"Kinds of Histories That Save Lives": A Q&A on Queer Archives in Kentucky and Arizona
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"Kinds of Histories That Save Lives":A Q&A on Queer Archives in Kentucky and Arizona Eric Gonzaba (bio), Jonathan Coleman (bio), and Jamie A. Lee (bio) Moderator's Introduction When I was asked if I would like to moderate a chat about LGBTQ archives for this special issue of the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, I jumped at the chance.1 Simply put: I love archives. 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 445] 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. But simply recognizing the value of archivists was not the reason I wanted to take part in this incredible opportunity to moderate this Q&A. The specific topic of LGBTQ archives is what really hooked me. 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 1970s, ordinary (actually, extraordinary) 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. Early LGBTQ archives developed in this period, including the Lesbian Herstory Archives based in New York in 1972, followed by the Canadian Gay Archives based in Toronto in 1973. In 1981, LGBTQ academics, archivists, and community members opened a Midwest-focused LGBTQ archive in Chicago (Gerber/Hart), while San Francisco's queers founded the GLBT Historical Society in 1985. 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." Rather, their teams, "networked together, using community and professional networks to share best-practices and support collecting efforts."2 Some fifty years into this campaign to preserve LGBTQ history, we are at a crossroads. What a time to be talking about LGBTQ history. Recent US Supreme Court decisions like Obergefell and Bostock marked significant changes to LGBTQ American life in recent years [End Page 446] (bringing marriage equality to the United States and a prohibition on job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, respectively).3 But the past few years have also seen a rise in anti-trans rhetoric and violence, shootings at gay nightlife spots in Orlando and Colorado Springs, and a wave of new and proposed laws that target schools that want to provide inclusive and relevant LGBTQ history education. 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. Lee founded Arizona's first LGBTQ archive in 2008, an oral history initiative known as the Arizona LGBTQ Storytelling Project. In 2011, Lee expanded the project into the Arizona Queer Archives (AQA). 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."4 The archive not only collects traditional newspapers and other textual documents, but also zines, eyeglasses, family videos, and more—sources that can expand our understanding of the diverse queer past. The second is Dr. Jonathan Coleman, originally from eastern Kentucky and a historian of Kentucky LGBTQ life. In 2014, he cofounded...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".