Future Knowledge

[00:00:00] Vida: Welcome to the Future Knowledge Podcast and our special summer series on vanishing culture, brought to you by me, Vida, and the Internet Archive. We're talking with the archivists, librarians, and creators fighting to preserve our shared cultural history

[00:00:24] Dave & Chris: Hey listeners, I'm Dave Hansen nd I'm Chris Freeland. This is Future Knowledge. A note as we start up. We're sharing a special six-part weekly series called Vanishing Culture, exploring what's at risk of being lost in the digital age and why preservation matters. series is inspired by Vanishing Culture, the new book from the Internet Archive.

[00:00:45] You can read it online for free at archive.org or find it in print at your favorite bookstore. And now on with today's episode

[00:00:56] Vida: Today we're talking about queer archives in the digital age. How have LGBTQ communities historically been erased from archives? And how are things changing thanks to community-led archiving practices? What risks and opportunities does the internet present for preserving queer history? I'm Vida, a musician and an artist.

[00:01:18] In this podcast series, I'll be finding out more about public access to culture and how to preserve it for future generations. Join me as I learn from the experts about threats to preservation in the digital age and what happens when culture vanishes

[00:01:35] This week I'm talking to Brooke Palmieri, a writer and an artist who uses queer archives to explore themes of memory, history, and transsexual alternate realities. Brooke trained as a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford, and in 2017 completed a PhD in radical 17th-century printing history at the University College London.

[00:02:01] In 2018, he founded CAMP BOOKS to promote access to queer and trans history through rare archival materials, cheap zines, and installations The CAMP BOOKS' motto is, "Queer pasts nourish queer futures." I sat down with Brooke and asked him to tell us more about this idea. Why is it important to archive queer pasts?

[00:02:26] Brooke Palmieri: the word archive is a really old word. I mean, yeah, it describes kind of government records, but it's just true that for thousands and thousands of years, no matter the media that people have had access to, like clay tablets, paper, papyrus, storytelling, you know, like the voice as a kind of archive of stories that, that passes down information.

[00:02:46] Like, humans have been sharing information about their ancestors and about what has come before them. And so it felt like, yeah, of course queer and trans people want to be able to participate in that. That's, like, a human right as well, to know where you've come from. And guess I was also thinking that, you know, myself and my friends, we make a lot of the idea of, like, chosen family and how, like, we take care of each other.

[00:03:11] If I had an emergency, I know who I would call, and I know that I am the person that my friends would call. And, we've made good on those, like, promises of chosen family to one another. And I also like to think about, you know, in addition to having, like, a blood-based lineage or family tree, like, who are the people in history that I have affinities from, that I've learned from, who have sort of parented and grandparented me with the example of their lives?

[00:03:36] and just abstracting it and thinking...

[00:03:38] You know, I think this is a human desire. I think that thousands of years of culture show us that what people do is they bury their dead so that they can remember them, and they keep records of how they lived.

[00:03:52] Something interesting about growing up in Philadelphia where I did is I just had no...

[00:03:55] I never met anyone. I didn't meet anyone who was queer, until I was maybe, like... Who was openly, who was out. Like, you know, kids had mean ways of speaking about one another where I grew up, and There was this ambient homophobia or transphobia.

[00:04:09] But I didn't meet anyone out until I was, like, maybe 18, 19, in college. And, It's just true that all of that history and culture was absolutely kept from me, and it was absolutely censored out of my existence by every adult in school and home, anywhere. and that was a really painful sort of separation to become aware of, as I grew older and kinda into my own consciousness as a queer person, as a trans person.

[00:04:36] and I remember going years later in Philadelphia to the William Way Center, which is the LGBT center there that also has the archive, and that also changed my life. It's sort of like my dream scenario is, like, a small community archive that's a little bit removed from some of the obstacles and processes and sort of, like, initiation rites, if you will, of getting into big institutions like big university institutions.

[00:05:03] This was just a place whose primary purpose was, like sexual health clinics, a place for people to meet up. It really served community needs, and it happened to have a room that was filled with, like 70 years of Philly LGBTQ history. And I remember going and looking and just sitting in the office.

[00:05:21] Like, it was also the office of the archivist, and we just got to sit together all day as I looked through boxes, and I found and was really excited by the collection they have of this lesbian activist, Barbara Gittings, who, in the '70s started, the American Library Association Gay Task Force.

