Online Exhibit Intern Inspired By Georgia LGBTQ+ Artists in the DLG

LGBTQ Collection Georgia State University. Special Collections

From January 19 to April 16, 2021, I held the position of online exhibit intern for the Digital Library of Georgia and the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The internship brief was to design an exhibit on my chosen topic, selecting all multimedia objects and organizing them into discrete thematic sections before writing exhibit copy. 

I had initially approached this project thinking that I should create an exhibit about something closely tied to my degree and dissertation research, which was, to be fair, not about Georgia at all: I had spent my doctoral career studying Renaissance English literature and medical history.

I mulled over potential exhibit topics on Georgia medical history, like the founding of hospitals and medical schools, before I reconsidered the purpose of curating an exhibit. 

I decided that the point was not to curate exhibit content for its own sake simply because it’s available information, just as you don’t teach a class about certain texts just because you’ve read them. The content should tell a story that the audience might not know yet, but that, once known, will change something about their perspective and understanding of the world. So instead of asking myself what I already knew, I asked the opposite: what did I not know? What stories had I not heard yet?

I grew up in a small mountain town near the border of Georgia and North Carolina, and I thought about the absolute invisibility of LGBTQ+ experiences in that community. Even in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, subjects like LGBTQ+ rights and pride could be dangerous to raise, and as a result, they often simply weren’t. Every single LGBTQ+ person I knew in my hometown, myself included, waited to “come out” until they had moved to a city like Raleigh or Atlanta, where it felt safe to be visible. We were all recovering the history of our community late, and it seemed like there was so much we didn’t know. So, I scrapped one proposal and wrote another for an exhibit on LGBTQ+ history in Georgia to tell the stories I hadn’t heard yet.

I found during the proposal process that there were important efforts I had already begun to collect, preserve, and retell: 

I couldn’t create an exhibit that would cover all grounds in Georgia LGBTQ+ history, so I narrowed my focus to a sub-topic that inspired me: art history. 

I am grateful in this process to have had both clear directions from DLG/NGE staff as well as the freedom to conduct the work in ways that made sense to me. I began by sifting through the collections of digitized materials aggregated by the DLG, and because I had to read and examine individual items in order to determine their potential relevance to my project, I learned an enormous amount about LGBTQ+ history in Georgia more broadly. 

As I learned, I also found myself responding emotionally to remnants of pain, joy, anger, and love in the archives. When I read about Tom Fox’s death from AIDS, chronicled in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, my heart ached; when I read the tender poetry of 1970s Radical Faeries, it soared. Every day of initial research involved entering an odd state of mind combining clinical observation with empathy pulling in unpredictable directions as I encountered new objects and stories. Nothing I had ever researched before had been so powerfully moving, and I ended each shift feeling exhausted and inspired. Even when I came across materials that for one reason or another wouldn’t be a good fit for the exhibit, I often felt compelled to share them, and I found myself linking friends to interesting materials represented in the DLG and starting conversations about them.

The themes and sub-themes for the exhibit emerged organically as I collected materials about creators, creations, and communities. Once I had arranged them, I began the process of doing secondary research to flesh out the context surrounding them. In this process, too, I learned more than I could possibly fit into the exhibit. I became familiar with timelines of LGBTQ+ activism in Georgia; with the histories of LGBTQ+-serving businesses and collectives, many of which had already come and gone; and with figures I had known little about, but whose artistic influences spread widely in Georgia. I excitedly told friends and family what I had learned each week, in that way spreading information before the exhibit was accessible to the public. 

The exhibit itself (while not yet finalized) is something I’m truly proud of because creating it required skills that I already possessed and enjoyed using–like researching nitty-gritty details–as well as skills that were newer. I had to find a balance in copy drafting, for example, between describing moments of historical trauma with the gravity they deserve and not allowing narratives of struggle to dominate the exhibit and drown out other LGBTQ+ experiences and emotions expressed in art. 

I also had to think as much as possible about the audiences that might see the exhibit and what would be meaningful, memorable, and clear to them. I have a tendency picked up from years of old-fashioned academic writing of composing long, winding sentences (you can even see them in this report), and it’s useful for me to have to edit and revise for clarity. 

