In 2016, Burford and Sullivan formed a nonprofit to begin raising awareness about, and money for, the archival project. Photo: Courtesy Invisible Histories Project We are trying to fix it.”Ī button from Birmingham’s first Pride march in 1989. “And as long as we are a cautionary tale, we can never be anything else. The South, especially the queer South, exists as a cautionary tale,” said Burford.
“We can’t see us because we have been fully ignored this entire time. For instance, an LGBTQ community center opened in Birmingham in 1980, noted Burford, while there were various queer publications across the region in the 1970s. Rather than the story of the queer South being one of LGBTQ people fleeing for the coasts to find acceptance and community, they are unearthing how LGBTQ Southerners thrived in their hometowns. Burford and Sullivan first met in the mid-2000s on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama, where Sullivan also received her undergraduate and master’s degrees. The project sought to preserve queer Southern history, particularly in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. In 2018, Burford moved to Birmingham, Alabama to work on launching the Invisible Histories Project with a fellow academic, Maigen Sullivan. “So it became this underground guerrilla gay bar,” he said. Known as the King-Henry-Brockington LGBTQ+ Archive, one of its oldest contents is a stash of photos from 1940 detailing a queer bar night held at the Barringer Hotel’s Hornet’s Nest Lounge in Charlotte.Ī lesbian who worked as a bookkeeper at the hotel started inviting her queer friends to the bar on Tuesday nights after realizing it was largely bereft of patrons on those evenings, recalled Burford.
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In 2013, he had taken a job as an assistant director for Sexual & Gender Diversity at UNC-Charlotte in order to create the city’s first LGBTQ archive housed at the campus’ J. “But man those five boxes set me on a completely different course in my life.” “I built this tiny collection out of, I think, five boxes,” recalled Burford. About a decade prior he had met with the student group’s first faculty adviser, who agreed to turn over the archival material stored in his garage. All these people were saying, “I am so glad you are here,’” recalled Joshua Burford, who earned undergraduate and master’s degrees from the university.īurford, 45, who is queer and grew up in Anniston, Alabama, first listened to the recorded messages in 2008 while assembling the Miller-Stephens GLBTQ UA Student Organization Collection housed at the University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections. “When I plugged it into the wall, it was so heartwarming and heartbreaking to listen to it. A librarian and faculty member who had advised the group for years had stored it in her garage. Such devices are largely relics today, but somehow the one used by Spectrum survived with its original tape. If nobody picked up the phone, callers left messages on an answering machine.
Over time, people from hundreds of miles away rang its office seeking support and referrals for services. When Spectrum, the undergraduate LGBTQ student group at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, launched in 1983, it became a resource not just for those on campus but for queer people living in that part of the South. Also in the photo are Barbara Jean (Lady BJ) and Mandy Lynn. The image is from Bronzie De'Marco, third from left, who has been a drag performer in Alabama for over 50 years. A photo from the Miss Gay Alabama pageant for 1980, taken in 1979 at the Ram's Head, a gay bar in Birmingham.