Abstract
Representation of queer expression through traditional and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) media can be reflective of efforts to stigmatise sexual difference and a way to challenge negative stereotypes. In a renewed era of censure and erasure of difference through digital media, the conundrum of the relative merits of inclusion of LGBTQ+ representation and LGBTQ+ invisibility has come into sharper focus. This article considers this dilemma through analysis of an eclectic personal archive of news clippings, ephemera, travel diaries, and autobiographical writing collated in Newcastle, Australia, by social justice activists Merv and Janet Copley. Despite their reformist stance on other socially progressive issues, the Copley's silence around queer narratives reflects the prevailing societal norms and political constraints of post-Second World War Australia that shaped even radical activists. This article critically reflects on how media framing of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity intersects with archival selection processes, and the ambiguities therein for queer (in)visibility.
Introduction
The rights granted to social groups based on sexuality, sexual expression and gender identity (Duggan, 2002; Richardson, 2017) are subject to norms reflected in institutional practices and their relationship to personal motivations and geo-politics. News media framing of these issues, and how that framing might influence the selection or omission of archival content, is central to the political fortunes of people who identify as something other than heterosexual. Yet, research into the ways the criminal law has stigmatised diverse sexual orientation and gender identity has tended to uncritically focus on periods of criminalisation and penal intensification through news media that can overlook a diversity of viewpoints and experiences of surveillance and intimacy (Ellis and Barham 2024).
Mid-to-late 20th century mass communication played a significant role in the stereotyping of aspects of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity. This was most notable in news media reporting on police surveillance of same-sex attracted men and its use as justification for criminalisation and penal intensification of male same-sex intimacy in the post-Second World War (WWII) decades in Australia and other jurisdictions (Ellis and Barham 2024; Willett, 2000). At the same time, regional perspectives in Australia on these issues can be overshadowed by a disproportionate focus on cities such as Sydney and Melbourne (Waitt and Gorman-Murray, 2011).
The Australian city of Newcastle offers a unique vantage point for understanding the intersecting forces of social progress and conservative values in the post-WWII decades in Australia, and how they relate to current perspectives on tolerance of sexual orientation and gender diversity. This is because of Newcastle's place in the national imaginary as a driver of post-WWII nation building through coal mining, steel production, and ship building, and its current status as a leading regional area in Australia supportive of same sex marriage and transgender representation in local politics (Ellis and Barham 2024; Murphy, 2024).
The police-queer 1 community relationship in post-WWII Australia was often characterised by arbitrary police surveillance of the homosexual ‘menace’ (Willett, 2008). The recording and interpretation of this conduct involved police reports, case law and media reporting that in the late 1940s and into the 1950s reinforced the criminal stigma of male same-sex attraction (Wotherspoon, 1989), and which was increasingly challenged by gay and lesbian media in the late 1960s and into the 1970s and 1980s (Ellis and Barham 2024). In a parallel universe during much of the same period, social justice activists Merv and Janet Copley were diligently documenting aspects of the social and political landscape of post-WWII Australia. As such, we initially approached the Copley Collection with a clear hypothesis: given Newcastle's known history of policing the queer community in the mid-20th century, that some trace of those incidents would appear in the Copley archive.
The Copley's selected personal archive of news clippings, ephemera, travel diaries, and autobiographical writing from the 1940s to the mid-1980s, documents pivotal moments in Australian nation-building. Merv and Janet captured the emergence of labour rights, women's and Indigenous justice movements, and profound social changes that reshaped the region's post-WWII imaginary (Ellis and Barham 2024). Yet, within this rich documentation of marginalised voices and social movements, queer experiences are absent. This silence, we argue, reveals the deep entanglement between progressive social movements and conservative values that characterised regional Australian life in the post-WWII era, and nuanced viewpoints on surveillance, censorship, and intimacy not reflected in mainstream news media of the period.
