Memorialising queer community: digital media,subjectivity and the Lost Gay # archives of social networking

Introduction – queer community and digital media

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) subcultural activity, community and communication in the contemporary era demand, according to Jack Halberstam (2008: 41), a ‘nuanced theory of archives and archiving’. Halberstam rightly points to the nascent and growing queer cultural theorising of archiving, as well as some of the practices of producing archives that incorporate queer zines, posters, guerrilla art, community histories and the sharing of historical documentation – all of which regularly take the form of digital and networked media, or are archived and shared in online settings today. In this article, I argue that there is a continuing need to theorise practices of archiving in terms of how new digital and participatory methods both expand and critique formal understandings of archives as physical spaces that collect materials for the purpose of forging imagined communities (Featherstone, 2006: 592). My contention in this article is that digital media practices turn archiving into an activity that is part of everyday online experience, engaged with affectively, and implicated in the production and maintenance of minority and diverse sexual and gender identities.

Digital cultures of minority and alternative archiving principally make use of social networking. In this interactive setting, community memorialisation engages a democratically broad membership of people who are arguably motivated affectively by nostalgia for community and subcultural activities of the past and of connections lost. What emerges and motivates this activity is a desire to record activities, events, intelligibilities and knowledge of minority communities that may not necessarily be considered part of a ‘mainstream’ national or international archive in a formal sense. The important question at stake is not what do emergent archiving practices archive and how do they do it? Rather, it is: In what ways do contemporary, digital and everyday archiving practices operate at the intersection of processes of memory and memorialisation, media and technological affordances, and affective forms of online belonging to forge and sustain minority identities?

This article begins to engage with that question by coming at it from three different perspectives: the digitisation of memorial practices that operate through interactivity, co-creativity and shared felt sensibilities of community engagement; the role of the archive in the production of contemporary digital identities within contexts of relationality and sharing; and, the way in which nostalgia is implicated in constituting community identities through memory and loss. Across these three perspectives, new ways of thinking about the contemporary practice of the archive as an affective engagement with identity formation are opened up. I would like to explore these three perspectives through an analysis of LGBTQ social networking sites set up to deliberately collect, collate and share local, city-based community archival material such as stories and images. Following the development of social networking pages dedicated to the preservation of individuals’ photographic and textual memorialisation of cities (e.g. Facebook’s Lost Melbourne), a number of archiving sites using Facebook have been developed that cater to the practice of memorialising LGBTQ city-based communities, events and public spaces, histories, past active members less visible today than in the past (e.g. Lost Gay Perth and Lost Gay Melbourne).

Innovative, participatory and co-creative use of social networking for the sharing of images of past LGBTQ parties, venues, political events, both recent and dated death notices, written memories and searches for ‘lost’ acquaintances and friends can be understood to invoke deeply felt and affective attachments to a formation of community as temporally prior or lost, through techniques and technologies of memory and memorialisation. In constructing and building archives, particular formations of subjectivity, agency, generationalism, sharing, belonging and communication emerge in ways that differ from older, official notions of performing archive-based memorialisation. What these sites demonstrate is that the temporal perspective of a minority population of everyday community members, recirculating stories, images and documents from a local community ‘past’, provides an alternative perspective on community. This perspective is framed, on one hand, by a sense of nostalgia and loss (of the past), while, on the other hand, also highlighting the melancholic potential of the archive as lost and thereby requiring participatory memorialisation. In this context, the act of memorial archiving, which has shifted from pre-digital archival production to a digital co-creative affective and nostalgic sharing, is one that brings into view the manifold ways that identity is articulated in and through the act of participating in a community archive.

