LINEAGE I

Historical research on “invisible minorities” engenders unconventional strategies, hones specially adapted skill sets, and relies on resources that may not qualify for conservation in traditional archives. For instance, the seventh sense known as gaydar, a sensitivity to detail that serves queer folks as both a survival mechanism and a social networking device, enables us to recognize and acknowledge kinship outside of nuclear family structures. Personal ephemera and apparently trivial historical detritus--a body building magazine, a recipe, a page of sheet music, a necktie--can connect us with past lives whose traces would have been lost were it not for archival collections such as those preserved by the GLBT Historical Society. Working with this kind of material calls for the mobilization of techniques frowned on by conventional historians: poetic intervention, speculative reenactment, story-telling, and fantasy. As Monique Wittig inveighs in Les Guérillères, “Remember. Or, failing that, invent.” Where there are gaps, we must infer, imagine, project. Or, we must take the gap itself as a statement of fact. This exhibition invites such leaps of imagination, projections that illuminate invisible zones within official accounts of historical and biographical events. These archives, animated by creative impulses, unsettle our ideas about who we are, where we come from, who we want to be, and how we remember.