This month, President Trump chose to opt out of acknowledging World AIDS Day. It’s the first time the U.S. has not participated since the World Health Organization created this day in 1988 to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS and to commemorate the lives that have been lost to the deadly virus.
From executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices on college campuses to the U.S. Supreme Court limiting access to gender-affirming care for minors, tactics meant to diminish and erase LGBTQ+ folks from everyday life are not new to us.
But rather than despair, it is essential we focus on what we can do: preserve our histories ourselves.
The first time I ever visited the Midwest, a close friend of mine and I planned a special trip to Illinois from the neighboring state of Indiana. As library nerds, we had heard about the Gerber/Hart Archives & Library and knew we had to experience it for ourselves. While Chicago is known for being home to museums about famous figures and topics, Gerber/Hart is a community archive that works on collecting and preserving LGBTQ+ history of the Midwest including the lives of everyday queer and trans Chicagoans.
Gerber/Hart is where I learned about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago and how it impacted people like Roland Peña, a Cuban-American writer whose diaries, letters, and self-written obituary were donated to the archive. It’s where I learned about Congregation Or Chadash, a synagogue for gay and lesbian Jews that was active for over 40 years in the city. It’s where I learned about Amigas Latinas, a volunteer-run group that provided a monthly space for queer and trans Latinas to socialize and support one another through issues specific to their community.
The good thing is LGBTQ+ history isn’t just being preserved in Chicago, it’s happening all over. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City has the largest collection of materials by and for lesbians in the world, some of which can be accessed digitally. The Lambda Archives of San Diego collects and preserves LGBTQ+ history of those in California and is also open to the public. We also have Invisible Histories, which focuses on LGBTQ+ history of the U.S. South and regularly hosts community programs from their queer history conference to workshops on documenting closed DEI offices. And Queering the Map, an interactive community-generated, digital archive where anyone can add their experiences as queer people on an interactive world map.
As I spend hours perusing the stories of my fellow LGBTQ+ kin through digital and physical archives, the words of Indigenous folks echo in my brain: our oppressors will never teach us our history. At least not our true history, so it’s up to us to learn it.
While not everyone has access to a physical archive, I believe there are actions we can take to ensure our history is not lost. For starters, consider reviewing Invisible Histories’ list of LGBTQ+ Libraries and Archives and learning what you can about the stories of people in your city or state. What kind of groups, establishments, or events happened in your community that you were unaware of? Along those same lines, actively seek out historical literature—like Queer Histories: Stories from Chicago’s LGBTQ Archives by John D’Emilio; The Stonewall Reader, edited by the New York Public Library; and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman—to explore this history further.
Our lives don’t have to be filled with fame and fortune to be worthy of being written about so document yours and encourage others to do the same. Write in your diary about the walk you took or what you had for breakfast. Take polaroids of your friends in the snow. Save the physical stub for the newest film you watched. Track your correspondence with that pen pal halfway across the country. In a digital world, analog allows us to leave a physical trail that we were here so save it all. Because, one day, we will be the queer and trans ancestors and it’ll be up to us that future generations know we have always existed, regardless of the ways our government tries to erase us.
Leslie Lopez is a graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Public Voices fellow of The OpEd Project, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.