Interactive record keeping – the Lost Gay # (city) online archives

In considering the ways that archives produce relational identities in the form of community, it is important to begin by thinking about how shared acts devoted to ‘the past’ are implicated in the production of subjectivity by responding to a desire or demand of individuals to participate in the sharing of stories (Cover, 2016) – a move that involves a shift from the official and top-down practice of archiving to one which is interactive. Archiving of queer memory in a digital setting occurs through two activities that can be considered acts of ‘recording’. First, a record of non-heteronormative identity performance can be produced through, for example, social network engagement, or the production of selfies or by contributing to a forum by reading, engaging, viewing and interpreting material posted there (Kwon and Kwon, 2015: 304). Second, a more direct record can be made through deliberate acts of contribution to a community; these can comprise the capturing and distributing of one’s own stories in ways that are designed to be sensible and meaningful to other non-heterosexual minority subjects. Such archival records can include the sharing of coming-out stories (Saxey, 2008: 5), and, in more recent times, the sharing of those stories in interactive forums such as YouTube (Cover and Prosser, 2013), or by adding to wikis and forums, or by contributing to the It Gets Better video site produced to foster resilience among young LGBTQ persons by sharing stories of fortitude (Goltz, 2013: 137). Alternatively, a record might be produced by contributing to online publications, creating and curating pages and profiles on social networking sites (Lincoln and Robards, 2014), or building a Tumblr for an anonymous audience. All these ‘produce a record’, an archive of the interactions between self and community. While archiving was once the province of official record keepers, digital practices of community memorialisation operate at the intersection of self-narrative and community memory in such a way that they bring personal histories of the domestic and the non-official into the practice of archiving. Community archiving, then, is affective and related more explicitly to the articulation of identity.

In addition to the emergent practice of LGBTQ minority community archiving online described above, there is also value in considering other practices of queer memorialisation in order to elucidate some of the ways in which affective attachments to belonging are reproduced differently as a result of the affordances of digital media. Take the Lost Gay Perth Facebook group, for example, which articulates its purpose as follows:

Perth is one of the most physically isolated cities in the world and the third oldest city in Australia. Most might not know of the Gay communities (the term gay is used as a broadly inclusive concept for LGBT and queer communities) that once existed in the city. This group remembers and celebrates the incredible legacy of that community. Because often too quickly, the future becomes the past, and the past is forgotten and lost. Post pics and discuss Gay Perth from the turn of the century – right up to the 60’s, 70’s. 80’s and late 90’s and possibly even the early 00’s! Invite your friends, add pics, videos, events, discuss; most of all have fun and respect (negative posts will be deleted) the people that may still be around in a suburb near you. This group has also been created to archive Perth Gay community for the Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives, (t-shirts, banners, journals, newsletters, photographs, oral history recordings, videos, personal papers, organisational records etc.) details on how to donate will be posted soon. (Edwards and Gomez, 2012)

This lengthy description serves as a useful example of the broader purposes, values and intentions of the Lost Gay # groups that were formed in Australian cities in the early 2010s, pointing to the simultaneous ‘will to archive’ (Featherstone, 2006: 595), remember and memorialise activities, stories and narratives of the past, as well as to encourage inclusive participation, co-creativity and interactivity in a digital context. Although typically begun by well-intentioned volunteers with the support of official archival organisations, such as the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Melbourne (http://alga.org.au), it is important not to understand these sites as determined by their establishment, but from the context of how they are ‘taken up’ by members and users, both active contributors or co-creators and lurkers. For example, in 2017, Lost Gay Melbourne has 4611 members, Lost Gay Adelaide has 718 and Lost Gay Perth has 3089. Minority community archives are often produced by volunteers who, through the act of archival volunteering, gain a sense of attachment and belonging to the community, organisation, subculture or nation that is being archived. Through this attachment, archives are often reflective of aspirations for the social, political or cultural enfranchisement of that community (Appadurai, 2003). The digital form of social networking arguably further enables entry, access, editing and contribution that is democratised, affective, intersecting the private and the public, and enabling acts of public memorialisation to simultaneously serve as acts of identity performativity, representation, self-recognition and community responsiveness.

The production of a community archive through co-creative social networking is an instance of what Laura Doan (2017: 114) refers to as the overcoming of the adversarial relationship between individual history and collective memory. Lost Gay Adelaide, for example, identifies itself clearly as a participatory site. This is clear from its description, which states, ‘Invite your friends, add relevant LGA pics, videos, events, discuss Ye Olde Days’ (Lost Gay Adelaide, 2017). This aligns with the interactivity of contemporary media use. Interactivity in this situation refers to the user-generated production of the site as a co-creative text outside of a linear sender–message–receiver framework. In an interactive setting, all participants have the capacity to contribute, add, adjust and reframe the text as a whole. In that context, the Lost Gay # sites are representative of the forms of interactivity in which a felt attachment to a text is communally shared and open, without the encumbrance of an historical framing of textual ownership through a claim to authorship or copyright that marks pre-digital textual, broadcast and print media (Cover, 2006).

