ICOM Voices Making Sure Queer Lives Are Not Forgotten: Preserving The Personal Histories Of LGBTQ+ Elders through the Queer Legacies Project

Keywords: LGBTQ+, Memory, Community, Elders, Preservation

When staff at the American LGBTQ+ Museum met with queer elders, there was one concern that was expressed again and again: that their lives – and their stories – would be forgotten. The programming team responded by creating the Queer Legacies Project, which illuminates and preserves the personal histories of queer elders through facilitated workshops in which their archives are digitised so they can live on forever.

The beginnings of a developing museum

The American LGBTQ+ Museum was first envisioned in 2017, when a group that included Richard Burns, the museum’s eventual board chair, convened to discuss the urgent need to record the voices of the surviving witnesses of the last 60 years, the greatest period of progress in LGBTQ+ history. This group raised money to fund the Museum and surveyed roughly 40,000 LGBTQ+ Americans across the country to get feedback on what stories to tell.

Starting in fall 2027, the museum will be housed at The New York Historical – a history museum and library on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The construction of the museum began in December 2024, and this addition marks a major expansion for the New York Historical Museum, which is the oldest in New York City.

The beginning of this construction was celebrated in an event that gathered more than 450 supporters, who came to hear activists, artists, and elected officials discuss the importance of telling queer histories in their own voices. While documenting the past, the American LGBTQ+ Museum – the first museum in New York dedicated exclusively to preserve, research and share LGBTQ+ history and culture – will also look forward to a future in which people of all backgrounds come together to experience the joy of liberation. Our teams are working on several projects and programs ahead of the opening of the museum’s physical space; in this article we are spotlighting one such initiative, the Queer Legacies Project.

The Preservation of Queer Elders’ Memories

There are LGBTQ+ people among us who lived through some of the most important advances in civil rights history, including the Stonewall Riots, the fight to end the AIDS epidemic, and the legalisation of same-sex marriage. These elders will not be with us forever. At the American LGBTQ+ Museum, we felt an urgency to preserve their stories while we still could. We therefore established The Queer Legacies Project, a series of in-person workshops in which queer elders share their stories and personal archives. The materials they provide are digitised, and participants are given a personal copy of their documents. They are also asked if they would agree to give a copy to the museum for potential use in future exhibitions. Most agree to do so.

Fig. 2. Queer Legacies Project participant with discontinued feminist newspaper. Photo © Leandro Justen.

The Project arose from feedback we received while seeking to shape the future of the museum. Queer elders expressed concern that their stories and archives were being lost. They lived through a remarkable period of history, they told us, and their experiences were worthy of being preserved.

We share that belief, and we saw these testimonies as an opportunity to center the experience of elders – experiences that can sometimes be ignored by younger generations. In addition, we felt that amid enduring attacks on queer lives in the broader culture, our workshops could be spaces of resistance where LGBTQ+ stories could not be discounted.

While valuable work has already been done to preserve the legacies of well-known figures in the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, the lives and experiences of lesser-known queer people who lived through this period of dramatic change are also worthy of preservation. We wanted to ensure that future generations can engage with these lives and learn from them.

Fig. 3. Queer Legacies Project participant with photo and card from a former gay bar. Photo © Leandro Justen.

Crucial partnerships with specialised organisations

We partnered with two remarkable organisations to put together our first workshops: The Feminist Institute, which has done exemplary work in digital archiving and preservation, and SAGE, a service and advocacy organisation for LGBTQ+ elders with centers around the United States. SAGE has fostered and provided community for queer elders, including members of marginalised communities whose narratives are often not prioritised. All these reasons made SAGE an ideal partner. We worked with them in New York City to bring together queer elders for these workshops, which took place in March at the Edie Windsor SAGE Center in Manhattan.

The Feminist Institute has led the way in preserving and digitising feminist contributions to culture, including at its pop-up “Memory Lab” events in New York City for members of the general public. We were deeply grateful to have Allison Elliott, the Institute’s Archives & Programs Manager, take the technical lead in our workshop. Digitisation, she pointed out, is the ideal way to build a people’s history from the bottom up.

The process entails ingesting a range of materials – including photos, papers, film, VHS tapes – and digitising them so that they can be held on a USB drive and/or accessed online. After their materials were digitised, participants each received a drive to take home. They were also given the option to release their digital files to the museum for potential future exhibitions on, for example, New York City club culture in the 1970s.

One of the most remarkable outcomes of the workshop was the way that it fostered intergenerational conversations. The people who did the digitising – staffers from the Feminist Institute as well as staffers from the American LGBTQ+ Museum who they trained – were largely from a different generation than the elders who attended, offering a wonderful opportunity for intergenerational exchange.

There were younger participants as well, including queer people in their 20s and 30s who brought family photo albums and other materials. Artist Yanni Young digitised a photo depicting her as a girl sitting on a quilt made by her grandmother. “When you connect with people across generations”, she said, “it’s like a balm, like a salve”.

During these workshops, the museum was able to gather photographs and other records dating back over half a century. Participant Mary Ellen Liona, 85, digitised photographs showing her family’s life in Brooklyn. “Our city and our world has changed so much”, she said. “The young people don’t know about our past. So the idea is to let them know what New York City, what Brooklyn was like, 60, 70 years ago. And how much fun we had.”

Conclusion

Four Queer Legacies Project workshops took place in March of 2025; they attracted around 60 participants in total. To showcase this initial effort, the American LGBTQ+ Museum, in partnership with Jessie Levandov and the creative studio, Mala Forever, put together a series of videos spotlighting the voices and experiences of those involved; a few episodes are now available online. A second series of workshops will take place in Harlem, New York this fall; in response to feedback, the museum plans to add an aspect of intergenerational dialogue to the workshops, perhaps by assigning volunteers to elder participants in each session.

The conversations that have already taken place during these first workshops are a powerful reminder of the importance of telling the stories of queer people who never made headlines – but whose lives were still enormously meaningful. The Queer Legacies Project represents an early initiative in celebrating these LGBTQ+ Americans, who were witnesses to and/or active agents of a period of tremendous progress in the fight for their civil rights. Their stories must never be lost to history.

Fig. 6. American LGBTQ+ Museum and Feminist Institute staff with QLP participants. Photo © Leandro Justen.