Archiving Queer Intimacies: Collections Across Space and Time is a conceptual and historical inquiry into the temporal dimensions of queer intimacy, memory, community, and archives. To assemble the collection of items in Archiving Queer Intimacies, I sourced photos, poems, letters, journal entries, flyers, and various objects from UCLA Library Special Collections, all in service of testing and stretching the elasticity of the archive to hold non-linear temporality and queer life-lived. Some of these materials explicitly describe experiences of time, while others demonstrate the infinite ways queer intimacy takes shape. This project suggests that an alternative or counter-queer temporality is revealed in an affective-aesthetic reading of archival material. Unconcerned with reproductive linearity or binary breaks between past and future, Archiving Queer Intimacies evidences the existence of queer temporalities that can be uniquely quantified by the intensification, relaxation, strain, openness, or networking of intimacy to ultimately disrupt normative narratives. Materials from the Tyger-Womon Papers, Angela Brinskele Photographs, the Southern California Women for Understanding Collection, and the ACT UP Collection invite us to consider how the intensity of intimate relationships or connections serves as a record of the movement of time that accounts for subcultural lives and resists archives’ desire for disciplinary fixity.
In the lobby of Young Research Library, an exhibit case features a selection of material that is in conversation with the extended descriptions and content found here. I engage with archival theory and push beyond its disciplinary limits to contend with queer theory and historiography. Archiving Queer Intimacies operates from a place of friction or collision where time, narrative, and space brush up against each other. From that place emerges intimacy, intensification, and imagination.
Societies’ structuring systems—namely racial capitalism—rely on temporal logics to retain power, sustain ceaseless productivity, and define normativity. Being steeped in temporal logics—or the repertoire of symbols and ideas that explain being in relationship to time—is a reproductive, hetero-temporality that progresses in a straight line from birth and adolescence to marriage, ownership, reproduction, and death. Reproductive time posits longevity or survival into futurity as the ultimate goal and enables generational wealth for white Americans. In turn, dominant Western archives reinforce ideas about preserving the past for some imagined use in the future. Mainstream cooptations of LGBTQIA+ narratives, or homonormativity, find the utility of the past only in the need to redeem it or to mark a boundary between before and after “coming out.” Yet many people live without the promise of futurity as the structuring system of their lives. Or futurity, for them, only ensures the continuation of suffering.
Outside of reproductive time, queer people engage in community, choose family, and assert belonging through various relational means. Community (or "being in community" and "to be in community") is the active engagement with groups, organizations, social spheres, or causes. In this sense, then, being in community involves unique and personalized intimacies that stretch over lifetimes or that exist for just a brief moment in a particular geographic area. They may be casual (running into the same people at the same events for years) or go through periods of varied intensity as life circumstances affect one's capacity for interaction. Relationships to a community or between members are a sort of safety net for queer folks who live outside the normative structures of marriage, family, or home ownership. There is someone to call when you need clothing altered, help moving, or care after medical procedures. Queer community is not underwritten by transactional exchange, but instead by networks of care. Archiving Queer Intimacies does not privilege romantic relationships as somehow more real or "better" as heteronormativity asserts. The lines (or lack of) between partnership and friendship are upheld by mutually agreed upon boundaries and consent.
The impetus for this project began with the Tyger-Womon Papers (Collection 1943). Tyger-Womon was an artist, writer, activist, and shaman of Navajo and Consican descent. Tyger-Womon is also known as "V.L. Adams" and "Michelle" in some of their correspondence. The majority of their archive is dominated by materials authored by and in conversation with artist Hanh Thi Pham. Why would one's minimal personal papers be so concerned with another person, lover, partner, enemy, or friend? V.L. Adams gifted the collection to UCLA in partnership with the June Mazer L. Lesbian Archives. However, the Mazer and UCLA confirm that little can be found/known about Michelle outside of the two-year period documented in this collection. Is this intentional, white archival silence aimed at erasing Tyger-Womon? Or are Tyger and Hanh escaping the archives and moving through time in another register?
My love for you hurts you. ca. 1993, Tyger-Womon Papers 1943
From the collection, it appears impossible to accurately describe and capture the relationship between Tyger-Womon and Hanh Thi Pham beyond the oversimplification that it was intense. Their relationship permeates typically intimate spaces, such as the bedroom, and more public spaces as they collaborated on many artistic projects. They describe hurting one another and simultaneously wanting to be together forever. The intensity of their relationship/intimacy is best captured in temporal terms.
Queerness is at least in part relational. One’s relationship, positionality, or proximity with others affects the construction of personal identity, and exercises in self-determination occur through intimate relationships.
In turn, an intimate relationship with ourselves emerges. How can archival description summarize the acts of trying desperately to achieve a sense of euphoria with one's gender presentation when people spend their entire lives in this pursuit? How can archives confidently reduce one's gender or sexuality to a final state when we spend our lives transforming or transgressing? Scholars of queer temporality often refer to the extended adolescence of queerness or the multiple puberties gender-queer people endure as they move through space in contrast to reproductive time. Along with community and love, these are the intimacies of queerness.
AIDS operates through a unique temporal violence. It speeds up an already likely fast and disorderly life, and renders a final temporal state of failure or having failed (failure to achieve longevity on dominant reproductive time). AIDS has denied queer communities a generation of ancestors and history—important frames of reference for being. The temporality of AIDS and the unique memory practices that took shape during the initial moment of the epidemic are well documented in scholarly discourse and artistic production (e.g., Felix Gonzalez-Torres's wall clocks or David Wojnarowicz's work). While many harmful pathogens are transmitted through intimate contact, there is a link between the intimacy of AIDS, its temporality, and the "what ifs" or possibilities left in its wake. What if an entire generation of cultural producers were not murdered by age 30? What art, music, poetry, writing, or knowledge would exist today?
Dominant temporal logics structure our lives and aim to fix the past in the past, asserting that what has passed is over-and-done-with. Rather than operating from a place of deficit, loss, or lack, this project acknowledges the abundance of material documenting queer life and love in front of us. But how is the intensity of queer intimacy different than normative relationships? Don't all people dream of their love extending through millennia and traversing mountain ranges? This project argues that different intimate relations are actually a mode of keeping queer time, or describing the experience of time, that is not exclusively in pursuit of longevity. If archival collections are typically organized chronologically, in accordance with reproductive time, this collection, in contrast, is organized and arranged by the intensity of intimacy.