[00:05:39] She's also a fellow... what was really striking is she was definitely a fellow, like, library and archive groupie in the way that I was. and my ability to find queer materials in libraries and archives was in part in thanks to Barbara Gittings and her task force because they had come together and met frequently to compile bibliographies that brought together, publications, periodicals, and archives that were relevant, that were made by queer people for queer people as opposed to, I guess the

[00:06:10] work of, like, reclaiming queer history from texts that maybe pathologize or criminalize us. So this was, like, a different radical strand of history, and that just opened up a whole world for me and helped me find the historians who are doing it here and now. and helped me see myself among them.

[00:06:26] Vida: I wanted to dive deeper into what Brooke said about the importance of archives created by queer people for queer people versus archives curated by more traditional institutions.

[00:06:38] How have institutional archives historically pathologized or erased queer stories? And are things changing?

[00:06:46] Brooke Palmieri: I would find that, I hadn't been trained to necessarily recover the materials that survive in larger institutional collections that have not been collected with a mind to future audiences of queer readers because who could have done that at the time? You know, that's not a,criticism, that's just true.

[00:07:04] collecting habits in major collections, you know,major organizations and major universities, you know, they reflect the tastes and interests of their time, and some of them can be really far-reaching in what they gather together. But, it is just true that it's hard to use a card catalog or a digital search catalog, to find LGBTQ materials.

[00:07:28] They haven't been accessioned into those collections. You know, it's, this is, like, technical, but yeah, it's hard to search for queer historic materials. the resources just aren't there, and I would kinda come up against that and realize that, you know, not only had I, in my little, you know, somewhat, like, outskirts of Philadelphia context been kept from this history and not even taught the language and ways of looking for it and finding it, like, the words to search for, but also these pr- you know, these, a lot of, a whole generation if not multiple generations of professionals also hadn't been taught that that's true.

[00:08:01] And there was this sort of fantasy that in these huge overwhelming collections, they capture all that is because they're so big. They must have it all, and if they don't have it, it doesn't exist and that is the resistance to that that is required of all of us because we all have, uh, different eyes and different experiences to kind of bring to the archives to help search them better.

[00:08:26] it really is a community project, a civilian kind of project, I think. I'll find something different than you would find something. You know, each person brings their own subjectivity to the archive. and so, for me it's just worth keeping in mind that we were sort of taught that fantasy of loss.

[00:08:45] Marginalized groups historically brutalized, incarcerated, stripped of resources, and kept marginalized, and that takes so many different forms. And one of the forms it takes is, like, our heritage is destroyed.

[00:09:00] And, yeah, you know, one of the pleasures of, like, telling a history of queer and trans people is that, is word of mouth, which is a really different system than, you know, like, when you are working academically it's, you know, you need to go get your picture taken for an ID, you need to have sometimes your academic credentials or a letter of reference.

[00:09:21] and it's a totally different Kind of seen in the outside world where the pedigree is just the time you put in. Like, how visible are you when, your community organizes?

[00:09:34] and who do you know that can introduce you to the person who has the archive in their house, who will trust you because you have a friend in common or because their really good friend said, like, "Oh, you can trust Brooke. you can welcome them." and so I've had a lot of experiences like that, and that's really the kind of, you know, you wouldn't believe what people have in their houses.

[00:09:54] Everyone has something. And for, trans people especially, like, you know, we've had to keep our own records because no one wants them, or not only do people not want them, we'll get punished for having them. this is a big part, you know, in the UK there was, like, the largest archive that documented the, like, trans experience in the United Kingdom.

[00:10:16] when the, scholar who had compiled it over the course of his lifetime's worth of research wanted to place it in a UK institution in, like, 2012, no one wanted it. They couldn't accept it. and so it went to the, transgender archives in

[00:10:30] Canada..

[00:10:31] But what I do feel like is really interesting to have lived through in my own life is this shift from what people think of when they think of archives.

[00:10:42] It's not really... Like, there has been, I guess, you know, some have called it, like, an archival turn even. It's become a kind of cultural word. it's become a word that people associate with heritage and with, human stories of human interest. And I think, you know, the way I see it being used, it really takes it away from, like, thousands of years of ledger books With statistics in them, you know?

[00:11:08] And starts to look at the human hands behind keeping those statistics, and it starts to look... And then that starts to expand into, over the past few hundreds of years, that started to expand into keeping collections of people's letters and manuscripts, and, you know, it's, so much tilted away from, like, property accumulation to, what were these people thinking?

[00:11:33] it's tilted to a psychological and cultural interest

[00:11:37] now that academic institutions are interested in collecting, you know, archives of the marginalized, archives of the oppressed. because for a long time, you know, even the word archive, like it kept out those exact stories, you know?

