Virtual Tools for IRL Problems

In a growing environment of censorship, in which the right and far right have targeted the study and teaching of queer history internationally as a scapegoat for political gain, the internet has become a refuge to those looking for information regarding queer history.1 Online, public history plays an important role in filling gaps of knowledge that cannot be filled easily anywhere else. The sharing of queer history on the internet is an important intervention against its censorship elsewhere. This essay is a review of queer public history on social media, especially Instagram (IG). I will center my attention on five Instagram pages that I consider to be part of a growing corpus of internet historiography focused on queer history.2 I use “queerness” here to signify the rejection of what lesbian-feminism has called compulsory heterosexuality, a challenge to the imposition of heterosexuality as an ideology, and not only a sexual orientation.3This review begins with The AIDS Memorial, an IG page dedicated to those who fell victim to the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s that got some attention recently thanks to the Queen of Pop, Madonna.4 Madonna used some of the site’s photographs as part of her 2023–24 Celebration Tour as a tribute to those who died in the pandemic, heightening its visibility.5 The page has posted more than 11,000 stories of people who died during the global pandemic and aims to spread awareness through life stories. Most of the stories relate to gay men from the US and UK, but there are also some stories from various parts of the world, and some stories about women and straight people. The project is, at its core, a collective virtual grieving monument that allows users to enter a space where they can share their thoughts and emotions in relation to this traumatic event that marked a whole generation. Although the page has no explicit political agenda beyond memorializing and does not call for pressure on governments for more funding in treatments, research, or similar demands, its name creates an unavoidable connection with the AIDS Memorial Quilt project, a handmade quilt sewed with names of people who died of the virus, that activists and advocates used in several protests in the US during the late 1980s and 1990s.6Much like the Quilt, the AIDS Memorial IG page and its growing contributions function as a political statement about the systemic violence and marginalization that people suffer, made clear via life stories shared by users and the comments of solidarity and relatability posted by others. In this page and others, the lack of a singular author (or content curator, as it is also called) is fundamental in creating a direct connection between the users and the past, mediated through the archive (usually family photos) and a short biography (usually made by someone close to the person who died). Thus, the page relies solely on the emotional connection the users can make with history, a deeply empathetic approach to the past, which gives significant attention to marginalized communities. There are almost no citations to academic works related to the history of the AIDS pandemic, other than the ones shared in the comments by other users. This creates a different approach to the past, mediated only by the knowledge of the users and with no authoritative voice to create or incentivize a reflection on the subject.Similarly, Queer Love in History (QLH) is a project dedicated to sharing queer love, because, as the page asserts, queer love has “always existed.”7 This project, curated by a person who only identifies themselves as Kate, posts pictures and stories of queer couples, both male and female. The IG profile also includes a link to a drive of supplemental material on “Sapphic History Media Recs,” which is appropriate considering the amount of sapphic love stories featured in the posts of the page. This page echoes the notion that “history hates lovers,” an idea made popular by an internet song turned meme, meaning that in describing personal relationships, historians tend to favor a heterosexual explanation rather than contemplating the idea of complex queer relationships.8 The phrase used to describe the IG page hits at the core of the debate about queerness as a historical phenomenon. The idea of queer love in this case is used to refute the historiographical assumption imposed by the constructivist/existentialist debate of the eighties that was all but won by the constructivists in part thanks to the enormous influence that the work of Michelle Foucault had in the emergence of queer historiography. Foucault, in his first volume of History of Sexuality, established a division between act and identity that has since been prevalent in queer historiography all around the world, creating a chronological division used to understand queerness from the perspective of the institutions that prosecuted it. More recently, however, historians have taken seriously the role of emotions, such as love or lust, challenging that division and proposing that even though we cannot assume, or even know, how a person understood their own sexuality, we can come close to understanding their feelings and thus their personal relationships.9Thus, much like The AIDS Memorial, QLH seeks to underscore that mystery of love by sharing archival photos of couples and their stories, appealing to empathy via shared experiences and reducing the mediation of academia to reach the past. However, unlike The AIDS Memorial, this page uses citations in most of its posts to reference either the archival material or further reading to understand a particular love story. In this case the academic authority is used to underscore an already established principle and functions more as a complement to the past narrative than a guide.A more conventional approach to history sharing can be found on the page Yesterqueers.10 This page is made by self-described “accidental public historian” Amanda W. Timpson, a former television executive, who decided to dedicate herself to internet-based queer public history.11 She links her experience as a TV executive with her current work as a historian by highlighting the importance of storytelling in both jobs, an interesting approach, especially when engaging with nonprofessional publics. On this page, Timpson shares short video essays in which she discusses queer history, either via a specific event or a person, in a very charismatic yet thorough manner. On her own webpage she claims that the idea came from friends who insisted she should share the stories she told them through social media and thus the format has that kind of flavor, of a friend sharing curious historical facts with the user.12 However, Timpson is far from careless with the information she shares. All her videos come with accompanying bibliography (either cited or for further reading) as well as full scripts. The level of source management is commendable. She demonstrates an awareness of how historiography works in her videos and expresses a knowledge of the politics and limitations of history as a profession. Although the phrase used to describe her project, “We have always been here, and we have always been queer,” seems to indicate an essentialist perspective of queer