Newcastle-Maitland is the seventh largest area by population in Australia, and aspects of post-WWII police-queer history in Newcastle have been documented (Ellis and Barham 2024; Wafer, 2015; Wafer et al., 2000). Previous research has examined how increased police surveillance, penal intensification of male same-sex conduct, and sensationalised media reporting rendered queer experiences hyper-visible (Ellis and Barham, 2024). Yet, it has often overlooked how this visibility may paradoxically have created silences in personal, community, and archival records. This article addresses that gap through interrogating the queer silences within the Copley Collection through an archival justice lens (Rawson, 2015). The article argues that these silences expose the moral and structural conditions under which certain histories are excluded. In doing so, we take an ethical approach to examining and addressing archival silences through triangulating data from newspaper and other archives with the Copley Collection. This is in recognition of multiversal perspectives on justice issues that enrich our understanding of the breadth and depth of regional life (Araluen Corr, 2018; Guberek and Hedstrom, 2017). Geopolitical instability threatens this pluralistic approach to archiving that has burgeoned in recent years. As such, sexual pluralism has become vulnerable to social media disruption through broader grievance narratives that have coopted late 20th century human rights-based claims of victimhood grounded in the social and economic disadvantage of minorities (Ellis, 2023).
To frame our inquiry, we begin by examining the vocabulary of archival silence and explaining its relevance for understanding queer absences in archives. We then introduce archival justice as our theoretical approach for interrogating these silences, and which aims to address systemic biases and exclusionary archival practices. Next, we situate the Copley Collection within the socio-political landscape of post-WWII Newcastle, while foregrounding the absence of queer narratives. Our subsequent analysis examines how these silences operate as active constructs shaped by broader institutional and cultural practices, rather than as mere voids in the historical records. Lastly, we consider the implications of our findings for future archival practice and the representation of marginalised histories, advocating for approaches that acknowledge and address these silences to create more inclusive historical representations.
Interrogating queer silences in the archives
As calls for recognition of diversity in archives have grown, and across broader institutional settings (Mazzei, 2003), ‘silences’ in archives have increasingly become sites of contestation over the reasoning behind the selection and destruction of material (Fowler, 2017). Underscoring these debates is concern that archivists are not selecting material that is reflective of social diversity (Fowler, 2017), and the necessity to give voice to the ‘inaudible’ (Mazzei, 2003). This attention has focused not only on identifying absence, but on the reasoning behind perceived absences. A ‘vocabulary of silence’ has thus grown into a potential evaluative framework for queer silences in archives.
Mazzei (2003) considers the revelatory capacity of an archive along a spectrum of silence: Polite silence as a precaution against offending a stakeholder group; privileged silence through inability to agree on positions of privilege or inability to identify privilege, which may mean the inability to speak about that privilege; veiled silence through a different premise to the one being offered; intentional silence, which is a purposive silence used to align expression with identity; and unintelligible silence – undiscernible silences that come with a caution against making presumptions about silence. ‘Inhabiting’ these silences in archives can be an ethical minefield. However, to ignore the silences is a vexed position if evidence of a lived experience has been documented elsewhere.
Archival justice
As Foucault (1981) reminds us, categorisations of sexuality and gender come into being through the tactics of power in discourse, its instability, and its capacity to produce meaning. Consequently, the way queer identity is represented in both physical and digital spaces carry significant weight, influencing not only how they are understood, but how they are preserved for future generations (Baucom, 2018; Kumbier, 2014; Stone and Cantrell, 2015).
Going beyond identifying archival silences, an archival justice framework shifts the focus to addressing the systemic biases and exclusionary practices that produce them (Rawson, 2015). This approach positions archives as instruments of resistance that amplify minoritarian voices long suppressed by dominant power structures. It challenges us to interrogate the political dimensions of archival practices by critically examining what is preserved, and what is omitted. As such, archival justice reimagines archives as dynamic sites for pursuing justice, where silences stimulate reflection, exclusions can be rectified, and historical narratives rebalanced (Gilliland et al., 2020; Rawson, 2015; Valderhaug, 2011).
