The ArQuives’ Century
When I got the call to meet with a Queer archival organization, the first among many questions was “why?” Why does such a group exist and why would they want anything from me?
Both are rather stupid questions in retrospect. I’ve been working with The ArQuives for a long time now and the answers are more clear every day.
First, who needs a Queer archive? The easy answer is “2SLGBTQI folk,” but that’s lazy thinking. Everyone would like their history commemorated and documented for them, like family histories, company histories, or small town histories. It’s a perfectly natural, self-interested activity. But what’s especially important about supporting a Queer archive, and for whom?
What I discovered about archives and other memory institutions (museums, libraries, and galleries too), and about The ArQuives in particular, is that they can deliver broad social benefits that make life better for everyone. For democracy to work in a pluralistic society, it takes constant care not to tyrannize minorities with the mechanisms of majority rule. A fundamental requirement is that the lived experience of oppressed citizens, and the ability to speak forcefully about it to institutional bodies, be preserved and protected.
Photograph by Jearld Moldenhauer at the We Demand march, August 28th 1971, the first recorded political action taken by queer activists in Canada. (From the ArQuives website)
At a minimum, that requires the collection, conservation, and interpretation of stories that would otherwise be lost. Such losses can be huge and destructive, not only to an historically victimized group, but also to the unwitting perpetrators. The pursuit of social justice is a long, slow, clumsy process of improving life for everyone who seeks harmony rather than strife, cohesive rather than divided communities, and in Canada, peace and order. While no one wants to be a victim of injustice, only psychopaths seek to be the perpetrators. The disagreements arise when the majority are implicated in an injustice for which they don’t feel culpable, or over which they feel personally powerless. That’s where memory institutions provide a point of reference, helping to educate opposed interests or to help litigate resolutions in courts of justice or public opinion.
I learned this with help from my colleagues at The ArQuives, but largely on my own. Inside organizations like this, there is a tendency to forget that most people are as oblivious as I am and need to be reminded why certain archives, libraries, museums, and galleries are vitally important.
Two great illustrations of the persistent need for minority voices, preserving and interpreting their own histories, come quickly to mind. The Supreme Court issued a ruling against the Government of Canada when the national archives was unwilling or unable to provide records requested by Indigenous advocates for the “truth and reconciliation” process. The ruling cited a principle obliging a national government to maintain and share with Indigenous peoples evidence that will help them to understand the harms they’ve endured and to seek redress. This, the court would maintain, is just and necessary, and what is just and necessary is good for the nation. It’s not a zero sum game in which the colonizers rack up points on First Nations for a couple of centuries, followed by Indigenous peoples trying to even the score through the courts. Everyone’s undeclared interest (again, psychopaths excluded) is to evolve more equitable and satisfying ways of living together.
For any measurable progress, a starting point is needed and an end state must be envisaged. Memory institutions help draw lines in the historic sand from which we set the pace and direction for other institutions (government, religion, education, justice, finance, etc.). Without them we’d still be swinging from trees, throwing feces at each other.
The other great example comes in from The ArQuives itself, which helped make the case for a significant settlement of grievances from “erased” 2SLGBTQI people in Canada’s military and police forces. “Erased,” is a polite way of describing decades of victimization in many forms; court martial, imprisonment, forced labour, lost pension or family benefits, and, more commonly, humiliation, isolation, shaming, and coercion. This undoubtedly still occurs today, but it was “normal,” without recourse, in the not-so-distant past.
Letter to Newsweek from James Egan, 1961. Egan wrote to the magazine in response to an article on homosexuality in the military published the previous year (From the ArQuives digital collection)
This is just a bit of what I learned among the kind, somewhat fragile people who do the unappreciated work of keeping stories alive for those who can’t tell them anymore. But it doesn’t answer the second stupid question, “why me?”
It turns out that it’s nothing special about me other than my single-minded interest in the success of nonprofits. My ignorance is tolerable because it narrows my focus to whatever prevents talented, well intentioned people from achieving their objectives. It’s a coarse, sometimes bruising approach to problems that are accorded to much delicacy, but it’s tolerable because it’s effective.
Still, I must conclude by noting how unprepared I was for this assignment. I am a paragon of the patriarchy, whatever the hell that is. I am a large, straight, CIS white male of a certain age, with an overbearing presence, acquired from decades of violent sport.
In the end my outlier perspective has value to this Queer organization in a way that’s somehow analogous to the value of bringing outlier perspectives into the embrace of a society that tends to centrifuge them out to the periphery, to obliviate them. All gains for them are gains for all if we all strive, as The ArQuives’ mission portends, for a future in which “LGBTQ2+ people are accepted, valued, and celebrated.” This is the kind of organization needed to provide the machinery of government and an evolving democracy with steady course corrections toward a more equitable and harmonious Canada.