Everyone Has a Hand in History Making: A Case Study of Nontraditional Historical Writing at the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network

The LGBTQ Religious Archives Network (LGBTQ-RAN) is an online archival resource center that supports the preservation and dissemination of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer religious history. The program has existed in some form since 2001 but became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 2020. While LGBTQ-RAN has links to and information about over 500 archival collections, the organization also hosts a catalogue of over 700 biographical narratives or “profiles” of spiritual leaders on its website. The creation of these profiles is a collaborative effort between staff members, volunteers, the spiritual leaders themselves, and the loved ones of those being written about. These profiles provide a useful case study of how secondary research and information can be created about communities and by communities whose histories are often marginalized by the mainstream. The volunteer-led effort provides opportunities for LGBTQ people themselves or those connected to LGBTQ history/spirituality to be part of creating secondary historical sources at a pace that would be less suited for monographs or other longer pieces of writing. I also hope to explore in this poster the benefits and challenges of “crowd-sourcing” secondary historical research, especially because many of the profiles of living individuals involve the volunteer researcher interviewing the spiritual leader, which can be a critical point of contact between the public and the archival resource center.

This poster aims to provide visual depictions of the research processes that can go into biographical profiles, highlighting its collaborative nature with the communities being written about. Furthermore, the poster will include excerpts from selected profiles, along with images of the profiles’ subjects. Given my involvement with LGBTQ-RAN as a volunteer historical researcher, I also aim to obtain approval to utilize the colors and some of the imagery from the LGBTQ-RAN website to highlight how visually engaging the online resource center is and to connect visitors to the site itself due to visual similarities.