Gilliland et al. (2016) describe ‘queering’ the archive as an act of interrogating and subverting normative structures, thereby disrupting the ‘invisibilized’ everyday practices that exclude rather than include (Lee, 2017). At the same time, community-based archives have evolved into spaces of personal and political transformation that nurture belonging and mobilise collective action (Caswell et al., 2018; Stone and Cantrell, 2015). In these contexts, queer archives emerge as sites of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) worldmaking, offering pathways to reclaim the queer past while affirming justice in the present (Cover, 2019; Stone and Cantrell, 2015; VanHaitsma, 2019).
While queering the archive challenges conventional frameworks (Gilliland et al., 2016; Lee, 2017), the concept of the archival multiverse underscores the broader need to diversify the archival paradigm (Gilliland et al., 2016). The archival multiverse encompasses the convergence of diverse evidentiary texts, memory-keeping practices, institutional frameworks, personal and bureaucratic perspectives, and cultural and legal constructs that form a pluralistic approach to archival understanding (Gilliland et al., 2016). Expanding on this approach, we argue that silences are integral dimensions of the archival multiverse.
As Carter (2006) observes, the dynamic interplay between speech and silence is one of mutual dependence, with each element deriving meaning from the other. As such, silences function as critical counterpoints to documented voices, exposing what is excluded, and prompting deeper reflection on the underlying structures that govern what is recorded and what remains hidden (Carter, 2006). This perspective provides an ethical framework for engaging with queer histories – one that honours silences as meaningful, while simultaneously combining previously isolated narratives through selective archival processes.
Every archival act, from cataloguing books to labelling files, becomes political resistance against queer invisibility by actively countering silencing and erasure (Rawson, 2015). Valderhaug (2011) extends this by positioning archival justice as both an individual and collective imperative. At an individual level, archival justice ensures democratic participation through equitable access to records; at a collective level, it reshapes social memory through inclusive representation. Taken together, these dimensions frame archival justice as a practice that must actively confront whose histories are preserved, under what conditions, and at what cost to those left silent. Gilliland et al.'s (2020) concept of ‘pluralizing the archive’ serves as a concrete strategy for advancing archival justice. This approach envisions a comprehensive reshaping of archival spaces to accommodate different ways of knowing, forms of evidence, transmission methods, and cultural traditions of recordkeeping (Gilliland et al., 2020).
Freeman (2023) emphasises the critical role of explicit queer metadata using contemporary and inclusive language in enhancing the discoverability and contextualisation of queer histories. By integrating such practices with pluralising the archive, queer narratives can be made more accessible, ensuring their rightful place in the broader historical record and challenging the power dynamics that have historically excluded, and/or erased them.
In the context of the Copley Collection, pluralisation offers a means to regard silence not simply as an omission, but as a potential locus for renewed dialogue and meaning-making. It also encourages collaboration with the communities who have historically been omitted or erased, inviting them to participate actively in determining how their narratives are recorded and interpreted (Gilliland et al., 2020). Viewing silence as an active element in the archival multiverse prompts us to recognise it as a deliberate and multifaceted construct shaped by institutional practices, personal motivations, and the geo-political context of a point in time. With plurality in mind, we now turn to the article methodology, which foregrounds the reasoning for the comparative analysis of the hyper-visible police surveillance of male same-sex attraction in Newcastle and the Hunter region illustrated through two news media case studies, and their invisibility in the Copley Collection. These silences in the archive compel us to rethink the narratives we inherit, and how they might be transformed.