I’m proud of the amount of content I was able to locate, organize, and contextualize in what seemed like a short amount of time without losing focus or a sense of the ‘bigger picture’ and purpose that the exhibit was to serve. I’m proud, too, that the result of this project will be a public-facing artifact. In my graduate career I have not had many opportunities to communicate research outside of classrooms and conferences, and this fact sometimes left me feeling disconnected, like my work lacked “real world” applications or relevance. With this exhibit, I felt the relevance acutely.

Moving forward in my career, as I transition out of professional academia toward other pathways, I will be able to show potential hiring committees concrete evidence of my ability to manage projects from start to finish, prepare digital content, work with members of a larger team, and more. I will be able to showcase fact-based and creative content, educational and (I hope) entertaining. I can demonstrate that I am not limited to only writing obscure academic papers aimed at specialist audiences but can create more accessible content. I do intend to apply for museum positions, where the ability to communicate to the public and arrange objects into stories will be especially useful, but I am also considering consulting positions that would apply the same skills to more abstract content.

Finally, beyond fostering professional skill development, working on this project has made me feel more connected with my identity as a queer woman. Even as a ” straight-passing adult,” I have sometimes wondered how visible I should or shouldn’t be or whether it’s safe to express myself authentically. Queer Georgians before and around me, as seen in this exhibit, have already paid high prices and made long strides for the privilege. I now have to be open about my identity; I cannot afford to ignore a gift that precious. Putting together the exhibit has also allowed me to feel connected to a larger community that I haven’t been among in what feels like a long time due to the pandemic. It’s been easy to feel isolated; it’s more difficult to feel that way when in the mental company of queer Georgian individuals and collectives across other times and places.

Image credit: Form letter invitation to the Short Mountain Faerie Faire, Short Mountain, Tennessee, July 4 – 6, 1980. (1 leaf, recto and verso, on pink paper).
Courtesy of Georgia State University Library Digital Collections
https://dlg.usg.edu/record/gsu_lgbtq_146

–Sarah Mayo

 

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New collection about pro- and anti-LGBTQ activities in Cobb County, Georgia circa 1995 are now available freely online

Image of LGBTQ+ activist, presenting male, speaking into a microphone during a press gaggle.

Pro- and anti-LGBTQ activities and demonstrations in Cobb County circa 1995 are the main component of a new digital collection belonging to Georgia State University Special Collections, funded by a competitive digitization grant awarded by the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG). GSU Special Collections received a service grant awarded in 2020 to broaden the DLG’s engagement with diverse institutions and collections across the state of Georgia. 

The Carol Brown Papers, 1993-2012 (bulk 1993-1994) document pro- and anti- LGBTQ+ activities and legislation in Cobb County, and belong to Georgia State University Special Collections’ LGBTQ Digital Collection, available at https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/lgbtq.  

In July of 1993, in response to complaints by residents, Cobb County Chairman Bill Byrne challenged county funding for Marietta’s Theatre in the Square, particularly as two of its plays– David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart — included mild gay themes. 

In August, Cobb County commissioner Gordon Wysong led the Cobb County Board of Commissioners to two anti-LGBT+ resolutions: one specifying that funding would only be provided for art that promoted “strong community, family-oriented standards,” and the other stating that “lifestyles advocated by the gay community should not be endorsed by government policymakers, because they are incompatible with the standards to which this community subscribes; and that gay lifestyle units are directly contrary to state law.” 

Marietta civic leader and activist Jon Greaves and local community members immediately responded by organizing together as the Cobb Citizens Coalition (CCC) to challenge the resolutions.

The CCC gained important allies in February 1994, when Atlanta-based activists Pat Hussain and Jon-Ivan Weaver established Olympics Out of Cobb County (OOCC). Their mission was to persuade Atlanta’s Committee for the Olympic Games not to hold the women’s volleyball competition in Cobb County as planned. Their efforts succeeded: ultimately, the women’s volleyball competition was held in Athens at the University of Georgia instead, and the Olympic torch bypassed Cobb County altogether. 

