“This is Our Memory”: Animating an Archive of Gossip
by Dani Stompor
Freda S. and J. Chester Johnson Archives Fellow and Consultant, Queens College Special Collections and Archives
This past spring, we threw a party in Queens College’s Rosenthal Library celebrating the completed processing of the club journals of the Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) student group. The collection was written from 1987 to 2017 and contains subjects ranging from poetry to organizing to personal dramas. The party was an opportunity (or perhaps an excuse) to crack open the marble journals, drift through entries, turn to one another, and gossip.
(GLU).
Anonymous GLASA Members. (1989–1991). Gay and Lesbian Union Journal, 1989-
1991. Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) Collection (Box 1), Special Collections
and Archives, Queens College, Flushing, NY, United States.
Popular culture depicts gossip as cruel and secretive, often associated with stereotypes of the housewife, the teenage girl, the flamboyant homosexual. Yet “gossip” can encompass a range of oral and written traditions designed to share valuable knowledge, build relationships, and protect others through secondhand or unprovable information. Its association with women and queer people is entangled with a process of history-making that delegitimizes the care-work such groups need to survive. “[Gossip] exists as a feminized tool…,” argues Emily Guerrero (2022), “which is in turn routinely undervalued and demonized precisely because of its utility in efforts toward collective safety.”
A 2019 study by psychologists Megan L. Robbins and Alexander Karan found that we gossip more than we’d like to admit. Of 467 adults recorded over a 48-hour period, only 34 (7.3%), did not gossip at all. The reasons for why we gossip vary from building group identity to organizing the stimuli we take in to expressing the complexities of our experiences. It is a vital
tool developed by humans to survive as a highly social species.
For generations of queer people whose lives are stripped from textbooks, gossip has offered an alternate mode of conceptualizing a shared past. As Caswell et. al. (2016) argue when discussing the work of transgender activist Reina Gossett, “connection to the past can be a survival strategy that enables people to counter feelings of erasure and isolation.” Guerrero’s
care-work contemplates gossip as a means of preserving in-group mythologies of figures and spaces by teaching the gossiper to read with and against a given narrative and its relation to a dominant view of history, “to weigh stories, examine them against structures of power, and synthesize what is left” (2022). These small stories we are able to preserve take on a life of their own, drifting from reality over time yet offering a record of how communal history is built.
(GLU).
Anonymous GLASA Member. (1989–1991). Gay and Lesbian Union Journal, 1989-
1991. Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) Collection (Box 1), Special Collections
and Archives, Queens College, Flushing, NY, United States.
At Queens College, there are few institutional records of queer life on campus. In a time before cell phones became ubiquitous, the GLASA journals offered a venue to share vital information about safe sex, HIV preventatives, or which spaces were safe to be “out.” A series of entries describes a gay-bashing several club members survived near a local bar in Queens, offering conflicting details as the survivors work to make sense of their trauma and protect their fellow students. Even after most members had access to email and texting, the journals continued to house knowledge about navigating life as a queer student on and off campus.
By taking these artifacts out of their native environment of the student organization office and rehousing them in the archives, we ran the risk of rendering the most exciting, emotional aspects of the journals inert. If they could not continue to offer a space for intergenerational encounters between queer students, then archiving the journals would destroy their purpose. But for the collection to be searchable and accessible to the public, we needed to balance this purpose against considerable use concerns. Many of the authors are out of the closet, but some are not, or no longer identify as they did in school. To protect their privacy, we undertook the added labor of censoring last names for access copies. With a large backlog and limited staffing, this is a level of processing our institution rarely can afford its materials. Yet we agreed it would be an act of violence to place the journals in a repository where they would not be found, experienced, and grappled with — their lives thus extended through use by another class of young scholars.
The notion of exploring gossip as an archival tool emerged as we considered how to explore the journals with students who had never been inside an archive. While research has gone into practices that make LGBTQ students feel more welcome in library spaces, it has focused primarily on circulation and reference services (Krueger & Matteson, 2017; Hays, 2020). During informal conversations with undergraduates, I’ve found that they rarely feel as welcome approaching the archive as they do other library spaces. For those that know we exist, our office is seen as the home of exclusively “serious” research, conducted with a specific aim in mind.
What would it look like to invite students to explore the collections on their own terms, to leaf leisurely through boxes, to play in the fonds?
In an attempt to disrupt the paradigm of archival research as evidence capture, we enlisted student groups, departments, and counseling services as collaborators. We crafted programming that invited students to encounter the journals with us. We cultivated an array of at-times contradictory selections that would encourage participants to focus less on finding truth than on sitting in the affective experience of hearing entries from queer students.
Tummino, A. (2023). GLASA Journal Party [photograph]. Queens College
Special Collections and Archives.
“This is our memory,” a current GLASA member said to attendees of the party. She noted that, like memory, the journals were malleable records that offered only brief glances into past lives. Group meetings, rants against homophobia, details about strangers’ sex lives, collaborative poetry… each a tiny window into the experiences of others, and sometimes a mirror of our own. Gossiping became a tool for students and archivists alike to see ourselves in the history of the college. Little of what we talked about could be proven. But together we invited students to see themselves as shapers of historical narratives who could speak back against the process of silencing through shared exploration and care.
Caswell et. al. (2016) speak of community archives disrupting the symbolic annihilation of subcultures by offering venues for such people to experience a sense of belonging among those from another time — strangers who are otherwise erased by an archival hierarchy that overvalues the reinforcement of dogmatic truth. Other institutions like academic archives can build spaces to celebrate that we, as queer people, are alive and together, and have been before. Though not every repository will have materials quite so overflowing with lived LGBTQ experiences as the GLASA collection, we each have much to share (and, yes, gossip!) about how a certain object made us feel connected to — or disconnected from — people we may never know.
(GLU).
Anonymous GLASA Member. (1989–1991). Gay and Lesbian Union Journal, 1989-
1991. Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) Collection (Box 1), Special Collections
and Archives, Queens College, Flushing, NY, United States.
Bibliography
Bannister, M. (2020). School Library as a SAFE HARBOR for LGBTQ STUDENTS and FAMILIES. Knowledge Quest, 48(3), E1–E6.
Caswell, E., Migoni, A.A., Geraci, N. & Cifor, M. (2016). ‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation. Archives and Records.
https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445
Guerrero, E. (2022). Gossip as practice, gossip as care: Affective information practices in the archives. Archivaria, 94, 182–202.
Hays, A. (2020). A Question of Space: Surveying Student Usage of LGBTQ Resources in the LGBTQ Student Center Library and the Campus Library. The New Review of Academic Librarianship, 26(1), 110–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614533.2018.1564336
Krueger, S., & Matteson, M. (2017). Serving Transgender Patrons in Academic Libraries. Public Services Quarterly, 13(3), 207–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228959.2017.1338543
Robbins, M. L., & Karan, A. (2020). Who Gossips and How in Everyday Life? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(2), 185–195.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619837000
Todorinova & Ortiz-Myers, M. (2019). The role of the academic library in supporting LGBTQ students: A survey of librarians and library administrators at LGBTQ-friendly colleges and universities. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 26(1), 66–87.
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