Methodology
The chaotic nature of the Copley Collection includes box after box of newspaper clippings arranged by themes such as ‘Aborigines’ and ‘coal’, which are neither systematised nor annotated. As such, we decided to firstly work through the newspaper clippings and ephemera on files that had cultural or spatial relevance to demographics that were likely to have been foci of surveillance for police in the period of interest (‘youth’, ‘Aborigines’, ‘beaches and baths’, ‘surf life-saving’, ‘drugs’, ‘entertainment’). Then, we looked for text or visual references that were suggestive of state regulation and surveillance of non-conforming social conduct (‘legislation’ and ‘bugging’). We read through the Copley diaries (C335-C391 – 1932-1971), as they provided five decades of a systematic account of political and cultural life from the Copley's point of view, and included images and text. This included material that was intentionally and non-intentionally collected. In the latter category, we include the newspaper advertisements and material on the same or reverse sides of newspaper cuttings. Text was scrutinised for mentions of sex and police. Images were scrutinised for visual representations of these two themes. Subsequent companion research on the Copley Collection has identified places and spaces, and slides of them, that were frequented by queer people in Newcastle, and which gets us closer to explicitly connecting the multiverses of Merv and Janet Copley with queer scene spaces in Newcastle (Betts and Ellis (forthcoming)).
Our analytical approach utilised reflective thematic analysis to process this archival material. This method facilitates the transformation of complex information into structured, meaningful thematic categories (Braun and Clarke, 2021). We individually recorded key themes and notes of key events which we then cross-checked to ensure consistency. Any material which was problematic (usually because it appeared unconnected to other material) or particularly interesting or pertinent to our study, was recorded for further evaluation.
We developed and refined coding schemes aligned with our research goals through iterative processes of documentation, reflection, and practical application (Guest et al., 2012). We then organised these codes systematically and identified relationships between coded elements sharing contextual or experiential similarities. This analytical progression revealed overarching themes grounded in our theoretical foundations of archival justice and queer silences in the archives. The approach enabled us to recognise significant patterns, relationships, and notable absences in the archival record – particularly the silences surrounding queer narratives in a collection otherwise dedicated to progressive social movements. As such, this archive provides an important context for our research for two reasons:
The Copleys are politically radical, demonstrated through the selection criteria for their collection, its thematisation, and its informal setting that operates outside of ‘established memory institutions’ (Moss and Thomas, 2021). They are deeply interested in the labour movement and are committed to social justice. It is possible reading through their archive to chart their emerging consciousness of such issues as equity for women and rights for Indigenous Australians. At the same time, they are a deeply domestic and family-oriented heterosexual couple. They look after their parents and have a pet ‘Putikat’, of which they were very fond. Details about their daily lives; their travels, the food they eat, the events they go to, paint a vivid picture of life in Newcastle and Australia during the period of our study.
These two aspects combined allow us to enter and experience the world of the Copley's and this world forms the context for our study. The Copley archive transcends being a historical reference and collection of papers, to become a richly described ethnographic place (Des Chenes, 1997). The collection is neither neutral nor holistic, but neither is the eye of the ethnographer (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). So, on the one hand, we cannot know what the Copley's views were on the queer issues of the time. But we do know that such issues were not within the scope of their collection of clippings and ephemera on the social issues of the period. At the same time, the collation of their unconventional ‘rebel archive’, emphasises that act of resistance is in and of itself a contribution to generating diverse sources of memory, regardless of their tangible outcomes (Moss and Thomas, 2021).