history, her content distances itself from anachronistic approaches by recognizing in almost every video the transformation of our understanding of queerness, and at the same time highlighting, as the phrase asserts, that queerness is not new. Its content, although primarily US based, extends to most parts of the world via commemorations such as Hispanic Heritage Month, and she uses current events as a way to delve into the past, linking present interest with historical processes.Timpson has a clear political position, and she is not afraid of sharing it in her videos, something that makes the approachable aspect of her presentation more intimate, as that of a friend. She describes her work as bringing forward the stories so that “we engage in queer history together,” ultimately seeking to “[e]ducate, celebrate and spark conversations that create new meanings to the past.”13 This is a more traditional approach to public history, in which the professional is a mediator between the past and the people, unlike the previous pages which broaden authorship.A similar interface, but with a different political approach, can be seen on the Instagram page Working Class History, a cross-media project that seeks to “record and popularize our grassroots, people’s history, as opposed to the top-down account of most history books.”14 This project is heavily influenced by social and political history as understood by leftist historiography that can be traced back to British Marxism, Indian postcolonialism, and North American radicalism.15 The page works as a calendar of sorts, using public commemoration, or the lack of it, as a tool to share history; every day is remembered through an episode of what the anonymous authors call “working class history” and sheds light on political history, including queer history, such as the birthdays of Amelio Robles Ávlia and Oscar Wilde, the pie attack on anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, or the making of the first Pride celebration in South Africa. Episodes of radical political projects and actions are shared by a post with a significant archive photo and a short text about the event in discussion.This project uses its political orientation, a broad popular left, as a booster to frame queer history as part of a continuous struggle for a better world. In this case, much like in Yesterqueers, the author(s) frame queer history as part of a social process and share it with users who can engage with it as they see fit. All the posts are accompanied by source citations and supplementary material that also links to their other media projects. Aware of historiography, Working Class History frames queerness in a Marxist political context that gives meaning to the historical events in relation to the ongoing struggles today.Not surprisingly, queer public history sites appear in language other than English. Moléculas Malucas (Crazy Molecules) is an IG page dedicated to reconstructing queer history in Latin America and Spain, aiming to highlight archives and memories “that resisted the darkness of oblivion.”16 On this page, archival photos are posted by the anonymous editors with texts from various authors (researchers, activist or artists), highlighting episodes of queer Latin American history, including interactions with other countries such as Spain or the US. The project also runs a parallel blog that broadens the information of the post with full-length articles that include very well-organized citations.17 Unlike the previous examples, this page features continuous engagement of multiple academics as the posts are defined by academic articles or investigations that reach the editorial team of the page. In this case, the administrator functions as an intermediary between other academics and the users and creates a platform to share new findings and reconstructed stories made elsewhere. This is a direct extension of the editorial project of the parallel blog but also shows another approach of public history in which academic works are transformed so they can circulate in nonprofessional spaces. Thus the many debates included in these posts come from various historiographical perspectives and users engage with the academic authors. Also, the material that is shared on the page is related mostly to the LGBTIQ+ social movement, its protests or writings. In this sense, the project is aimed not only toward a general audience, but also toward progressives or leftists who might not know about the shared history of revolutionary and queer politics.Due to the lack of academic spaces for Latin American queer history, Moleculas Malucas sprouted two other Instagram public history projects that have come to have a life of their own: the sister page Archivos Desviados, under the control of editors who share documents of queer history; and Sexo Y Revolución, a subdivision of a digital archive project of Latin American leftist political history called CeDinCi.18Of all these pages, Working Class History holds the biggest follower count, with 779,000 as of October 24, 2024, and next are The AIDS Memorial with 296,000 and Queer Love In History with 87, 200. The remaining pages have considerably smaller followings with 4,446 for Moleculas Malucas and 1,686 for Yesterqueers, who nevertheless hold 141,900 followers on TikTok, a social network on which only two others of the sites reviewed have a presence and none as robust. The biggest page, in terms of content, is The Aids Memorial with 12,379 posts, followed not closely by Working Class History with 7,446, Queer Love in History with 576, Yesterqueers with 230, and Moleculas Malucas with 142 as of October 24, 2024.What all these pages have in common is the drive to share episodes of queer history obscured by either ignorance or malice. They thrive in sharing relatively unknown moments of the past (collective or personal), moments that are not learned either in schools or universities. What they do, at their core, is fight what some queer scholars have called the “cruelty of the archive,” the difficulty of re-constructing queer pasts in a dignified and positive manner, when most documents come from places or institutions set on persecuting queerness.19 Some decide to do this through empathy and without the mediation of historical analysis, appealing to human emotions and the familiarity of personal archives; others seek to use historical analysis as a tool to frame events so they can make sense of present struggles, sharing information as a political exercise toward social transformation. There are differences in their projects also, both ideological and methodological, yet all these pages have in common the awareness of the contentiousness of queerness and the fragility of current acceptance.Thus, through social media, activists and/or academics who understand either the peril of absence of information or the importance of access to it are trying to fill the gaps in knowledge of the queer past. In this case, the history that is being constructed online is one that recognizes the relevance of current events and the relationship between past, present, and future. Queer public history online is aiming to create tools: empathy, political consciousness, mobilization tactics, and strategies; and every tool could be used for change, if used correctly.