Any social networking site is, of course, archival in the first instance, even though its archive is produced as the digital trace of communication that often takes the form of ephemeral, interactive conversation (Crang, 2015: 354). Most commonly used as personal sites for self-expression and interactive communication, social networking sites such as Facebook operate as a convenient tool for the construction and clarification of selfhood online. Sites like Facebook are also capable of being utilised as an online archive for offline performances of identity that present a temporal account of the self that records past and the present events (Buckingham, 2008; Cover, 2012a). Minority identities such as LGBTQ sexualities are also relational, constituted in the citation of discursive resources that enable belonging through recognition. Such resources have traditionally been accessed through popular culture (Cover, 2000) and minority community media resources (Cover, 2002); in recent years, this access is occurring through the interactive process of social networking, which further shifts the constitution of identity into representational and confessional modes.

Identity is articulated through representation, and, in a post-structuralist framework, such representation can be understood as confessional. Confession, as Sally Munt (2002: 18) has pointed out, is a technique of the self which renders the subject ‘visible and plausible to itself, and to others’ through a reiteration which gains the force of a plot and involves a persistent and retrospective reordering.

But, what happens to that retrospective remembering and reconfiguring when the momentary articulations of an identity performance and the many conversations and regimentary instances of surveillance-and-confession are laid out across a social networking wall as a written history? Following Stuart Hall, St Louis (2009) has pointed out that narratives account ‘for peoples’ arrival at the present through a past that is imaginatively reconstructed and dramatized’ (p. 565). Likewise, Buckingham (2008) notes that part of what he calls the ‘project of selfhood’ compels the production of biographical narratives that are articulated over time.

Both conceptualisations of self and representation usefully allow us to consider how narratives of performative selfhood developed by users through profile management are put asunder by the friendship wall discussions, additions, commentary and tagging that act as an archive. That is, the memorialisation of the past is not as easily refigured, reordered and re-remembered when an order, a history and a set of collective memories are laid out as an archive that is not produced through a singular authority but a co-creative network of both individually and collectively nostalgic subjects.

In contrast to the curation of an individual social networking profile, an autobiography or a reflective construction of a user’s online profile involves a memorialisation of a past which retrospectively narrates and justifies the current moment of identity coherence. The act of producing an intelligible and coherent identity lends the illusion of an ongoing fixity of identity across time (Lincoln and Robards, 2014). Relatedly, this ‘sameness’ of identity across time, in interaction with others, produces what has been considered a ‘healthy’ sense of belonging (Cover, 2012b; Mehra and Braquet, 2006: 2–3). A community archive of the past, on the other hand, is precisely the one that opens up the possibility of identity incoherence by documenting a shared community past from the perspective not of a collectively agreed history but of individual co-contributors acting in the context of both the performance of individual and community identity.

This form of community, collective and co-creative sharing of the past is built not solely on what Appadurai (2003) considers an aspirational ‘will to archive’, or to engage in archiving practices. It is also built on an affective sense of nostalgia that is expressed by engaging electronically, interactively and through practices of co-creative contribution, reading and commenting that are a nostalgia for a past ‘real place’ (the places of minority community engagement, bodies assembled together, clubs, bars, venues, political organisations, marches, movements). The chaotic, non-linear temporality of the contributions is presented on walls, feeds, albums and document bays on group Facebook pages. These contributions thus reflect a pattern of randomness given the individual, personalised and customised manner in which members might contribute an image, a death notice, a comment, a memory, a text in their own time and not in a chronological order that reflects a community history. This framework competes, therefore, with older, traditional classificatory systems that derive from a desire for cataloguing contents in settings related to history and time, and arguably demonstrates the difficulty of transposing a traditional, procedural activity into a crowdsourced social network setting. Part of that transposition, and the desire to provide a sense of order, involves the setting of rules for members and users. For example, Lost Gay Melbourne (2017) requests that members and users operate as follows:

This page is to remember and preserve the gay history of Melbourne from the early days onwards. If you are posting pictures, please add basic information such as name, place, date etc.

