There is something lonely about working in archives—namely, everyone you’re working with has already died. You enter into a hushed room and perform funereal rituals. At Princeton University’s Special Collections, there’s a basin where you’re observed washing your hands before you are allowed to enter the room. A liturgical atmosphere blankets the whole affair. You spend days examining the private property of people long passed, placing decaying letters and decomposing photographs on cradles and handling them with cotton gloves. When you reenter the world of the living, you bring some of the ghosts with you, at least in your mind. You all find a Panera and sit down together with a sandwich. The guy over there enjoying the bread bowl doesn’t realize that though you look alone, you’re really dining with the dead.
For historians mining LGBTQ+ history before 1960, this loneliness is amplified. Many of the people we write about spent their lives making themselves unknowable, hiding aspects of their lives that, if widely known, might have caused them harm. When we find scraps of stories left in letters, diaries, and ephemera, we stitch them together into some kind of narrative. But much of what we learn remains incomplete. We take what we can and set the rest aside. In the end, we accept that they will remain behind a veil. History is always just a little bit too late. Every book claiming to convey it remains unavoidably unfinished. But still, we retain the hope that someday we might learn more.
When I began to research the book that became Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, I realized that many of my subjects’ lives were doubly masked—once for queerness, and again for politics. “Who among us,” Harry Hay, an influential gay Communist and founding Radical Faerie, wrote in a letter to a historian searching for documentation about his past, “was stoopid enough to keep records through TWO Witch-hunts?” The veil falls again. Betty Millard, a lesbian who was active in leftist politics in the 1930s, sliced excerpts that were too risky out of the pages of her diary with a scalpel. Her past was not simply redacted, it was excised like a cancer. She discarded the scraps, but she left the remainder. We know that Chuck Rowland, a former Communist and founding member of the early gay rights organization Mattachine, burned his organization’s records, cremating his story into ash and cinder. Amidst so much loss, I mourned the stories I would not be able to tell. But I did not anticipate how one of these lives would, by a chance discovery and an act of collegial kindness, be miraculously resurrected.