The Papers of Foster Gunnison, Jr, and the Politics of Queer Preservation

Rumours that the Institute of Social Ethics (ISE) did not survive the death of its founder, Foster Gunnison, Jr, have lent the centre’s archive an almost mythical status, conjuring visions of an ancient, lost library, one that still awaits discovery by some intrepid treasure hunter, tomb raider, or historian. Of course, Gunnison’s elusiveness contributed greatly to his collection’s mystique. The man recognized by many as the archon of the US homophile movement spun tales of a grand repository housed in the institute’s ‘magnificent and fully equipped twenty-second floor offices overlooking Hartford’s beautiful Bushnell Park and state capital’, where only ‘a few remaining gaps’ prevented the movement’s history from being exhaustively and enticingly organized on custom shelving in the official ISE colours of black, cream and gold.¹

But between the mid 1960s and Gunnison’s death in 1994 frustrated scholars found that the seemingly endless unpacking of boxes or the anticipated arrival of new bookcases barred access to these research riches indefinitely. Behind Gunnison’s evasions was a man overwhelmed by the task of imposing order on countless communities and activist strands, and precariously piled papers and overstuffed cartons continually threatened to burst forth from the additional apartments that he leased to contain them. The absence of clarity and system at ISE unintentionally provided perhaps the most accurate archival representation of queer politics from the 1950s to the 1970s. As Gunnison lamented, ‘It’s sort of like a turnstile at Grand Central Station with people moving in and out and a substantial turnover, and often not knowing who is what from what, or, for that matter, really caring’.²

Curiously, the project of forcing order on Gunnison’s own life fuelled the tales of the lost ISE archive that have circulated since his passing. In June 1994 the New York Native sounded the alarm over rumours that the ‘largest collection of research materials relating to the early history of the gay movement . . . in the eastern United States has recently been damaged or possibly destroyed by heirs of the noted gay activist and legendary archivist Foster Gunnison’. The charge surfaced in the midst of concurrent campaigns by the New York Public Library and the University of Connecticut’s Dodd Research Center to acquire the papers from Gunnison’s cousin and half-sister, and it centred on the purging of a file of correspondence between Gunnison, his psychiatrist, and perhaps his mother that discussed the interior workings of his family. Without a doubt, the ongoing dispute between surviving relatives, subaltern communities and scholars over who owns the personal and family histories of queer individuals marks an irresolvable fault-line in the politics of queer preservation. Given the intimacy of the documents in question, the potential loss to Gunnison’s future biographers is incalculable; still, one struggles to understand how the family’s withholding of this folder came to be equated with the expunging of a movement’s history. The loudest cries echoed from those who lodged no protest over the New York Public Library’s plan to acquire only the materials that recorded gay-rights organizing and to reject those that documented Gunnison’s other research pursuits. Gunnison nurtured eclectic interests in railroad history and barbershop quartets, and the ISE files competed for space with a hoard of archival treasures on these subjects and on smokers’ rights, the cause that eventually supplanted his gay-rights activism. ‘I’m sick about it’, a librarian reportedly said in response to the possible destruction of family papers, even as her institution planned the archival reconstruction of Foster Gunnison, Jr, as a singleminded advocate for homosexual equality.³

No surviving clues indicate how Gunnison would have greeted the housing of the ISE materials alongside his other research collections at the University of Connecticut, but we know he craved the respectability that a generation of historians and activists associated with the transfer of gayrights papers from independent archives to traditional repositories. Although he died without a will, Gunnison hoped ‘to leave . . . [the] entire collection to a university or other competent institution for...