What does the thriller drama Missing (2023) and the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT archives have in common? At least one thing, surprisingly. First and most important, something is, well, missing. In the movie, the protagonist’s mother does not return from a vacation, and there is an absence of information to aid in figuring out why she disappeared; meanwhile the Bradbury-Sullivan archives are predominantly representative of the experiences of cisgender, white, gay men—thus leaving out many QTPOC voices and experiences. Our team hopes to diversify the archives by building a contact list of different bodies and collecting materials and memorabilia from them.

In regards to the work we did this fifth week at Mountaintop, we began the transition from exploring, documenting, and sorting archival material in favor of entering the first few steps of drafting the actual exhibition itself. We decided that the panels would be grouped by modality and color, though after a meeting with our advisor we realized that we were still missing the “through-line;” we therefore spent some time drafting ideas. Below is a day-by-day list stating what tasks we completed each work day, the bolded bullet representing the most important task.

07/03/23

• Continued InDesign tutorial
• Collecting questions for meeting with Mary
  • Linked files
  • Made our past week digestible
  • Worked on DJ top 10 playlist
• Continued online archival research

07/04/23

• Day off for the holiday

07/05/23

• Polished Google Slides for weekly League Meeting
• Attended League Meeting
• Productive meeting with Mary
• Wrote and sent responses to Carmen Maria Machado and Conner Habib about archival material collection
• Sent Mary a template for contacting potential donors associated with the LV Gay Men’s Chorus
• Began drafting potential panels for the exhibition
• Continued InDesign tutorial

07/06/23

• Based on Mary’s feedback, we worked as a team to map out two potential through-lines for our exhibition: resistance and community. For each, we considered the specific forces that each art form pushes back against, as well as the particular benefits of local community art versus national media for each category 
• Created a working list of potential panel topics with resistance throughlines and regional community

• • Introductory panel:
    • Introduce the through-line narrative connecting all the different artistic modalities 
  • Music (3 panels) 
    • ACCO: 
      • Resistance: Explicitly an effort to push back against misogyny in music history by highlighting the works (historical and contemporary) of women composers. 
      • Regional community: The group connected with other local organizations and also provided a sense of ‘found family’ among members — something that had to be hyperlocal in order to function in the way that it did. 
    • Gay Men’s Chorus: TBD
    • Clubbing Music/Role of the Local DJ 
      • Resistance: Combats ideologies of sex negativity. 
      • Regional community: The DJ acts as a mediator between national culture and local spots by curating playlists, taking requests, and publishing top song lists. 
  • Drag (2 panels) 
    • Resistance: Drag is a radical act of self expression that pushes back against all forms of gender normativity, expectations, and restrictions. It is one of the most visible aspects of queer community that has been targeted by conservative organizations. 
    • Regional community: Local shows provide the queer community an opportunity to attend live drag shows: to participate in them in an embodied sense that cannot be captured through watching Ru Paul. It is telling that local drag culture continues to be less assimilable than national programming.

• Comics (2 panels) 
  • Resistance: Comics use multiple forms of satire to engage in intercommunity political commentary & intracommunity demolition of stereotypes. 
  • Regional community: The comics published in local newspapers respond to events impacting community members in real time—a phenomenon that cannot be recreated just by reading famous cartoon strips like Garfield.

• Narrative (2 panels) 
  • Carmen Maria Machado 
    • Resistance: Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir takes a stance against purposeful archival absence. 
    • Regional community: Having an author from the Allentown region take on prominence in the greater literary scene allows for a broadening of recognizable queer aesthetics. 
  • Conner Habib
    • Resistance: Hawk Mountain can be read as an affront to overly simplistic narratives of progress or shiny, It Gets Better stories. This is important because it provides catharsis and ongoing space of critique for those who it has not ‘gotten better’ for. 
    • Regional community: An author like Conner Habib speaking about this region will provide a necessary component to the picture we’ll try to paint about this place, highlighting the complex nature of community and potential isolation that can continue on an individual level. 
• Visual Art (1 panel)
  • Resistance: Visual art insists on the beauty of lives that have been denigrated. 
  • Regional community: The support of local artists allows the community to financially support itself. In addition, local visual artists play an important role in influencing local change (for example, the portraits for the marriage act project) 
• Blank Community Panels (2) 

• Distributed labor for first drafts of panel texts and possible designs in each category

07/07/23

• In-person archival research, looking specifically at:
  • Scanning Stephen Libby photographs
  • Boxes for Miscellaneous Trans Publications
  • Combing through undigitized editions of Above Ground for art
•  Mountaintop blog reflections
• Continue drafting panel text for assigned sections

07/08/23

• Attended first-Saturday tabling event at the Bradbury-Sullivan center
  • Acquired the contact of a young artist planning to create art based on the exhibition
  • Strengthened interpersonal connections between current Mountaintop fellows and Bradbury-Sullivan staff

Looking forward to next week, we plan to fully shift from archival research to exhibition drafting. We plan to have a fully-fleshed out narrative/through-line to be approved by Professor Foltz for our next meeting (Wednesday the 12th), and hopefully have a few physical panel designs to pitch. Below I have attached pictures of our work week. Thanks for reading!