Multiversal perspectives on queer silences
Much of the Copley Collection spans the 1940s to the mid-1980s, a period of 40 years that included the broadening of the criminalisation of male same-sex intimacy and its penal intensification (Wotherspoon, 1989), and the expansion of civil rights for gays and lesbians, and the decriminalisation in 1984 of homosexuality in NSW. Queer life in the Hunter region during the post-WWII decades involved several high-profile cases of intense police surveillance of same-sex attraction that were reported in local news media (Wafer et al., 2000). The basis for the broadening of criminalisation is reflected in the media framing of 10 males for a range of same-sex ‘unnatural acts’ (Crimes Act 1900 (NSW)) in mid-1952 as ‘gang’ activity. Some of these males allegedly recruited ‘reinforcements’ from Sydney (Newcastle Sun, 1952), and ‘lured’ minors into the vice of homosexuality. Now known as the Yellow Socks affair – because of the allegation that the men wore yellow-coloured garments to indicate their interest in male same-sex intimacy – most of the men pleaded guilty to ‘abominable’ offences, such as buggery (Ellis and Barham 2024), and several to indecent assault charges (Newcastle Morning Herald, 1952). This type of media coverage did more than inform; it functioned as an extension of state control, reinforcing public anxieties, and justifying increased police intervention. In this way, criminalisation and penal intensification were not merely enacted through legislation, but reinforced through media narratives that framed same-sex attraction as a social threat. At the same time, this was a period when criminal pathology of same sex attraction was the basis for the growing commodification of psychological and medical responses as ‘cures’ for homosexuality (ILGA World: Lucas Ramon Mendos, 2020), implying that criminal law was but one way to address homosexual ‘deviance’.
By the early 1960s, the absence of media reporting on the ‘menace’ of homosexuality is indicative of the normalisation of its criminalisation and penal intensification throughout the 1950s. It was in the late 1960s that globally gay and lesbian resistance to criminalisation through the identity politics movement gained visibility and created awareness of gay and lesbian issues. By the 1970s, gay and lesbian activists were challenging stereotypes within unions in Australia, though progress was slow (Askew and Fortescue, 2000), and through law reform and advocacy. Reflective of this slow progress generally on gay and lesbian rights, the Newcastle police investigation of the 1977 murder of Newcastle Herald worker Alan Edge in 1977 (Moloney, 2019) included the disproportionate police surveillance of the local queer community over Edge's death through intensive questioning, ostensibly to track down Edge's killer/killers. Consequently, police furthered their access to this still criminalised community and their meeting places, seven years out from the decriminalisation of homosexuality in NSW in 1984 (Ellis and Barham 2024). At the same time, there was a tension between traditional media framing of same-sex attraction as deviant, and challenges to this framing through the maturing gay and lesbian media (Ellis and Barham 2024; Willett, 2000), and through successful calls in the early 1970s from liberal politicians for assessment of films based on ‘current community standards’ (McKinnon, 2013). These calls were significant, as even in the mid-1960s, the Censorship Board included homosexuality within ‘sordid’ subjects that included rape, nymphomania and prostitution (McKinnon, 2013).
In contrast to the ‘order’ of the criminal law and intensive police surveillance of male same-sex attraction, the Copley Collection is an eclectic archive of news clippings, ephemera, travel diaries, and autobiographical writing. The Collection has a personal interest focus and was collated by Mr Merv Copley, a trades union clerk based in Newcastle, Australia, and his wife, Janet. Merv and Janet were closely connected to the labour movement in Australia. Both were tireless activists and campaigners for social justice in Newcastle and nationally, helping to organise International Women's Day and May Day celebrations in Newcastle during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The Copleys were meticulous in their enumeration of the political economy of the post-WWII decades in Australia, and the social issues that were emerging during those decades. They lived in Newcastle, and travelled widely domestically and internationally.
The personal diaries in the collection span 1932–1971 and the newspaper clippings range in date from 1797 to 1983. The collation and recording of entries in the Copley Collection was very much grounded in local industry, and was a collaborative effort: ‘I gathered a lot of material for him from Trade Union Offices. About 4 pm on Fridays I took the shopping trolley to the Trades Hall and visited the Trades Hall Council, the Water Board, and The Seamen's Union office etc, and picked up the daily papers and Hansards they had finished with and brought them home for Merv to dissect them. We worked during mealtime with Merv clipping the various papers and Janet with a lead pencil in her hand recording the dates and the paper or book from which they had been cut’ (Copley, 1993).
