The Papers of Foster Gunnison, Jr, and the Politics of Queer Preservation
Abstract
The reprocessing of the vast holdings of a legendary queer community archive to form part of the Foster Gunnison, Jr, Papers at the Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, offers an opportunity to consider how the interpretive allegiances of archive founders, donors and curators shape the historical narratives that can be told. The flurry of rumours that Gunnison's Institute of Social Ethics gay-rights collection had been damaged or destroyed after his death expressed these politics with particular potency. An example of the independent archives that arose to counter the exclusion of past queer lives from preservation in traditional repositories, the Institute of Social Ethics itself betrayed the impulse to judge only certain individuals and activist strands as legitimate subjects of post-World-War-Two movement history. Given that the collection's new organization at the University of Connecticut exposes both this impulse and its contestation by activists with diverse racial and gender identities as well as multiple trajectories and localities of activism, this essay concludes that the academy can provide an archival location for the successful retrieval of queer counter-histories.
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