“Queer history, it’s always a history of resistance, because that’s what queerness is,” he adds. Whether it’s sexual or gender identity, being queer is non-normative. “Institutions, even well-meaning ones, even schools that try really hard, even great public schools, they’re invested in a version of history that’s from the top down. And queer history is never that way.”
Ryan says that to “meet this moment,” it was important to not just discuss histories of what it means to be queer and Black, or trans in the 19th century—they had to get people connecting to one another. “We’re bringing a history of revolution, but we’re also trying to make community,” he says.
The way people connect and build community has changed, thanks to social media and smartphones.
Michael Bronski, a Harvard professor of the practice in media and activism, has been involved in LGBT politics and activism since 1969. He’s authored several books on queer history and politics. His students today, he says, are often astounded at the work that was done without social media. “All those new technologies are incredibly useful and efficient, but they often lack interpersonal relationships,” he says. Civil rights of all kinds began as community actions.
“It’s really important to prioritize the reality of community,” Bronski says. “We actually don’t form communities by tweeting. That may be useful for contacting people for something, but that’s not a community. Community means being together—physically, often, but virtually as well. “Now people get together on Zoom, which is good too,” he says.
Written histories do exist and are being added to every day. Our phones make it easier than ever to preserve the record; everyone’s able to take photos, video, and record audio. But websites can be changed, media can be removed. “What good is it gonna be if Amazon can just flick a switch everybody’s watching a commercial at the same time,” says Peppermint. “We are in this era of technology, but we clearly have to go back to an analog way of recording history as well.”
She points to Marion Stokes, a civil rights activist and archivist who recorded 24-hour television broadcasts for over 30 years, and in doing so created an indispensable record between 1979 and 2012. “We’re gonna need that, and we’re gonna need people to do things like that,” Peppermint says.
Despite the changes being made now, the Trump administration will not be in power forever. It’s possible that every step backwards for the queer community will be ground regained in the future. At the very least, says Bronski, Trump cannot truly erase trans or queer Americans.
“There’s an interesting contradiction that every act of erasure admits that something was there before,” he says. “The active erasure is actually an affirmation that it was existing to begin with.”
At 76, Bronski has a long memory of events like Pride before corporations swooped in, when they were protest marches, not parades. He says it’s important for queer communities, however they’re formed, “to keep this knowledge alive within themselves”—whether that’s publishing their own books and magazines, telling oral histories, or preserving other aspects of their culture.
“What the administration is doing is horrible and destructive, for the moment,” he says. “We have to think of ways around that. The government has a lot of power, but it’s just the government—it’s not a community.”
