I am beginning to wrap up my research into available resources for LGBTQ historical research available at Mississippi repositories. This week I sent out follow-up emails to any repository I had contacted and had not yet received a response. I continued to search ArchiveGrid for historical names identified as Mississippi LGBTQ-related figures. To ensure my reasoning for inclusion is clear to anyone who might access my research, I am also writing up a short statement. I will be spending the remaining time summarizing my research and cleaning up the spreadsheets. This is not the most exciting work to be reflecting on, but I want to ensure I'm thorough in the final products I provide to my program and IHP.
Brainstorming Lessons Learned
During this process, keeping this blog as a journal of my activities and thoughts has been helpful, especially given the repetitive nature of surveying and searching web resources. I identified the following lessons:
Knowing Mississippi’s LGBTQ history matters
I wish I had more time and energy to absorb more outside reading materials prior to and during this internship. I learned that for many parts of the country, the Lavender Menace reactions that targeted LGBTQ people began in the 1950s. However for Mississippi, according to historian John Howard (1999), the backlash against minority sexualities and gender identities did not appear until the late-1960s and corresponded with the Civil Rights Movement. Police raids, employee purges, and political "gay-baiting" associated with anti-gay sentiment was part of the anti-integration actions of those in power. The social backlash against civil rights equated the activists coming into Mississippi with communism and accusations of homosexuality were common to malign civil rights workers and political figures (Howard, 1999). This connection of civil rights issues indicates that many resources associated with this period and the people involved--both the activists and the anti-integrationists--could provide insight into LGBTQ individuals and the social issues they faced during this time.
Other subjects and issues relating to the historical LGBTQ experience involve the high level of religiosity of Mississippians, and how religious groups and organizations impacted LGBTQ lives. Queer experience in the South is connected to rural communities, which organize around churches and locales that are non-urban. Historian John Howard (1999) ties LGBTQ experience to the church, to the family home, to schools, and to transportation and the roads that connected Mississippians to each other. Many of the repositories I surveyed either have roots as religious institutions or maintained a strong religious presence. Mississippi colleges and universities are almost guaranteed to have religious student organizations, but gay-student alliances were actively supressed and denied recognition by schools into the 1990s, as were gay advocacy groups denied incorporation by the state (Howard, 1999).
Recognizing the difficulty posed by social forces in organizing, rural, close-knit Mississippians were not self-identifying as LGBTQ in the same ways. Many Mississippians were not publicly "out" nor did they use the labels that began to emerge with the Gay Rights Movement. These and other factors resulted in families who may not have known about LGBTQ identities when donating materials. Or family and/or archival professionals actively suppressing these identities, removing materials or not including that information in finding aids. Despite all this, there are examples of prominent historical figures, whether identified as LGBTQ during their lives or later, representing Mississippi. For many of the collections for these cultural treasures, their LGBTQ status was excluded from descriptive inventories entirely, and even secondary sources failed to identify this part of their lives.
Repositories vary and some are better at preserving and providing access to LGBTQ materials
As of 2020, most of the colleges' and universities' libraries, even the private religious schools, had published materials with LGBTQ titles, keywords, and subject headings. The archives and special collections, however, lagged behind in collecting the full experience of Mississippians. Many schools had evidence of LGBTQ student groups as early as the 1960s, with the Mississippi Gay Alliance having attempted to organize at Mississippi State (Howard, 1999). By the early 2010s, possibly earlier, some student groups were recognized at by their schools. Today, most of the larger universities' LGBTQ student groups have a web presence and are recognized, and a few schools explicitly include LGBTQ in their diversity and inclusion offices and statements. Despite this clear display of LGBTQ culture in and around Mississippi's institutions of higher education, few examples of intentional collecting and preservation exist. Perhaps the unfriendly political climate for LGBTQ people in Mississippi is a cause of the slow progress, but archival professionals trained in recent years surely were presented with the professional standards and ethics that demand equal representation. Despite a general trend of collections no existing or not being adequately described to provide access, there were a few shining examples of LGBTQ inclusion in archiving. One LGBTQ research guide, a few examples of metadata, and a handful of oral histories projects were found. No doubt there are other examples that I was unable to find, but the growing dedication of a few professors and students will hopefully expand available resources in the coming years.
Collections identified primarily cover known historical figures
Manuscript collections identified mostly were created by or collected about well-known figures, especially creatives. Writers, poets, artists, and critics that gained national or state recognition were collected, as well as political figures that either identified or were known for marginalized sexual orientations. Politicians and anti-gay figures are also represented in Mississippi archives, and while these resources are suppressive, misrepresentative, or attempts to erase the lived experiences of queer Mississippians, they nonetheless provide resources for historical research. The most obvious and accessible resources are relatively new (1990s onward) oral histories, some part of targeted LGBTQ projects, that capture the experiences of students and faculty of Mississippi institutions.
References
Howard, J. (2002). Men like that : a southern queer history (1st paperback ed.). University of
Chicago Press.