Discovering Lost Voices in the LGBTQ Community

Rebecca Reyes

Cover, Rob. “Memorialising queer community: digital media, subjectivity and the Lost Gay # archives of social networking.” Media International Australia, Vol. 00, 2017, pp. 1-10.

Summary:

Rob Cover analyzes the ways in which archiving on online sites have become a means by which minority groups are able to counter the narrative of the past that may have been omitted, or in his words, “lost.” He focuses on the LGBTQ community and how their histories are more than just the official historical records and archives that we currently have. For example, Facebook groups have been created, such as Lost Gay Melbourne and Lost Gay Perth. The purpose of these groups is to create a community of belonging through notions of the past and shared experiences (both past and present). This allows for communities to share their stories, sometimes giving alternative perspectives of historical events. With the collective memories of many, this form of digital archiving gives members a means of connection, validation, and maintenance of their diverse sexual identities through a platform accessible to anyone. Because of its public availability, people who are not a part of this community can begin to understand the history of other individuals whom they would have otherwise never known. It is a form of rewriting history and opening up the door of validity for groups that are typically marginalized and whose voices are ignored.

Response:

When reading this article, I thought about historiography—the way in which history is written. For thousands of years and still even today, much of history is written by rich, white men with the power to write. So what does that mean? Well, thinking of examples such as Christopher Columbus, it means that minorities are marginalized, ignored, painted as the bad guys and/or omitted from history. Nowadays, we have more diversity in our history books but there is still such a long way to go. Cover discusses archiving through social media as a means of providing a counter-narrative to the history that we do know.

His main argument is the validation of collective memories. There are individuals whose stories we never get to hear unless they invented something useful, founded a new country, or did something that warrants their names to be written down in official historical records. For those that have been marginalized, how else do they create a voice? In Cover’s examples of Lost Gay #, we see how social media has allowed for individuals to forge and sustain minority identities. In these Lost Gay # groups, individuals “remember and memorialise activities, stories and narratives of the past…encourage inclusive participation, co-creativity and interactivity in the digital context” (3). Being in these groups gives minorities and marginalized groups agency. Not only that, but history transforms from the standard linear sender-message-receiver into an interactive setting where participants have the capacity to reframe, add to, adjust, and contribute to this record. From that, individuals gain a sense of attachment to this community, developing their own communal and personal identities in a way that fosters belonging through recognition.

Quotations:

“What these sites demonstrate is that the temporal perspective of a minority population of everyday community members, recirculating stories, images and documents from a local community ‘past’, provides an alternative perspective on community” (2).

“In this context, the act of memorial archiving, which has shifted from pre-digital archival production to a digital co-creative affective and nostalgic sharing, is one that brings into view the manifold ways that identity is articulated in and through the act of participating in a community archive” (2).

“Because often too quickly, the future becomes the past, and the past is forgotten and lost” (3).

“The centrality of a shared history—whether that is a history of oppression, marginalization, social distinctiveness, inequalities or political gains over time—is central to the framework through which belonging to a minority community operates at the intersection between relationality and identity” (6).

“The digital archive of the Lost Gay # sites has enormous political value by providing co-creative collation of memories that operates as a bulwark against exclusion, forgetfulness, minoritisation, marginalisation which, for non-dominatn groups, is always a risk in more official archival settings, where exclusionary practices often produce an erasure of historical struggles and conflicts” (9).