Out of the Closet, Into the Archives

Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Anthology presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Out of the Closet, Into the Archives takes readers inside the experience of how it feels to do queer archival research and queer research in the archive. The archive, much like the closet, exposes various levels of public and privateness—recognition, awareness, refusal, impulse, disclosure, framing, silence, cultural intelligibility—each mediated and determined through subjective insider/outsider ways of knowing. The contributors draw on their experiences conducting research in disciplines such as sociology, African American studies, English, communications, performance studies, anthropology, and women's and gender studies. These essays challenge scholars to engage with their affective experience of being in the archive, illuminating how the space of the archive requires a different kind of deeply personal, embodied research. "Out of the Closet, Into the Archives represents the exciting directions for scholarship enabled by this rapid growth of new LGBTQ archives. Although mindful of critiques of the archive as an institution of power and attentive to experiences and ephemeralities that can escape it, the essays published here practice forms of the archival turn that put relentless curiosity and unapologetic passion to use as methods for intellectual invention." — from the Foreword by Ann Cvetkovich