Importantly, this archive is not a neutral collection. It is a collection of material purposely collected by people who were interested in social reform, and so reflects these interests. We have little indication of why the Copleys preserved the material and how they thought it should be used. We are, however, told that the collection is an important part of their lives: Just before Christmas 1965, Merv comments that the work of ‘clipping up of papers alone is eleven weeks behind’ (Copley and Copley, 1965–1966 (C367: 70)).
Space, place, and identity
The Copley Collection not only provides detailed descriptions of a place in time, it also provides insights to a place over time. Through the Copley Collection we see change in the attitudes and concerns of Newcastle and the nation as well as the emerging and developing political consciousness of the Copley's themselves. Their attitudes towards Aboriginal people are a key example. In 1961, during a trip to Tasmania they wrote: ‘This intelligent although primitive race did not long survive the impact of white civilisation’ (C348 1961). ‘[i]t is a startling fact that no one has any real idea about how many Aborigines there are. Section 127 of our constitution prevents Aborigines being included in the National Census’ (C358 1961). ‘Unfortunately, old prejudices still continue in this club. The ladies must drink in a separate section’ (C348 16th March 1961). ‘Under station management their homes are disgraceful. “Homes” are rusted iron shells, four walls leaning in towards each other, pieces of hessian covering up the worst holes. There is no water and certainly no sanitation’ (C 358: 1964: 127).
Indicative of the paranoia of the Cold War, and the fear of being surveilled by the state or by foreign states, is the box of clippings on ‘bugging’, which spans a full decade from 1959 to 1969 (C022). Reflecting the perennial tension between surveillance and privacy, is an article from The Australian from 1968 – ‘Controls on electronic Peeping Toms urged’ (C022); and an article from The West Australian from 1969 – ‘at odds on bugging’ and which notes that ‘bugging is a means of stealing secrets’ (C022).
The collection also reveals particularly telling silences around sexuality. Their only significant engagement with the topic appears in a set of newspaper clippings in the archive listing under the entry ‘youth’. This material shows an emerging permissiveness, evident in an opening address to University of Newcastle students in 1968: ‘you will come into an environment in which the sexual restrictions of society are openly flouted if not actively at least verbally. Most of you will have to try to find some path between indiscriminate free love and complete celibacy’ (Mr Giles Martin, representative of students representative council) (Copley and Copley, 1968 (C318: 5/3/1968)).
It would appear that in keeping with societal norms that the Copleys, while socially progressive and politically radical, remain sexually conservative with an emphasis in their own personal lives on privacy. The Copleys are deeply concerned about equality, and their growing awareness over years in the archive of the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Australians is palpable. They were also very aware of levels of surveillance in the community, and as communists were surveilled themselves. Merv has an ASIO file dating from 1948 to 1964 (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 1948–1958 & 1958–1961). They were also very conscious of their activities being the subject of police attention, such as their participation in the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship in 1952: ‘This morning one party went to Katoomba by bus and were shadowed by the police. They are doing this for every function held as part of the Carnival’ (Copley and Copley, 1952–1953 (C343: 2))
Engaging with the archive: Reading silences, reconstructing context
As noted in the introduction, given Newcastle's known history of policing of queer individuals and communities in the mid-20th century, we anticipated some trace of those incidents in the Copley archive. We expected to find, for example, clippings about local arrests or court cases involving same-sex conduct or diary comments on the sensational news of the day. After all, the period of our investigation (1940s-1980s) encompassed exactly those decades when moral panics about homosexuality episodically gripped Newcastle and when the gay and lesbian rights movement began to emerge. We knew from external sources that these developments were ‘newsworthy’ at the time. We also knew the Copleys paid close attention to the stories of marginalised people – their archive is filled with material on the struggles of workers, women, youth, and First Nations peoples. It stood to reason then, that the evidence of the queer community's plight might be interwoven in their files.
