The Future is Now: An Impossible Archive of Queer Advocacy and Resistance brings together information on more than one thousand LGBTQIA+ historic and contemporary organizations in the United States gathered from online and offline archives, books, research papers, primary sources, and oral histories. These organizations engage(d) in community building and education; social, cultural, and political advocacy; and direct action. Conceived as an urgent and timely response to the current repressive political environment and the renewed violent culture wars waged on the LGBTQIA+ community, The Future is Now projects a resilient landscape of possibility, accomplishments, and community within which we can organize, advocate, and resist today. The archive can only ever be incomplete, holding both that which we can remember or research, and that which lies as intangible sustenance below a queer collective consciousness.
It is important to note that this archive is rooted in the incredible labor of uncountable individuals: researchers, collection managers, family members, friends, and activists whose work is shared in archives, collections, research papers, books, podcasts, movies, oral histories and interviews; on websites and social media; at parties; on panels; and more. It brings together content from many archives before it and it pulls descriptions, when available, from the organization’s own websites and from entries accompanying the papers of an organization housed in an archive.
This archive is therefore another knot in the web of existing knowledge. It remains also inherently incomplete, imperfect, and impossible due to the complex histories it attempts to hold: of what and how things enter collective or communal memory; what is meant to be remembered; what is continuously repressed; what asks for itself to be fleeting, or to remain in the memory of few. The Future Is Now aims to hold both that which is recorded and that which cannot be. The archive will always be growing, changing, and evolving; committed to remain truly collaborative across the many communities that relate to the histories it holds.
Lead Research: Andrea Geyer, Lydia Lane / Lead Archivist and Researcher: Neen Lamontagne / Additional Research Support: Eliza Doyle, Kris Grey, Em Miller, Andrea Ray, and many others who asked to remain anonymous.