Queer History conference coming to Sloss Furnaces

The representation of LGBTQ people in archives is slim, especially in the South, and often lost and overlooked, Invisible Histories Project founders Maigen Sullivan and Joshua Burford said.

That’s why it’s so important to Sullivan and Burford to take time and put that record together.

The inaugural Queer History South conference, which will be March 28-29 at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, will bring together students, historians, researchers and community archivists from 13 states in the South to gather for a weekend of sharing collections, processes and researching work involving LGBTQ history.

The conference, Burford said, is about allowing a network to form and for people to discuss projects, like creating a lexicon of information related to words or identities so they can have a national shared database of standardized language. Currently, the words in the database are often era-specific and can be difficult to find, Burford said. 

“You send a 20-something to find data, and if they can’t type in LGBT, then they aren’t finding anything and they don’t think these things exist,” Burford said. 

IHP is a community-driven, Birmingham-based nonprofit with the mission to preserve, collect and protect the history of LGBTQ life in the state of Alabama, as well as the entire Southeast, through archiving the living history of the LGBTQ community’s diversity, Sullivan said.

The event will include social gatherings and the premier screening of “The Joneses: Every Family Has a Story to Tell.” The cost is $50 for graduate or undergraduate students, $100 for community members and $150 for institutional full-time faculty or staff. For more information, go to invisiblehistory.org.