Confronted with this unexpected quiet, we were compelled to reflect on what it meant. The contradictions we observed in the Copleys’ archive are in many ways characteristic of the times in which they lived – a time that was at once deeply domestic, future-orientated, and revolutionary. It was also a world where censorship was routine – films were cut by censors, events were monitored, all to uphold a particular social and moral order. The Copleys’ diaries document these realities repeatedly, treating them as almost mundane inconveniences. The censorship of a Chinese film Merv was watching in 1952, the recounting of how even transportation for a peace festival was shut down by authorities, Merv's ASIO file. This was the atmosphere of silencing that pervaded their daily life – an atmosphere they were used to navigating in pursuit of their causes. Juxtaposed with this government surveillance is the police surveillance of same-sex attracted men in public and private.
By immersing ourselves in the Copley Collection, we were able to reconstruct a sense of the world in which the events we were interested in (the policing of homosexuality) took place. Even without direct references to homosexuality, the archive's wealth of context – the exceptional alongside the ordinary – allowed us to piece together the social backdrop. Through the Copleys’ eyes, we see Newcastle in those decades as a community where people went to union meetings and peace rallies on weekends, and to the beach or the cinema for leisure; where they read about international Cold War dramas and local crime in the same newspaper; where a night out at a pub or a swim in the ocean could be subject to unwritten rules about who belonged and who did not. The Copley archive let us observe what they ate, what they wore, what they believed in, as well as how people were labelled, persecuted and prosecuted for their beliefs and desires, or made invisible through legislation. In short, we gain an appreciation for how a society can render certain representations of identity invisible even amid apparent openness. The gay men of post-WWII Newcastle were hyper-visible in police and media and court records, yet invisible in personal chronicles like the Copleys’ – a paradox that speaks to the heart of archival silence. Yet they, and their lesbian and queer confreres may well have been congregating in some of the same public places for friendship and intimacy.
In the Copley Collection, silences surrounding queer narratives serve both as evidence of historical marginalisation (Trouillot, 2015) and catalysts for critical reflection (Caswell et al., 2016). One might ask, did the Copleys consciously avoid queer topics, or were they simply oblivious? We cannot know for certain whether the silence in their archive was deliberate or inadvertent. Protecting one's public identity by staying silent on taboo subjects could have been seen as a pragmatic strategy in that era (Fowler, 2017). Likewise, the general prudishness to the body and sex and emphasis on ‘politeness’ in the 1950s may have guided the Copleys to steer clear of discussing sexual matters in their writings. In Mazzei's (2003) terms, the Copleys’ silence could be read as a ‘privileged silence,’ stemming from their position in the social majority (heterosexual, married) which afforded them the choice to prioritise other social reforms and leave sexual minority issues alone. It also has elements of ‘veiled silence,’ in that it deflects attention from an underlying reality by focusing on other issues (Mazzei, 2003). Both forms of silence were likely at play, products of the Copleys’ personal socio-political parameters, and the broader socio-cultural constraints of Newcastle in their time.
Seen through the lens of archival justice, silences like the one we encountered demand action. They are not just benign absences to be noted; they are calls to intervention (Carter, 2006). The power dynamics that produced the silence in the Copley Collection still echo in many archives today (Gilliland et al., 2016; Kumbier, 2014; Rawson, 2015). Thus, our engagement with this archive also became an exercise in imagining how to transform such silences into opportunities for recovery and inclusion. By recognising the silence and probing its origins, we effectively turned it into a space for asking new questions: What stories of queer Newcastle were happening in parallel, and where might they be recorded if not here? We sought out those stories in other archives, and in doing so, we began to ‘fill’ the silence not by speculating, but by linking the Copley Collection to a larger multiverse of records. This approach aligns with Gilliland et al. (2020) and Rawson's (2015) ideas that every archival omission we identify should motivate a rethinking of archival practices, so that marginalised voices are no longer relegated to the periphery. It also follows Gilliland et al.'s (2016, 2020) call to move away from a singular authoritative archive and toward a dynamic, participatory process effectively pluralising the record. By engaging the Copley archive in conversation with other sources, we start to reshape the narrative, incorporating voices that were left out and creating a more inclusive historical tapestry (Gilliland et al., 2020; Rawson, 2015).
