Supporting important infrastructure initiatives
One of the most rewarding aspects of working with heritage collections and archives is when an audience finds its own story in the materials you are showing them.
For last year’s Coast is Queer festival I’d been tasked with identifying a selection of interesting LGBTQ+ material from the Documents & Ephemera collections here at Sussex, amongst which was a rare Birmingham Gay Liberation Front newsletter from 1972.
To me, this is a fascinating glimpse into another world, but to one attendee it was even more significant – nothing less than a portal back into their own past. They’d been a member of the group in their teens, had been to all the venues listed and recognised loads of the names. According to them, the people they’d met through BGLF had played a key role in them coming out and in their life ever since.
These potential stories lurk within the pages of all our ephemeral LGBTQ+ materials, and one of the reasons we were so keen to put on this year’s Telling Stories, Making History, and Queering the Archive session was to expose them to new readers.
We’ll be joined this time by our colleagues from the Mass Observation Archive, the legendary archive of everyday British life which contains a rich seam of LGBTQ+-relevant diaries and responses. From this we’ve chosen selections that reflect some of the overall themes of the festival, such as lesbian representation and AIDS.
These sessions are also meant to be creative, and to spark this it’s great to have been able to team up again with Erin James and Aghh! Zine, with whom we ran a similar session back in May at the Brighton Festival of Ideas.
Erin is a poet, creative researcher and facilitator working at the intersection of art and social change, while Aghh! Zine is a zine created in Brighton and Hove by MNamug and Nuria Castro, which focuses on queer, BIPOC, and other underrepresented communities. They’ll be leading the interactive element of the workshop, where we’re hoping that participants will be inspired by the materials they find (and maybe the materials they bring) to create their own collages.
The workshop is free to attend (but you must register), and no previous experience is required – just an interest in the topic and a willingness to delve into the archive!