archives do beyond collecting really cool and really queer stuff.

This is not a comprehensive discussion of LGBTQ archival practices; rather, it is three folks sitting down over Zoom talking about personal experiences and our mutual love of uncovering the nuances of the LGBTQ past. I thought we would start off by introducing you to our readers, describing how you got involved in LGBTQ archiving, the background information on your respective archives, where they're from, and what was the impetus for creating these archives in the first place.

So, let's start with Jamie. Thank you for having us, Eric, and so good to be with you, Jon. I lived in Minneapolis and [End Page ] was a documentary filmmaker and co-owned my own multimedia company from the mid- to lates until we moved to Tucson in Following the murder of University of Wyoming freshman Matthew Shepard, I decided to do something in rural Minnesota.

I went from place to place and slept on futons and collected the stories of how people lived, and they could live out in small towns of one hundred people on the Iron Range. So, it was really interesting. And we just got talking and he said, "People are dying.