When we talk about LGBTQ+ history, it’s easy to think about the names, protests, court cases and political victories that made it into history books.
But what about everything else?
The photographs somebody kept for decades. The flyer from a queer bar that no longer exists. An old Pride program. A newspaper. A box of letters. The stories of people who never became famous but built lives, communities and movements anyway.
Episode 3 of “The Q by QnotesCarolinas,” out now on YouTube and podcast platforms, asks a bigger question for LGBTQ+ History Month: Who tells our stories?
The episode begins inside Invisible Histories, where co-founders Joshua Burford and Maigen Sullivan take viewers through an archive preserving pieces of LGBTQ+ life across the South. The collection includes photographs, newspapers, flyers, Pride programs and other materials documenting lives and communities that haven’t always made it into traditional accounts of LGBTQ+ history.
Those objects also raise harder questions. Whose stories have we already lost because no one realized they were worth saving? Who has traditionally had the power to decide what becomes history? And what changes when LGBTQ+ people are the ones preserving and telling our own stories?
Later in the episode, the conversation with Burford and Sullivan digs deeper into those questions and the particular importance of documenting LGBTQ+ life in the South.
But history isn’t only about what came before us.
The records future generations use to understand LGBTQ+ life in 2026 are being created right now, often on phones, social media platforms and other digital spaces that can disappear much more easily than a photograph tucked into a box.
That idea carries into the episode’s political round table with Cameron Pruette, executive director of the Freedom Center for Social Justice.
With Election Day approaching, the conversation looks beyond the highest-profile races to what LGBTQ+ North Carolinians should be paying attention to, why decisions made in state and local elections can affect everyday life and whose voices are still being left out of political conversations.
It also asks viewers to consider elections from another perspective: Years from now, this moment will be history too. What story will the choices we’re making now tell about us?
The episode makes room for some Halloween fun along the way. For this month’s Arts & Culture segment, Vanity brings makeup artist Daniel Sexton into the White Rabbit to show Halloween looks while sharing techniques viewers can try themselves.
Little closes the episode with Good News Corner, highlighting LGBTQ+ history as it’s being made across the South, including a Pride parade returning to downtown Greensboro, a historic first for LGBTQ+ representation in Congress and Equality North Carolina marking 47 years of advocacy.
Because LGBTQ+ history isn’t only found in an archive.
We’re making it right now.
Episode 3 of The Q by QnotesCarolinas is available now on YouTube and major podcast platforms.
This story is brought to you by Rosedale Health and Wellness and Dudley’s Place.
