Will is particularly precious about these objects because they are tangible proof of a history he lived through—one at risk of being lost over the next few decades, when there will be few people left who witnessed it firsthand. This is the inherently precarious nature of grassroots queer archiving: Much of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was sparsely documented by mainstream institutions, so unless organizations like Will’s capture it and describe it while the stewards are still alive, the history could very well disappear.
“If we don’t at least make an effort, a certain amount of this stuff is never going to see the light of day,” Will says. “People are going to throw it away because they’ve got no idea what it is. Or, even worse than actually looking at it and throwing it in a dumpster is just clicking on a folder and saying, ‘Delete,’ and then it’s gone forever.”
Archivists are always racing the clock and crossing their fingers, hoping that they encounter artifacts in time and that they’re able to access what they find. Technological barriers can sometimes get in the way. “I have an old WordStar terminal with someone’s thesis on it that people consider lost because only serious tech geeks know how to translate that,” Will says. “Most companies threw the terminals away, and I think in general the shelf life of technology is not long—they deliberately make it obsolete so that you have to update it. It’s like the Tower of freaking Babel or something.”
Queer archives are uniquely vulnerable in several other ways, too: Most operate on a shoestring budget, many with facilitators who are understandably skeptical of help from the government or mainstream institutions, both of which could potentially provide financial support. Queer archivists also confront the problem of erasure—materials being discarded out of bias, or because the current custodians simply don’t recognize the objects’ value. The family of Will’s high-school girlfriend encountered that problem: After the death of an aunt and her “friend,” the family found documentation that the pair had been underground leaders in their lesbian community of the 1940s and 50s—but, having no use for the papers, the relatives threw them away.