Lost Gay Melbourne (2017) provides extensive instructions to help ensure contributions are relevant to the Melbourne LGBTQ community:

UPLOAD YOUR MATERIAL INTO AN ALBUM: If you’re uploading a whole batch of images etc, create an album first and upload the entire collection of images to that album at once. That way, it will only appear once on the group wall and not flood the entire wall with individual posts …. DO NOT POST SONGS OR MUSIC unless they have some direct relationship with the GLBTIQ community of Melbourne. ACCEPTABLE POSTS INCLUDE: Drag shows and special performances etc, videos that relate to Melbourne.

The ‘will to archive’ here is not a form of community belonging (because it is not simply about utilising the digital space to express or articulate that belonging with just any text or artefact that is meaningful to the user in the manner of a private Facebook page). Rather, it is a form of affective community ‘responsibility’ because it presents an injunction to make a record. The site thus calls for any material that would ‘work’ in traditional archiving practices, and does so by providing a code of conduct for the provision of that material. Such a code of conduct is, of course, a mode of boundary policing of all minority communities based on discrete identities. With the archive of a local community past understood as an identity resource, it is possible to understand the production of identity not only through a ‘thrownness’ into collective pasts of a minority community, but as open to the political possibilities of earlier formations of minority community, including those which were explicitly contra to neoliberal marketisation and individualisation of identity.

Finally, nostalgia comes into play as an activity that articulates a performative identity of minority LGBTQ community belonging. This might be limited, ultimately, to older generations of people who, in the context of ageing, feel a reduced sense of belonging to certain sites of community gathering frequented by younger community members, such as venues, bars, clubs. Or, they might have found that past belongings forged on political and community activism are no longer a space for the performance of identities because such kinds of political activities might no longer be as relevant or essential (e.g. the shift in community politics from the struggle for decriminalisation of homosexuality or HIV/AIDS funding to one focused principally on marriage equality). Or, indeed, this might reflect an ongoing attachment to place including both current and former sites of community gathering (e.g. bars and clubs that have closed). In this sense, the affect of nostalgia that prompts activities or memory, memorialisation, sharing, record and archiving comes to be symbolic, sustaining modes of symbol and iconography that are meaningful to the maintenance of minority identity, but might belong to an historical past rather than have political or cultural meaning for the present.

To put this another way, a minority community culture is built not merely on the relationality between individuals identifying with a category of subjectivity, such as LGBTQ, but on the shared symbolic culture that precedes that membership (Cohen, 1985). Such a symbolic community consciousness is not subordinate to a community’s structures and institutions (such as social venues, histories of protest or political organisations), but participates in the fabrication and sustaining of a bounded, minority community identity (Anderson, 1983: 4). The centrality of a shared history – whether that is a history of oppression, marginalisation, social distinctiveness, inequalities or political gains over time – is central to the framework through which belonging to a minority community operates at the intersection between relationality and identity. In this sense, then, the Lost Gay # sites present the fulcrum of a community engagement built on producing a sense of belonging online. The digital setting actively enables the bringing together of history (of community), memory (of subjects), relationality (in participatory sharing) and the convenience of sustaining this community setting without the need for geographic place, space and traditional frameworks of social time.

