For some, being LGBTQ+ in the South can feel like a constant uphill battle. Southerners that break from the heteronormative mold can often feel alone and unheard due to a lack of support and resources. What’s a queer Southerner to do?
Joshua Burford and Maigen Sullivan began independently investigating Alabama’s queer history and the duo formed the organization Invisible Histories in 2015.
The project quickly took off, and in 2018, Invisible Histories received an Andrew W. Mellon grant in partnership with the University of Mississippi. This grant allowed Burgord and Sullivan to expand their non-profit and acquire Mississippi-specific materials to be housed at UM.
Margaret Lawson, a Jackson, Miss. native and director of programming and outreach for the non-profit, explained the deeper significance of this archival lack.
“Queer elders from the South who were part of the original gay liberation movements and people who had lived through the AIDS epidemic were starting to pass away. We realized that those stories were getting lost to new generations,” Lawson said.
The organization now operates in several Southern states.
“We’ve expanded to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida,” Lawson said. “We have community partners, library partners and archiving partners across all our states. We have over 150 collections — queer collections — that have been created that wouldn’t exist without this project.”
Those 150 collections are not restricted to researchers and academia, but are readily available to anyone who would like to view them. Lawson expressed that increasing the public’s access to Southern queer history is one of the driving motivations behind the project.
“LGBTQ+ history is so important because queer people have existed in the South for a very long time. And this history has been censored or rendered invisible, and when we don’t know our history, we don’t understand that this is not a new trend. People have always existed here,” Lawson said.
The censoring of LGBTQ+ history has had a negative impact on many queer Southerners, such as Casper Lagabed, a sophomore art major from Ocean Springs, Miss.
“Even with the internet, I have struggled to find information about Southern queer history. I think that if I knew more about the history of queer people in the South, that might’ve helped me with understanding my identity sooner, rather than trying to deny it for so long,” Lagabed said.
Grayson Huggins, a freshman psychology major from Memphis, echoed Lagabed, saying that an understanding of Southern LGBTQ+ history would have been helpful as a queer youth unsure of their identity.
“I would’ve loved to grow up knowing more about LGBTQ history in the South,” Huggins said. “I grew up thinking I was strange because I thought women were just as pretty as men. I would have liked to be proud of being from the South and how we had our own LGBTQ history and culture, but it’s something that I’ve only recently learned about.”
