A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project

The 300 people that gathered in Newark, New Jersey, on a fall day in 2011 were not the typical academic crowd. That day, LGBTQ activists and high school students, street workers and church leaders, politicians and university students, professors, administrators and university staff sat rapt, watching rare and stunning images of “New Millennium Butches,” resplendent in tailored suits of black, pink or purple, flashing before them on a thirty-foot screen. The images were curated by Peggie Miller, a Newark activist and businessperson who has been organizing New Millennium Butch fashion shows in Newark since 2000. The crowd also viewed a series of photographs of Newark’s LGBTQ leaders, produced for this event by Newark black lesbian photographer Tamara Fleming. Each photograph was accompanied by an epigraph describing her subject’s vision of social change.

“Mentorship is the key to our longevity as a community,” read the epigram by Sauce Leon, LGBTIQ commissioner of the City of Newark. “I want to see a community where we are all free and safe enough to unleash our unlimited potential,” urged Janyce L. Jackson, Pastor of Liberation in Truth Unity Fellowship Church. “We must individually and collectively create, organize and establish viable institutions that speak truth and realness to our lives,” Newark activist James Credle advised. Through the medium of Fleming’s images, which conveyed power, openness, and profound inner strength, Newark’s grassroots LGBTQ leaders seemed to offer their blessing to the gathered crowd. It was a breakthrough moment in which black queer was beauty openly lauded in public space. By the time the photographic series concluded, many in the crowd were in tears.

Although all social histories are challenging to uncover, the histories of LGBTQ people are among the most difficult to preserve—and among the most important for historians to retrieve. LGBTQ people are a minority that exists both interdependent with and independent of the biological family. Therefore, each generation faces the task of inventing a life for itself, often without the help of family or extended relations. Although each generation of LGBTQ people tries to pass on its strengths, skills, cultures, and traditions to the next, in fact most youth grow up without knowledge of the histories of people like themselves, or with the awareness that people like themselves even have a history. This absence of a grounding history, and this sense that they are nowhere reflected in the history they learn in school, can add to the alienation that gay youth experience simply by virtue of growing up in heteronormative families, communities, and religious traditions.

For these reasons, documenting and preserving LGBTQ community histories can be literally a life-saving endeavor. Even thirty years into the writing of formal LGBTQ historical scholarship, queer history remains underdocumented. After all, as postcolonial critiques remind us, the archive itself “came into being in order to solidify and memorialize first monarchical and then state power.”¹ Yet literal and discursive antigay violence, as queer historian David Churchill notes, played a crucial role in modern state formation itself in North America and elsewhere.² Thus queer history has primarily survived in the interstices of texts and archives, until the very recent past.

Resistance to that erasure has generated a massive body of queer historical scholarship in recent years. The historical profession has slowly responded to what has turned out to be a strikingly intense demand for queer history on the part of queer people and even, increasingly, their straight friends and relatives. Likewise, undergraduate LGBTQ history classes continue to be scheduled with trepidation—will enough students be willing to have such a course appear on their transcripts?—but turn out to be routinely overenrolled. The lines of inquiry and recovery have not run evenly in this project. Instead, they have often built upon the very inequities sutured into the archive itself. Community studies, histories of activist groups, biographies, reconstructed sexual geographies, and other leading formats of LGBTQ history as it has been written have been powerful and...