[00:11:51] It made it impossible to recover more than, the ways in which human life was kind of debased and dehumanized by being turned into numbers, you know? and figures and statistics. So yeah, it's kind of wild to just see the accumulation turn over to, in the case of, like, queer and trans archives, you know, it's all about sex and love and activism, you know?

[00:12:14] And that, feels so rebellious, like the, what it's possible to go into a university library and see is incredible.

[00:12:26] I love the artist David Wojnarowicz, and I looked at his archives, and it was just, like, incredible to see his, little collages and letters and endless typescripts of him working through his poetry.

[00:12:40] and just to think, like, you know, David Wojnarowicz was homeless. He was, like, a homeless sex worker for part of his life. And the idea that I was in this, like, beautiful room, climate controlled, and his work was being presented to me, like, on par with the greatest treasures of any library, that felt like a watershed moment.

[00:13:01] Just, like, it was unthinkable even a few decades ago when he was alive. That would've been unthinkable So, there has been a real shift in how, I think part of it is, you know, there has been a real shift in who has become librarians and archivists. There's been a really important shift in the profession.

[00:13:20] Like the people who do this work, who are, like, are from these communities and love and care and value the cultural outputs from, you know, their communities, and I think that that has really shifted, a lot of what's possible. so the important thing is that we keep that shift going, you know?

[00:13:38] yeah, I hope archives only accrue more and weirder things.

[00:13:42] Vida: I'm interested in how online access to digital archives can benefit artists, creators, and researchers. How can online platforms help preserve queer history? I spoke to Brooke about how he uses digital archives in his own work and how he thinks the queer community can best use the internet to preserve LGBTQ culture

[00:14:04] Brooke Palmieri: as someone who thinks and even feels through, like, the historic remnants that I find in archives. And now, you know, how I work with that is just, like, my creative practice, my practice as a writer, it just always has this historical component, this research-based component. I just also use it now for a little bit more creative raw material than I used to when I was in my academic, phase And so the book that I'm working on right now, which I was telling you has me on the Internet Archive a lot. so the book I'm working on now is, like, a 150-year history of, queer and trans spirituality, and specifically, like, non-denominational spirituality, like paganism, witchcraft, esoteric traditions, DIY spiritual, movements.

[00:14:52] and so that, I mean, that is something I can participate in because I've participated in those communities for a long time, so I know who to ask for information. and so I'm really compiling, like, the documentary evidence that I need to write from, so I'm making my own archive.

[00:15:08] And, because it goes back so far and begins with this really significant writer and thinker, of the late 19th, early 20th century, Edward Carpenter.Edward Carpenter was, like, a gay socialist who lived in a kind of communal experiment on the land. had a kind of upper middle class background, but, used his inheritance to sort of, like, he poured it into the workers' movement.

[00:15:32] He, really is, like, a living example of solidarity across, in, like, a coalition based. You know, he was friends with, like, migrant workers. He was friends with, you know, trade unions. he was friends with the suffragettes. He was really interested, and he was one of the first people to write in English about, in celebration of gender nonconformity and same-sex desire.

[00:15:52] and so he's a really crucial figure for me. And so one of the things I've been using the Internet Archive to do is just, like, to print out his books because they're all there. They're all, like, public domain. so I was showing you, yeah, my, like, Edward Carpenter's The Art of Creation printed out from the Internet Archive.

[00:16:08] So I'm kind of taking a digital archive and making it into my working archive, for this book.

[00:16:13] I mean, I think for me, inheritance, like, very broadly based when it comes to something like history is, it is just about sharing what you know in as many mediums, media as possible.

[00:16:27]

[00:16:27] Brooke Palmieri: for me, I'm not, like, a specialist in, born digital archives or, and all of the problems that have arisen with capturing vanishing digital cultures. But what I do feel like comfortable saying is, you know, more places and media in which information survives, like, the better chance it has.

[00:16:46] and so, like, a kind of funny example of that is, you know, historically, single printed sheets like posters, broadsides were printed in the hundreds of thousands. They were printed, you know... we're talking, like, in the origins of printing, like 15th, 16th century printing. These types of broadsides that would have songs or kind of news-like information, topical information, or they would have an almanac about what was happening with the stars or poetry, things like this, for popular consumption, were produced in such huge numbers, but they were single sheets.

[00:17:17] it's not a very stable medium because it's not bound in a, you know, a hardy, sturdy book. and they're so ephemeral that people just throw them away. So the ones that survive to us like, we know if something survives, it only does because it was printed in huge numbers. and it's just true.