Archive, memory and identity – digital subjectivities in temporal coherence

I have argued so far that the operation of the Lost Gay # sites as archives and as interactive, co-creative settings of identity curation provide opportunities for coherent performativity and for fostering an attachment to selfhood in ways that may usefully complicate identity production. We might ask, however, what happens when a concept of temporality is brought into the framework in attempting to understand the social, cultural and community role of such online archives. Temporality, in this sense, is a critical standpoint that draws attention to the fact that practices, artefacts, archived materials, comments and online engagements all have a complex relationship with time. By invoking time, a critique of the concept of memory becomes necessary. For example, if the Lost Gay # pages are to be understood as notable for producing an affective social attachment to community beyond a felt sense of attachment to place while simultaneously re-invoking place (the named # city), then it is through the bringing together of identity (performatively articulated online rather than in physical assembly), memory (as a processual act of sharing rather than a singular or individual recollection) and an archival sensibility (as a relational procedure that produces community in a digital setting within complex temporalities). In the case of the third term in this conjunction, the figure of the archive, it is important to understand how digital technologies are related to surveillance. Such surveillance actively produces a perception of the world through a particular view-point on place (e.g. presenting geographical locations viewed nostalgically, such as bars, clubs and public events) and people (both presenting images of queer community members including in many cases those known to other members of the Lost Gay # groups, and simultaneously articulating peopleness and membership as a discrete, bounded community population). It is also important in the context of temporality (making the world and ourselves searchable by the persistent ‘fixing’ of particular frameworks of understanding the past). This means that the archive in this form simultaneously creates the possibility of a fixed temporal history and the possibility of critiquing or questioning that temporality through the archive’s inherent interactivity as a technology of both individual and collective memory.

Digital media make available an archive by fostering modes of connectivity and presence preserved over time (Castells, 2000: 492), and this is not limited to the sense of a personal past that is produced, as with individual accounts, in a timeline on Facebook but to a collective perception, built on both relationality and exclusion, of that which is deemed marginal or irrelevant. It also includes the practice of debating what belongs and does not belong in the collective ‘memory’ of a geographically bounded minority community of sexual and gender diversity (Mills, 1997: 56–57). Forms of tacit exclusion, however, are not merely oppressive or marginalising but work to actively produce identities of belonging in a framework of temporality. Here, the past becomes significant for understanding and interacting in the present; particular kinds of pasts are made intelligible and categorisable in the context of present discourses of LGBTQ belonging and selfhood. Identities become part of the categorisation of the ‘unsaid or sayable’ (Agamben, 2002: 144) within community practices of archiving and memorialisation.

At the same time, the archive is also a form of documentation that operates as an intervention in subjectivity. According to Arjun Appadurai (2003: 24–25), the archive does not merely precede but is a step towards different forms of change, imagination, alternative memory, ‘a tool for the refinement of desire’. For Appadurai, then, archives are implicated in kinds of cultural change, whereby marginalised groups and minority communities can formulate, record and disseminate knowledge that are excluded from the mainstream. However, the archive is also typically related to how we think about the kinds of changes that are brought about by digitisation of media and the ubiquitous access to information more broadly. That is, archives in contemporary digital use have both conservative (conservational) and revolutionary (culturally transformative) potential (Halberstam, 2011: 86). Practices of performing identity change because the practices of disseminating information change and develop. One such change is the availability of information as an archive that actively attempts to hide the fact that the digital repository of information found online is an archive. What once might have been thought of as the chronologically old (the record, the database and the outdated information) sit alongside the new (current information and dominant frameworks of community identity).

The concept of the archive is generally figured in the context of the modern nation state, as a repository through which memories related to national belonging are constructed. Archives in that sense are an element in the ‘apparatus of social rule and regulation’ via the accumulation and organisation of information (Featherstone, 2006: 591). For Featherstone, it was through the archive that the individual subject of the Enlightenment and modern European era was formed as a category or site of knowledge ‘through the accumulated case records (the file) which documented individual life histories within a particular institutional nexus such as a school, prison, hospital or more generally through governmental welfare or security agencies’ (pp. 591–592). In this traditional sense, then, the archive constructs the subject within the coupling of nationality and subjectivity, producing each individual as a national subject through the cross-referencing of different pieces of information about that subject’s finances, life decisions, educational achievements, medical health, compliance with law and other elements. Within the digital formation of an interactive and co-creative practice of archiving, a ‘will to archive’ utilises the social networking platform as a tool of surveillance, simultaneously providing a framework for the operationalisation of disciplinary practices that produce particular kinds of conformable identities and concomitant actions (Foucault, 2008: 138). Such identities, intersecting with community history online, sustain an affective attachment to community through temporal distinctiveness of past over present.

