The year is 2014: Josh Burford was working to co-curate an exhibit at the Levine Museum of the New South in Uptown Charlotte. The exhibit focused on LGBTQ+ perspectives on equality, and while working on setting it up, Burford, along with other archivists came up with an idea: an event in Charlotte where people could come together to discuss the importance and necessity of documenting the queer history of the South. However, because of the anti-trans legislation at the time (HB2), the event didn’t come into fruition.
Fast forward to 2018 when Burford and Maigen Sullivan co-founded the Invisible Histories Project. Burforde said it was then he decided he wanted to try to revive this idea for an event to gather those with a passion for preserving LGBTQ+ history. Thus, the first Queer History South conference happened in Dallas, Texas, in 2018.
Now, the conference is set to return to where the idea for it was born.
“Now all these years later, I want to be able to do the thing that we had talked about doing,” Burford told Qnotes in a phone interview. “It’s sort of a homecoming for me and … we’re all working together to show off this place and really let Charlotte sort of show out.”
What is the Invisible Histories Project?
The Invisible Histories Project (IHP) was started in 2018 and actively works to “locate, preserve, research, and create for local communities an accessible collection of the rich and diverse history of LGBTQ life in the U.S. South,” according to the organization’s website.
The organization currently focuses on collecting artifacts and oral histories from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle with the hopes of returning these collections to their communities of origin.
“We do research work with the community to locate collections, both old and new,” Burford explained. “We work on those collections to get them organized, potentially digitized, and we look for a permanent home for those collections within local repositories that we have partnerships with.”
Some partnerships with the IHP include public libraries, universities, state archives, and in some cases, community based archives. Burford said the goal of this initiative is to tell the stories of queer people of the past, some of which have remained invisible for decades.
“People have held on to these stories of activism organization, community joy, as well as grief and resistance,” Burford said. “Our job with Invisible Histories is to find those collections and then work so that we can give the history back to the LGBT community.”
Burford explained a lot of the physical artifacts of southern LGBTQ+ history had been moved to other states or regions that were deemed “safer.” With IHP, he hopes to be able to bring those stories back to the people and communities where now, queer rights are under attack.
“For too long, I feel like our southern queer history collections have been taken out of the South and put into places where they were ‘safer,’ and because of that, we don’t have access to our history,” Burford offered. “Our job, we feel, is to make sure that history ends up preserved, if possible, in the communities where it was made.”
Queer History South in an anti-queer South
Queer History South started as a way to connect archivists, oral historians and those interested in LGBTQ+ history preservation, and at first, only a couple hundred people signed up. This year’s conference, however, is expected to be the biggest one yet with over 700 people currently registered to attend.
The two-day-long event begins on February 23 at the Dubois Center in Uptown Charlotte and will feature a series of panel discussions, workshops and more about queer history in the South. However, this year’s event is different, according to Burford. The current political climate of the South in the last couple of years has shifted against LGBTQ+ Southerners, with most states in the region — including North Carolina — passing anti-LGBTQ+ laws targeting queer and trans youth.
With that in mind, Burford said a lot of the workshops and panels are going to focus on not just preserving queer history, but it will also focus on what organizing and resistance look like and how people can get involved.
“We decided that because of all the political stuff that’s happening — this distinct rise in fascism that is happening all over — we want to all be together and then learn how we can thrive and survive the experience that we’re currently in,” he said.
The workshop sessions this year reflect the new goal of Queer History South, with topics ranging from “Digital Technologies for Marginalized Communities” to “How Archives & History Can Connect with Current Activism and Political Movements.”
Burford said looking at the current political landscape through a historical lens shows just how much history tends to repeat itself. In fact, Burford cited Anita Bryant and her anti-LGBTQ+ campaign in Florida in 1977 is almost verbatim what’s happening in the Sunshine State now.
“It’s like they [anti-LGBTQ+ activists] had a script — all you have to do is go back and read a Wikipedia article about Anita Bryant, and it’s exactly what’s happening now,” Burford said. “In Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, we have political candidates who’ve been elected into senatorial and Representative positions, who are white supremacists and fascists. They are seeing themselves less represented in the past and they’re trying to make certain that doesn’t happen.
“It’s just a power grab.”
It’s not just Florida where LGBTQ+ rights are under attack — according to Burford, states including Alabama, Texas and Mississippi have elected people to office who don’t act on the interests of all their constituents, and that in itself is dangerous, according to the archivist.
“I don’t know that history has ever been super comforting to people, but there is clarity that you get by seeing what has happened to previous generations and to know as a queer community, that we are sitting in a time of increased visibility and a lot of that visibility under our own control,” the archivist explained. “It means that we need to be able to organize and resist”
That’s why it’s even more crucial for this year’s Queer History South conference to help empower attendees and ensure they are connected to resources intended to help support queer folks across the Southern United States.
“I want this to be an experience where people can feel motivated and powerful and learn from each other and go back to their individual states so they know how they can continue to do their work and know that they’re supported,” Burford said. “We don’t do the work that we do to give the middle finger to our detractors — we’re doing this for queer and trans people.
“We want to give them their history because when we’re done fighting with these idiots, we need to have the knowledge of who we were so that we can imagine what our future is going to look like.”