[00:17:35] It's like we know that what survives is, like, the tip of the iceberg of a really popular, cheap, like cultural output that cuts across class. You know, books are for, like, elites, and then these were for everyone else to learn and sing from and everything. But yeah, we just know that when one survives, it's because so many had to be made, and it's just like, its chances of survival, you know?

[00:17:56] And I just feel that way about, digital stuff. It's like I print things out. Who knows? I share them when I'm in my teaching or my workshops. I'll make zines or I'll make art about it. I think the best way we can, A, like, dislodge inheritance from a very sort of capitalist notion of, having a bit of property and keeping it for yourself.

[00:18:17] Like, we could dislodge it from that by sharing it. and we can increase the chances of its survival for future generations by sharing it in as many platforms. So that's, like, my kind of, glass-half-full idea approach maybe.

[00:18:32] Vida: I'm curious about whether there are new threats to accessing queer history in the digital age and what we can do about it.

[00:18:39] I asked Brooke about his concerns and hopes for the future of LGBTQ archives

[00:18:45] Brooke Palmieri: I've used the internet to find people who can help me, who have gone through similar things, who share their experience, who share their knowledge. I've really relied on that, and it has really positively shaped my life. And, you know, in my household we joke about the University of Reddit because there is a lot of information to be found there, for better and for worse.

[00:19:06] it's helped me out of a bind many a time. and so yeah, I do worry that there's just this increased, exponential increase in information that's wrong. I'm definitely sort of scared by, those, descriptions of slop on the internet, just, like, the use of AI to constantly create information that is just, exaggerate- images, information that's just exaggerated and wrong, and it's sort of made to be, exaggerated and wrong to, like, gain, clicks and gain attention.

[00:19:37] But it sort of... It doesn't serve anyone beyond grabbing your attention span for a moment. it's not really informative. And I do worry about the idea of, like, an internet overwhelmed with, slop and bots talking to each other about a lot of nothing, which would keep people from resources that they otherwise could really benefit from.

[00:19:57] I came of age in such a different digital environment. and it had problems of its own, but, it wasn't one of overwhelm to find information and to be a weirdo online, to be, like, a weird little, like, trans kid online, you know? And now the overall of information and surveillance and, is just,

[00:20:17] Yeah, it's just cause for concern, and I think we just need to remain critically engaged with it. But also, the sheer amount of incorrect information also erodes our ability of critical engagement, and I'm worried about the loss of critical engagement. So, yeah, I think that increasingly is, like, a desire for me, I guess, in my writing, my art is just to, promote people's ability to have a feeling and critically engage with what they're seeing in front of them, 'cause there's so much information out there, and a lot of it is, you know, is not helpful, is not serving any purpose.

[00:20:48] It's kind of just, using a lot of electricity.

[00:20:52] and then I hope that, another hope for the future is just that, more people get invited in. And the ways you can invite them in are through digitisation, you know? Like, and that's something the Internet Archive has a really long demonstrated history of doing for people.

[00:21:09] it doesn't cost anything. and, you know, classes, programming, exhibitions, lectures, you know, just there are so many different ways to, make meaning out of all of this, all these materials that survived to us. And yeah, I think, like inviting artists in is a really good way to open up collections to people.

[00:21:28] but yeah, to think you know, letting the librarians and archivists who know the materials they have, make decisions about how to open them up to people and the best and kind of like, most conservation-minded way of doing so, I think, is, like, you know, let the experts decide, but give them resources to better open up and make accessible things.

[00:21:46] 'Cause if we don't know it survives, you know, it's not really doing anybody any good. and that's something that's interesting. It's like there's conservation concerns for these materials in terms of their, like, materiality and how well-kept they are, but another conservation concern is, is access, 'cause if nobody knows the history, it might as well not exist.

[00:22:08] It might as well have been destroyed. So yeah, I think that's my hope for the future is just more accessibility

[00:22:16] Vida: listening to Brooke speak about the importance of queer archives made me think about how we often forget that preservation and archiving often begins outside of traditional institutions, and how it is through grassroots initiatives that we, as a community, eventually reshape historical narratives. It also felt very inspiring to observe Brooke's creative and playful approach to working with archives and hear about the different ways we can use archives to relate to one another, particularly his example of queer ancestors as chosen family.

[00:22:54] Vida: join us next time as we'll be talking to Helen Nde and Laura Gibbs about preserving African folktales