Loss – affect, nostalgia and memory

I would like to conclude this conceptual account of digital queer archiving practices and identity with some comments on the signification of ‘loss’ that is represented in the very title of the Lost Gay # pages, and that further nuances the relationship between belonging or relationality and identity in the context of digital practices of memory and memorialisation. The form of such a digital archive is the product of the very languages of digital communication. As Butler (2012) notes, language ‘does not only record, preserve, and transmit, though on occasion it does all those things. Language also invariably works upon the material it records, preserves and transmits’ (p. 182). Thus, while digital discourses convey names and categories that serve as both memory and archive (Düttmann, 2000: 74), the language of digitisation operates to transform the archive from the one which served the nation and national identity to the one which serves the individualisation of the individual. The individual is figured here, then, as a singularity governed by performative practices recognisable to a community, rather than through labelling, categorisation, location, nationality and citizenship. In this sense, the preservation of an archive in a digital context is that which is anti-loss – the repetition of the data across the cloud preserves an archive in a way that not only sees it protected against the kinds of threats that might be expected of a Mediaeval manuscript repository in a monastery (e.g. fire or flood), but also begins to operate as mobile and as if separated from both tangible form and presence (Urry, 2007: 162). At the same time, however, as a digital and co-creative site, it is interactive, meaning it is changeable, transformable and unfixed, always open to the loss of the archive as it stood at one moment in favour of an adjustment, a comment, new imagery, new interpretations – the form of co-creativity sponsored explicitly by digital interactivity (Cover, 2006). This has implications, then, for how subjects might gain a sense of attachment to the archive. Identity comes to be performed through belonging, although this is a form of belonging that is constituted in a community oriented towards its own temporal past – thus, an identity articulated in part through acts of memorialisation. On the basis of the above, what constitutes queer identity involves a fluctuation between the individual self and the collective community: the more we archive, the more a greater range of discourses is made available.

This is not to suggest, however, that greater the range and diversity is, in all instances, an ‘add on’. Rather, the greater the archive, the greater, also, the production of vulnerability. It is a form of vulnerability conditioned by particular kinds of loss, such as the vulnerability of the people who have been archived (exposure of a past that, in the sharing of an image might be a loss of anonymity or loss of a deliberate forgetting) or the vulnerability of the archive itself (to interactive adjustment as described above). It might also include vulnerability to the exposure of the self as formed in a melancholic attachment to a temporal past (identifying the subject active in processes of collection, recollection, memorialisation and nostalgia, the latter term being available as one of insult or exclusion). In the context of melancholic identities, the affective attachment to the ‘pastness of the past’ (Kouvaros, 2009: 401) is technologised as melancholia that is, itself, made accessible and persistently available, perhaps in stark contrast to the contemporary practice of the ‘reunion’. Melancholia is invoked by way of framing, for example, a particular form or variation of ‘Gay Perth’ as ‘Lost’, noting the role of the archive in community affiliations fixated on shared mourning (Doan, 2017: 126). Here, the archive becomes what Butler (2015) has described as the ‘undeniable archive, the enduring trace of loss that compels the ongoing obligation to mourn’ (p. 202). The past here is given as a particular kind of relationality that is no longer available, hence attachment shifts from one of community as a-temporal to one that is connected with a particular ‘place’ or ‘point’ on a timeline of past events.

To conclude, then, if we are to take up Laura Doan’s (2017: 116) imperative that we embrace the complexity of minority community histories, then there is value in thinking about the ways in which the relationship between the archive and identities constituted in nostalgia, memory and melancholic attachment to loss are made more complex in a digital, interactive and co-creative setting. The digital archive of the Lost Gay # sites has enormous political value by providing a co-creative collation of memories that operates as a bulwark against exclusion, forgetfulness, minoritisation, marginalisation which, for non-dominant groups, is always a risk in more official archival settings, where exclusionary practices often produce an ‘erasure of historical struggles and conflicts’ (Giroux, 2004: 806). However, the complex way in which the digital practices of interactive archiving bring together and make complex identities, temporality, attachment and relationality are a fertile field for ongoing investigation that might be expected to reveal not only how particular marginalised communities relate to communication, but how technologies are utilised innovatively and unexpectedly in ways that reveal the central importance to communities of the practices of subjectivity.