Abstract
Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy Stone and Jayme Cantrell, presents a collection of essays detailing the experiences of researchers navigating queer archives. Funded by the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation Trust, the text is a product of the work of 15 researchers who each expose the queer archive’s affective nature, acknowledging the subjectivity in their engagement with archival works. Through the lens of each researcher, the reader enters the queer archive.
The text is divided into four sections: materiality of the archive, analysis of nontext materials, marginalized queer lives, and a catalog of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in the archives. In their introduction, Stone and Cantrell articulate how the government attempted to systematically erase queer lives in the material archive. However, despite discrimination and oppression, the authors explain how queer archivists are able to identify undertones of queerness in a world fraught with heteronormativity. And yet, the authors explain that the queer archive is skewed toward documenting privileged LGBT individuals, noting the continued erasure of queer people of color. Furthermore, the authors highlight that queer archivists contradict norms of traditional archival research by queering the physical archives of LGBT history outside of the ivory tower and locating them within the community, with many LGBT collections housed beyond the bounds of academia.
The first section explores the archival space, itself, focusing on contrasting archives (community based vs. institutionally housed), noting how institutional archives present as highly exclusive spaces meant to be occupied by researchers and academics. The subsequent chapters in the section reveal the contents of the archives, detailing what is and is not available. The second section explores “extra-archival” experiences, from Youmans’s research on Elsa Gidlow’s gardens to Enzer’s encounter with Minnie Bruce Pratt’s vibrator. The third section is dedicated to marginalized queer lives, highlighting queerness within the Chicana art movement, focusing on the life of Essex Hemphill, and incorporating the history of the trans community into the archive. The final section speaks to the ways in which queer lives were documented within the archives through autobiographical texts, sexual self-documentation, and magazines.
The researchers interspersed their essays with their own experiences exploring the archives; however, the narratives do not always amplify the reader’s understanding of the malleable nature of the archival materials. Throughout the volume, there are moments when it appears that individual researchers may have reached beyond the bounds of their experiences with the archival materials, searching for similarities where they do not exist. In Fullan’s chapter describing Essex Hemphill, a black gay poet who was lost too soon to the AIDS crisis, Fullan often compares herself, a bisexual-identified white woman, to Hemphill. These comparisons while interspersed with acknowledgment of her privilege, seem, at times, naive. At one point, Fullan compares a collage that she made from news articles to Hemphill’s collection of clippings related to the unresolved homicide of 20-year-old, Ronald Gibson, more commonly known as “Star” (p. 213).
Overall, the volume seems to lack a cohesive intention regarding the subject of queer archives. Each piece seems to have been written without consideration of the content contained in the other essays; oftentimes concepts re-emerge chapter after chapter, reiterated by a new author. This repetition often occurs in descriptions of differences between community-based and institutional archives. Beyond this redundancy, the essays are only further tied together in that they exist either in, around, or parallel to material queer archives. The disjointedness of the volume also reinforces the blurring together of queer history, assuming that because these archives, researchers, and spaces are all “queer” that they can be situated alongside one another. While reading, I often asked, was this disjointed narrative intended to provoke discomfort, to impress a nonnormative or queer experience upon the reader? Or did the editors miss an opportunity to provide cohesion? As the text fails to provide an answer, the lack of synthesis appears to undermine the volume’s purpose of encapsulating the queer experience. Although, individually, the essays capture distinctive elements of the queer archive, the essays fail as a collection of works, linked only by the label of queerness. By pushing together these archives, it reinforces a single narrative of a community that has many voices.