The silence in the Copley Collection was not an endpoint but a starting point for advocacy. It highlights that archivists and researchers must act as active defenders of justice, ensuring that queer histories, and other marginalised stories, are preserved with accuracy and integrity going forward (Carter, 2006; Gilliland et al., 2020; Rawson, 2015). For instance, if the Copley Collection were being processed by archivists today, one could imagine adding contextual annotations about the queer history of Newcastle in those years – effectively writing a counter-narrative in the finding aids or exhibit descriptions to acknowledge what the Copleys did not collect (Baucom, 2018; Freeman, 2023; Gilliland et al., 2016). Additionally, engaging the local queer community to contribute oral histories or supplementary materials could help bridge the gap left in this regional archive, integrating the voices that were historically silenced (Gilliland et al., 2020).
The urgency of these efforts is amplified in digital societies, where new forms of archival silence are emerging (Ellis 2025). Consider a contemporary parallel. Following Donald Trump's 2025 presidential inauguration, mentions of ‘lesbian,’ ‘bisexual,’ ‘gay,’ ‘transgender,’ ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and related terms were removed from the United States White House website virtually overnight (GLAAD, 2025). This digital purge demonstrates how modern technologies can facilitate institutional silencing with a thoroughness and immediacy that traditional archives could never match. Such incidents are stark reminders that silencing queer identity is not just a relic of the past. It remains an ongoing tactic employed by those in power – only now it can occur via a keystroke, hidden behind the algorithms of search engines and content mediation. What this means is that the work of archival justice is as relevant as ever. Only by foregrounding both deliberate and inadvertent omissions can we begin to dismantle the processes that continue to write some narratives while consigning others to oblivion.
Conclusion
The stark juxtaposition of the Copleys’ progressive social documentation with their silence on queer experiences illuminates how personal archives can unwittingly parallel, and thereby reinforce, broader mechanisms of institutional marginalisation. Their personal collection of news clippings, ephemera, travel diaries and autobiographical writing reflect a tension between outward calls for justice, and private hesitations in acknowledging stigmatised identity. Did the Copleys simply view sexuality as outside their primary concerns? Or might they have been influenced by an era suspicious of the ‘unorthodox’, where preserving one's public identity sometimes meant keeping quiet on taboo subjects? Whether motivated by strategic reticence, prevailing social norms, or a subtler unease, the Copley Collection illustrates how even well-intentioned collectors of history operate within power structures that perpetuate silence. Importantly, the insights drawn from this study transcend the particulars of one archive or one city. Contemporary instances of intentional queer erasure, from state-sanctioned censorship to abrupt policy rollbacks – demonstrate that the politics of silencing are very much alive. Whether stories are hidden in an uncatalogued box or obscured by an algorithm, the effect is the same – a community's history is pushed into the shadows. The task before us, as archivists, historians, and community members, is to shine a light into these shadows because once recognised, silence is no longer a void; it becomes a catalyst for change, urging us to ensure that in the archives of the future, no community's stories are left quietly on the shelf.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-mia-10.1177_1329878X251405567 - Supplemental material for Interrogating queer silence in the archive: A multiversal approach to archival justice
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-mia-10.1177_1329878X251405567 for Interrogating queer silence in the archive: A multiversal approach to archival justice by Justin R Ellis, Emma Bunn, Grace Barham and Kate Senior in Media International Australia
Footnotes
Ethical approval
Per Part E, section 24 of the University of Newcastle Ethical Human Research Procedure Manual: The use of data, documents or records that are all publicly available (such as publicly accessible archives or publications) does not require ethical approval.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dr Ellis and Professor Senior received funding from the Copley Bequest to undertake the archival research for this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
This research did not produce any data that is not already accessible in the public domain.
Supplemental material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
References
Supplementary Material
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