LGBTQ Archival Activism by Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. conducts and funds archive activism--identifying, conserving and interpreting the LGBT historical record.

With the proliferation of digital storage, it's easy to take for granted that records will always be there. That assumption costs historical records every day. Documents don't just archive themselves. Hard copies are lost to accidents, fires, malicious destruction, deliberate destruction from misguided motives. (And let's not even think about that silly European crap about the "right to be forgotten"!)

LGBT history is an embarrassment to the mainstream, but it's part of the DNA of the queer community. It's important for our identity and survival.

(As an amateur packrat archivist, I vividly remember my sense of scandalization on learning how vastly different the modern philosophy of libraries is from what I had believed. I naively believed libraries would see themselves as archives, dedicated to preservation of knowledge resources. Nothing could be further from the truth. Library evangelists today preach only the gospel of circulation. Preservation be damned. If an item isn't circulating, they've been taught to see it as a parasite, sucking precious space and especially funding from items that the people want to read.) [stepping down from soapbox]

We need more organizations like this.

I can hardly wait for Swiss Army Man

A movie with Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano, who could resist?

Opens July 1.

Meanwhile, here's the green band trailer and the red band trailer.

Trey Pearson, a Christian rock star (Everyday Sunday) is in the process of coming out.
In the face of great rejection, and possibly severe changes to his career, he is courageously standing up to say who he is.

Go, Trey! Be strong and courageous!

Here's an article in 614 Columbus magazine with an interview.

Unprecedented Apology to the LGBT Community

While American legislators bully trans kids over bathrooms, things are truly getting better in Australia.

Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria, Australia addressed the Legislative Assembly with an apology to LGBT Victorians for "powerful prejudice written into law."

Speaker – it’s never too late to put things right.
It’s never too late to say sorry – and mean it.
That’s what brings us all to the heart of our democracy …
… here, in this parliament …
… where, over the course of decades, a powerful prejudice was written into law.
A prejudice that ruined lives.

...

So it is our responsibility to prove that the parliament that engineered this prejudice can also be the parliament that ends it.
That starts with acknowledging the offences of the past …
… admitting the failings of the present …
… and building a society, for the future, that is strong and fair and just.

 He discusses predatory police raids, but adds that the police were merely acting on law from the leislature.

But I look back at those statutes and I am dumbfounded.
I can’t possibly explain why we made these laws, and clung to them, and fought for them.
For decades, we were obsessed with the private mysteries of men.
And so we jailed them.
We harmed them.
And, in turn, they harmed themselves.
Speaker, it is the first responsibility of a government to keep people safe.
But the government didn’t keep LGBTI people safe.
The government invalidated their humanity and cast them into a nightmare.
And those who live today are the survivors of nothing less than a campaign of destruction, led by the might of the state.

The fact is: these laws cast a dark and paralysing pall over everyone who ever felt like they were different.
The fact is: these laws represented nothing less than official, state-sanctioned homophobia ...
And we wonder why, Speaker – we wonder why gay and lesbian and bi and trans teenagers are still the target of a red-hot hatred.

 The full text.

Why This Blog Exists

It took me 40 years to be able to look into the mirror and say "I'm Gay."

As early as second grade, I discovered that some of my feelings (a crush on another boy) were just not acceptable. Not at all.

I couldn't make the feelings stop, but I learned how to keep them so deeply bottled up that no one could see them. The resulting mixture of conscious concealment and unconscious repression laid the foundation for decades of depression and internal agony.

When I finally came out, I began to realize how much I had lost to a culture of shame.

RepressionPosterBoy is an effort to stand up against that culture in the hope of preventing the sort of damage it caused in my life, and perhaps providing a little encouragement and direction for some of those who on similar paths.