Sample Items
About the Collection
“Read My Lips: Queer Protest Art and Ephemera” is a digital archive collection centered around protest art and ephemera in the context of post-Stonewall LGBTQ+ movements across the United States. This project aims to bring together materials from all over the United States to highlight the rich and multifaceted history of LGBTQ+ activism. The collection has a particular focus on gay and queer liberation movements and AIDS activism through the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Items were selected from the Digital Public Library of America’s collections which included items from the Gran Fury Collection from NYPL, the Safe Harbor/Aids Collection, and ONE National Archives. The collection features a wide range of media types such as posters, pamphlets, banners, t-shirts, buttons, and pins to show the various forms protest and celebration have taken in the LGBTQ+ community throughout history. Items in the collection were chosen based on the following themes:
- Post-Stonewall Gay and Queer Liberation movements and protests
- AIDS activism and the role of organizations such as ACT UP
- The history of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States
- Pride and celebration
The anticipated user groups of this collection would include researchers interested in queer history, protest, feminism, and the AIDS crisis. The collection could also be used as a teaching tool for relevant college courses. Another potential user group would be queer community members interested in learning about historic events related to their own affinity groups.
Some Historical Context and Background
Starting in the 1980s, several artist groups, collectives, and other political groups were founded in response to the lack of government intervention in the AIDS epidemic. Many protestors engaged in direct action tactics such as phone zaps, fax zaps, sit-ins in government offices, vigils, die-ins, kiss-ins, marches and demonstrations, and wheat pasting posters in public spaces. Agitprop art was made to provoke the public and as a call to action.
One artist collective in particular, Gran Fury, comprised of members, Richard Elovich, Avram Finkelstein, Amy Heard, Tom Kalin, John Lindell, Loring McAlpin, Marlene McCarty, Donald Moffett, Michael Nesline, Mark Simpson, and Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, designed a lot of agitprop art for ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). ACT UP was formed in 1987 as an international, grassroots, horizontal activist group that still has active chapters across the US today. Other groups active in cultural production and protest around AIDS include Lesbian Avengers, Fierce Pussy, and Queer Nation.
This collection draws attention to the diffuse coalitional nature of various direct action anti-AIDS movements and the use of camp and humor in protest which highlights how the political, emotional, and cultural dimensions of protest are linked together. Queer feminist protest ephemera extends beyond AIDS activism to contemporary movements for queer liberation, trans rights, and more. This collection focuses on cultural production, that is objects such as ephemera, events such as protest, and spaces such as archives, memorials, and museums that occur external to science and government.
Sources and Additional Resources:
Cheng, J.-F., Juhasz, A., & Shahani, N. (Eds.). (2020). AIDS and the distribution of crises. Duke University Press.
Cifor, M. (2022). Viral cultures: Activist archiving in the age of AIDS. University of Minnesota Press.
Gould, D. B. (2009). Moving politics: Emotion and act up’s fight against AIDS. The University of Chicago Press.
Jolivétte, A. (2016). Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco’s Two-Spirit Community. University of Washington Press.
Juhasz, A., & Kerr, T. (2022). We are having this conversation now: The times of AIDS cultural production. Duke University Press.
Lowery, J. (2024). It was vulgar and it was beautiful: How aids activists used art to fight a pandemic. Bold Type Books.
Reed, T. V. (2019). ACTing UP against AIDS: The (Very) Graphic Arts in a Moment of Crisis. In The art of protest: Culture and activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the present (Second edition). University of Minnesota Press.
Roth, B. (2017). The life and death of ACT UP/LA: Anti-AIDS activism in Los Angeles from the 1980s to the 2000s. Cambridge University Press.
Schulman, S. (2023). Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Picador.
Metadata Schema
| Element | Description | Source |
|---|---|---|
| objectid | A unique identifer for each object. They include qfm and a number starting at 001 and were assigned to objects in the order they were added to the collection. | Custom |
| filename | The name of the file for each object. | Custom |
| title | A name given to the resource. These include words from the resource itself if available. | Dublin Core |
| format | The file format of each resource. | Custom |
| description | An account of the resource. The descriptions on our site were pulled from the descriptions created by the institutions that created each object. | Dublin Core |
| creator | An entity primarily responsible for making the resource. | Dublin Core |
| contributors | An entity who submitted the resource to an archival institution. A secondary contributor to the CreativeWork or Event. | Schema.org |
| date | A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource. These are primarily the dates of when the image iteslf was created or when the resources within the image were created. | Dublin Core |
| date approximate | Date or range of dates associated with the creation of the resource | Custom |
| title | A name given to the resource. These include words from the resource itself if available. | Dublin Core |
| item_information | The material or physical carrier of the resource. | Dublin Core |
| subject | A topic of the resource. | Custom |
| location | City and state of the institution that created the original metadata record for each resource. The location of, for example, where an event is happening, where an organization is located, or where an action takes place. | Schema.org |
| latitude | The latitude of a location. The latitude of the institution that created the original metadata record for each resource. | Schema.org |
| longitude | The longitude of a location. The longitude of the institution that created the original metadata record for each resource. | Schema.org |
| publisher-digital | The name of the institution that digitized and published the resource in an online collection. | Custom |
| source | The name of the institution that digitized the resource or holds the physical object that was digitzed. | Custom |
| finding aid | The finding aid for the collection each resource is associated with. | Custom |
| original-identifier | The original unique identifier given to each resource by the institution that digitized its record. | Custom |
| identifier | The unique identifier name of each resource made of its title and its medium. The identifier property represents any kind of identifier for any kind of Thing, such as ISBNs, GTIN codes, UUIDs etc. | Schema.org |
| rights | A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource. | Dublin Core - Rights Holder |
| rightsstatement | Information about rights held in and over the resource. | Dublin Core - Rights |
| type | The nature or genre of the resource. | Dublin Core |
| language | A language of the resource. | Dublin Core |
| relation | A link to the webpage of the institution that digitized the record of the resource. | Custom |
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
The site started from the CollectionBuilder-GH template which utilizes the static website generator Jekyll and GitHub Pages to build and host digital collections and exhibits.