While CCC was active, CCC member and Marietta resident Carol Brown documented the organization’s activities and those of OOCC by recording protests, marches, and local news coverage, using audiocassettes, videotape, and photography. 

She also saved almost-daily newspaper reports, providing a wide range of coverage of events as they unfolded in Cobb County. The audiovisual materials have been digitized and described by the DLG as part of its service grant, and the newspaper reports were digitized in-house at Georgia State University. 

Carol Brown also recounted her personal memories in an oral history that is part of the Activist Women’s Oral History Project. Together, they provide a rich and powerful narrative about a small community’s response to local discrimination that garnered international interest. 

Carol Brown’s materials are unique and significant to Georgia because so much of Georgia’s recorded LGBTQ+ history has been Atlanta-focused. Carol Brown’s materials focus on pro-and anti- LGBTQ+ activities in traditionally conservative Cobb County. They are also important because they highlight several challenging backstories about art censorship, community protest, and the 1995 Olympic Games that garnered national and international interest. 

View the collection online

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More about the Carol Brown Papers, 1993-2012 (bulk 1993-1994) Collection

Digitization of audiovisual items from the Carol Brown Papers, 1993-2012 (bulk 1993-1994) focusing on pro-and anti- LGBTQ+ activities in traditionally conservative Cobb County and the campaign to move 1996 Olympic events out of the County. Furthermore, in a time of daily protest that we find ourselves in now, the collection illustrates the power of creative, peaceful protest.

About the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives (Women’s/ Gender and Sexuality Collections)

The Women’s Collections chronicle women’s activism and advocacy in Georgia and the Southeast. Within this curatorial area are several notable collections: the Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women’s Movement Archives, the Lucy Hargrett Draper Collections on Women’s Rights, Advocacy and the Law, and the Archives for Research on Women. For more information, read the Women’s Collections research guides at research.library.gsu.edu/womenscollections. The Gender and Sexuality Collections document LGBTQ+ communities in Georgia and the Southeast. For more information, read the Gender and Sexuality research guide at https://research.library.gsu.edu/c.php?g=912561.

About the Digital Library of Georgia

Based at the University of Georgia Libraries, the Digital Library of Georgia is a GALILEO initiative that collaborates with Georgia’s libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions of education and culture to provide access to key information resources on Georgia history, culture, and life. This primary mission is accomplished by developing, maintaining, and preserving digital collections and online digital library resources. DLG also serves as Georgia’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America and as the home of the Georgia Newspaper Project, the state’s historic newspaper microfilming project. 

Visit the DLG at dlg.usg.edu.

Facebook: http://facebook.com/DigitalLibraryofGeorgia/ 

Twitter: @DigLibGA

 

Selected stills from the collection: 

Image of LGBTQ+ activist, presenting male, speaking into a microphone during a press gaggle.
Image courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections Title : [Press conference to announce rally on Square, June ’94. Raw footage. CD ???] Description: Still image from a video recording of a press conference held to announce a demonstration entitled “And justice for all, Cobb rally for human rights” to be held on August 28, 1993, the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Leaders from three co-sponsoring organizations, the Marietta Interfaith Alliance, the Network for Social Responsibility, and the Cobb Citizens Coalition, give statements and answer questions from the press about the rally and their reasons for holding it, which is for the Cobb Commission to change or rescind an anti-LGBTQ+/anti-gay resolution negating the human rights of gay citizens of Cobb County, Georgia.
 

Image of civil rights activist and public intellectual Loretta Ross, seated, speaking into a microphone
Image courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections Title : [Stop Hate Politics seminar 11/6/1993. Meg Riley, Hans Johnson, Loretta Ross. Tape 1] Description: Still image from video recording of a portion of the “Stop Hate in Politics” seminar entitled “Righting the Wrongs of the Religious Right…Can We?” which took place on November 6, 1993. The recording presents speakers (including civil rights activist and public intellectual Loretta Ross, shown in this image) who discuss the manner in which right-wing Christian fundamentalists have weaponized their response to American liberal politics, and the importance of building common ground against violent right-wing trends.

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