Fighting Anti-Queer Backlash with Citizen Archivists

That adaptation has included plans to open a physical space in Charlotte, N.C., in 2026, so Invisible Histories can handle its own archive rather than partner with institutions, along with setting up its own servers to save materials outside of cloud storage for their long-term safety. For safekeeping, too, certain collections — particularly those at risk of state-sanctioned censorship or retribution — have been made temporarily unavailable to the public. As of November, due to concerns about increased state surveillance, Invisible Histories has instituted a policy of not corresponding with .gov or .edu email addresses in their internal communications. 

To meet the urgency of preserving at-risk materials, the Invisible Histories team has also prioritized social media content from important queer community spaces, such as gay bars and affirming houses of worship. Social media is the most comprehensive way people are keeping records of their lives right now — through event photographs, the names of key community figures and elders, and activism, the organizers say. 

“Historians and archivists, everybody knows we think about the past,” Invisible Histories Co-founder and Co-Executive Director Maigen Sullivan says. ​“But we’re also always thinking about the future. The way we find out about people’s individual lives is we look back to letters, journals, diaries, meeting minutes, maybe typed or printed out but usually handwritten physical items. When people 150 years from now are looking back on us, they’re not going to have those.”

Following a cyberattack after Sullivan gave a talk at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the team began thinking about preservation in the digital world and decentralized storage. Underscoring that need is the flux state of LGBTQ+ content and expression on social media, from bipartisan support for the Kids Online Safety Act reintroduced in the Senate in May (which critics believe would lead to censorship around LGBTQ+ content) to the proposed TikTok ban, to Meta and X becoming increasingly censorious of and unsafe for queer and trans creators.

“Digital space is queer space,” Sullivan says. ​“It’s a resistance space. I can remember the early years of the internet, and particularly in spaces like the South — where it’s more rural and people can be disconnected in small towns — it can be your only path to community.”

With that in mind, Invisible Histories launched Born This Way, Digital, which is specifically designed to preserve materials for content creators, artists and designers that have disappeared from the web. Invisible Histories is also working to save grassroots online content, such as a website for trans Southerners to research DIY healthcare resources.

The pull between seeking to preserve history and keeping it accessible for those who may need it is an unwinnable position, Sullivan says. The Invisible Histories team says it doesn’t have the answers, but notes that many institutions are leaning into hiding rather than resisting policies.

“I would really implore people at institutions to not do that and resist,” Sullivan says. ​“If we just keep accepting this, and pre-complying and complying, we comply ourselves into nothingness.” And trusting and working with those institutions, Sullivan says, is not the solution right now.

In fact, the Invisible Histories team has been asking many institutions to stop collecting materials related to Southern queer and trans history and instead give those archives to Invisible Histories or another community-based archive.

“This is not the time for institutions to pretend to be community-based,” Sullivan says. ​“You’re not. Even if you are amazing and awesome and cool as an individual, and there are so many people like that, the institution is not. If your institution is the problem, you can’t solve that problem with the institution. So one of the things we are telling people is to find a repository where it is safer and can be more accessible, where the state may not come in and defund them or change policies willy-nilly.”

The Invisible Histories team is also accounting for gaps in accessibility by teaching others how to find, preserve and archive things themselves — through training programs, how-to zines and teaching about the history of this work, including about revolutionaries who were doing it all clandestinely and through the mail in the past.

“History, education and empowering people to save and learn from things is such a huge part of revolutionary leftist movements that we have forsaken,” Sullivan says. ​“But I think it’s not too late to start.”

In the interim, Invisible Histories is teaching people community-based archiving skills so they can do this work, too.

“Start journaling, make zines, go meet people in person,” Sullivan says. ​“Talk to them about those things that seem everyday and mundane to you now but will one day be important. How did people adapt? How did people resist? Take meeting minutes. Make banners by hand. There’s so many ways to be part of a historical legacy and it only requires a small bit of change to you.”

Where should a budding queer archivist start? Sullivan advises those interested to save an archive of their own data from social media platforms ASAP.

“Meta and X are the most pressing,” Sullivan says. ​“Save them both to the cloud but also to something like an external hard drive. Redundancy is your friend.”

Some of the zines and guides the Invisible Histories team has created include How to Archive a Protest, How to Archive a Political Campaign and How to Spot AI Images on Social Media. Another, called Dirt in a Cog, focuses on small, practical means to resist fascism and authoritarianism day to day, from supporting community food pantries to resisting AI.

“There’s a lot of practical ways to do this that don’t make you feel like you’re drowning,” Sullivan says.

