This paper explores the successes, challenges, and complexities of a multi-year, multi-pronged archive-, oral history- and exhibit-building effort to collect, preserve, and disseminate LGBTQ+ heritage in Worcester, Massachusetts (USA). For The Record: The Worcester LGBTQ+ History Project, brought together a small, local museum, LGBTQ+ community advisory board, local residents, and a small group of scholars to foreground the histories, voices, experiences, and images of the city’s LGBTQ+ community to understand more fully our past and the possibilities for our collective future. To create a more holistic understanding of place, identity, and justice, this project sought to render tangible the histories of minoritized community’s that, in fact, have been actively made intangible through discrimination and exclusionary policies and practices. The community-led project became a site of celebration and resistance – that questioned the politics embodied in certain “intangibility” claims, as well as the hosting museums’ need to reckon with its approaches to heritage resources management. The project’s site focus on a mid-sized urban center and it suburban and rural surroundings, challenged the extant LGBTQ+ heritage work preoccupation with major metropolises, such as Paris, San Francisco, Berlin, as itself potentially re-marginalizing large swathes of already at-risk historical populations. As LGBTQ+ communities and their allies fight to establish, protect, and enhance the rights of sexual minorities, collaborative community-engaged heritage work is more important than ever. As one local lesbian activist, Martha Brockman, noted in a 1993 newspaper interview: “History is very important and powerful. In a way, if you’re not remembered, you don’t exist.”
Stephanie E. Yuhl (PhD, Duke University) is the W. Arthur Garrity, Sr. Professor in Human Nature, Ethics and Society and Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross (Massachusetts, USA), and former Associate Faculty in the Critical Conservation program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She specializes in the social, cultural and public history of the twentieth-century United States. She is the author of the award-winning book A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston and lead scholar of LGBTQ+ Worcester History Project.