Invisible Histories is not alone in this space. Since 2003, the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has worked to build a searchable, public, online archive of hundreds of queer zines. More recently, co-founder Milo Miller says they have been amplifying the storytelling aspects of the collection to highlight queer existence and community as resistance.

“One of the biggest activist tools that we’ve found is queer folks’ stories, and the stories we tell about ourselves,” Miller says.

Unlike the shifts at Invisible Histories, QZAP hasn’t changed its processes since Trump took office. Miller says QZAP’s grassroots structure, which is not connected to an institution or a nonprofit, empowers it to set its own priorities.

“One reason we keep coming back to zines is because zines, by their very nature, are kind of uncensorable,” Miller says. ​“Nobody is going to tell me that I can’t write out the word ​‘sex’ if I’m talking about sexual health. No robot is going to go through and scan the material and say, ​‘You can’t publish this.’ And because of that nature, in some ways, we’ve done an end run around what X is trying to do and what Meta is trying to do in terms of making things and hiding things. But on the other hand, you have to know where to find a zine.” 

Since the 2024 election, Miller has seen more information-based zines on topics such as pushing back against AI, workplace organizing and even what to read as a leftist that ​“isn’t boring.” They’re working on their own zine about tools they use to create and disseminate zines. 

“We don’t need to get anybody’s permission to do these things, and we don’t need to ask nicely,” they say. 

Miller emphasizes, too, that no one needs permission to start doing this work. They recommend reaching out to a preservationist, community-based organization, like Invisible Histories, to see how to help — whether that’s financial support or collecting bits of ephemera from queer spaces. They also emphasize the importance of recording metadata — information about the materials — such as the date collected, the location and the significance. As for actually making zines, they advise connecting with local libraries and visiting zine-friendly bookstores or independent media centers, to read more zines to get inspired, and especially to reading Alex Wrekk’s Stolen Sharpie Revolution.

Storytelling as resistance is a cornerstone of the QZAP approach and can offer a road map during a time of regression, such as the defiant Utah-based Queer Fuckers from the 1990s or Eberhardt Press’ Jane, about the pre-Roe underground abortion collective of the same name. 

“I think a lot about the zines that are not from major cities and coasts,” Miller says. ​“We’ve been getting these little art zines from Mississippi that are super delightful. We get stuff from a queer youth group in North Carolina sometimes. Things like this, that just show that queer folks exist everywhere and tell their stories everywhere. And in telling their stories, they’re saying, ​‘Your story is like my story,’ and knowing there are other folks out there going through this and facing it and surviving and thriving through it all brings me comfort and joy in a lot of ways.” 

One of the key throughlines in the work of these queer archivists is to highlight community joy alongside the struggles. ​“I want the history of the queer friend group that meets every week to go to the farmers market,” says Invisible Histories’ Director of Programming Margaret Lawson. ​“Obviously we need to see the history and the struggle and resistance. But reminders that people are living their daily lives and finding queer and trans joy in the South — there are so many people who are making a life here and that is not just a life of struggle, but a life of happiness and joy, and those things go together. These are the things queer and trans youth need to see more than anything to envision themselves staying in the South.”

For a more intensive approach, Invisible Histories offers a yearlong training cohort called Memory Keepers, for queer and trans Southerners to learn skills around conducting oral history and accessing resources to support interviews and material preservation in their communities. One of the team’s recent favorites comes out of Mississippi, where community archivists have been working to preserve the history of Black-owned gay bars by interviewing performers, owners and patrons of its ballroom scene. The results have blossomed into offshoots like mapping drag family trees and documenting the evolution of queer slang in Jackson.

One of the most exciting aspects of the work of Memory Keepers is its intergenerational sharing. The next cohort will learn how to create memorial collections, memorializing the lives of loved ones and community elders who have passed, as a means of processing grief and honoring local resistance and legacy.

“It’s a cultural shift to people valuing these skill sets and lost arts that maybe they haven’t in the past,” Sullivan says. ​“It’s been a real bright light in a really shitty time.”

When Miller receives zines from smaller communities, they say they are reminded of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, and how he spoke of queer people living as their whole selves as an act of resistance. ​“He would talk about the kid in Altoona, Pa., and always said, ​‘You gotta give ​‘em hope,’” Miller says. ​“I think about the zines we have from all over the country and all over the world, where folks are able to say, ​‘This is going on in my life, this is what’s going on in my scene — how we’re surviving, how we’re thriving and how we’re pushing back.’”