For the LGBT community, historical amnesia manifests on multiple levels that results in a serious issue for those looking to truly delve into our shared history. While there has been significant, institutional neglect towards records of our existence prior to the last century, even in this more modern period exists extensive scrutiny about the explicitly queer details of our lives and times. For the average queer scholar of today, this contemporary history and writings of our community may seem like common knowledge, an introduction to many prominent authors whose work may even be taught in more progressive schools. However, understanding the framework and proliferation of these materials might be more difficult to parse, and it is this obfuscation in the modern day that concerns me the most. This living, breathing history is under threat of virtual annihilation every day whether or not the audience or author is aware of it. By following the example set by Audre Lorde in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” and Loren Cameron in the preface to Body Alchemy, one can realize that the act of sharing our personal queer experiences is not only one that memorializes our existence, but one that urgently encourages others to share their lives and preserve the writings of those who came before them.
Audre Lorde’s experience with mortality in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” is a stark, sobering introduction to the precarious position queer creations perpetually exist within. Crucially, though, is how she emerged from the experience, lucky to survive and now using it as a means to speak while fearful because of the realization that the very existence of queer people will never be remembered otherwise. Lorde described that, "In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences" (Lorde 5). To Lorde and those who she surrounded herself with, the fear of staying silent, complicit, or being silenced through the finality of death outweighs any of the fears of discrimination or violence they may face by speaking up about their struggles. It’s may appear difficult to convey to a contemporary American audience how bold of a stance this was in 1978, but with the queer community’s foot in the door of the public eye for acceptance and recognition, I would argue that grappling with mortality at this point at large set up the groundwork for a culture of preservation and documentation to proliferate. By establishing this as a philosophy that LGBT people and those who fall at the intersections of multiple marginalizations can find strength in when society has failed them at large; There is nothing left to lose except your sense of self, and you deserve to be remembered. To Lorde, "It is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way along we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth" (Lorde 7). The essence of queer life may not be able to be communicated in its entirety through creative means such as writing or artwork, but it is certainly better than nothing at all. One of the most prominent factors of historical amnesia is the literal history that has died off or been erased, so perhaps by following Lorde’s example born not just out of the fear of silence but the love of her fellow humans tossed by the wayside, a richer picture of queer history in a given moment can be remembered.
With this framework and philosophy in mind, one can now turn their attention to it in practice, such as through the works of Loren Cameron. Body Alchemy pioneered how T4T photography and therefore creative documentation of trans lives came about through necessity of its own to exist as such. It reflects the sentiment that Cameron felt himself going through his transition, a sort of rebirth that he exclaimed how by doing so, "This time, I refused to feel any shame. I was creating a beautiful new body image, and I was proud of it" (Cameron 43). Again, while the experience of going through a ‘second puberty’ of sorts, both physically and socially, for transitioning people may be common knowledge now, it certainly was not at the time when Body Alchemy was published in the mid 90s. What was once a struggle for visibility, particularly for transmasculine people, only found through a thoroughly medicalized lens now can be moved towards normalization through the continued efforts of queer people today. Photography by transgender people for transgender people for the sole purpose of documenting the existence of themselves and their communities owes an abundance of credit to this work of Camerons. His creative process reflects this continuum of fighting historical amnesia even, describing it as, "When I photograph transsexuals, men or women, I ask about their histories. I know they have labored to arrive at the place where I've found them... More than anything, I hear the relief in their voices. Satisfied with their changed bodies, they tell me how much better they feel, and that they would do it all again if they had to" (Cameron 45). What stands out the most to me is Cameron’s precise efforts to get to know the people he is documenting; Not for the purposes of medical examination, but to bond with one another on a human level. This is what makes his work stand out even today amongst the near-oversaturation of information shared and available about transgender peoples’ daily lives; by making those human connections, community can be built and lives can be remembered in a way that even now is still struggling to be legitimized by mainstream society. If there is no other means to combat historical amnesia, I would say that the strengthening of a community network such as what Cameron sought to do with this book is the living history that will continue to memorialize our existence as time goes on.
Returning to the preface of Body Alchemy introduction, I became interested in his book that it mentioned (Cameron 41), titled Man Tool; The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery. In looking for it, I realized the rabbit hole of queer media preservation on the internet goes much deeper than I had first assumed. The first result for a search on Google leads to a wiki article on the website Susan’s Place, a transgender internet forum that has existed since 1995. This stub of an article only contains publication information and a link supposedly leading to Cameron’s website (Larson), where the e-book was hosted, the URL of which has now been purchased and repurposed by someone wholly unrelated. This shocked me, and as I continued to dig, I realized how we know many things about the book- It’s date of publication, subject matter, and other factors of metadata- but not the text itself. When I took the provided link to the Internet Archive, I found it had been saved multiple times, providing a clear picture of the preview statement that describes Man Tool as a book that, “addresses urgent and intimate questions about plastic surgery options for the female-to-male transsexual” (Cameron). Cameron not only understood how rare information on FTM surgeries would’ve been in the late 90s and early 2000s, but sought to publish his findings in electronic form precisely for the ease of access it could provide to any queer person with a home computer. Thinking I had finally found what I was looking for, I soon realized the book was behind a paywall, defunct and unarchived. Effectively, Man Tool had been wiped off the face of the earth, and I am still searching for a copy somewhere in the depths of the world wide web.
After going down this rabbit hole, I couldn’t help but wonder how an electronically published work by someone who only passed away last year could be erased from the internet so quickly and thoroughly. The tragic irony of a statement such as how Cameron, "Wanted the world to see us, I mean, really see us" (Cameron 43), isn’t lost on me; if this information published by a somewhat established figure in the queer community is disappearing to the sands of time at that rate, then there must be an innumerable amount of experiences lost on the individual scale every single day. In the age of quickly consumed and subsumed social media, there is a mounting fear of the exact sort of photography and creativity that Cameron dug out a place for being wiped at a moment’s notice, not just at the death of the creator like Lorde feared but whenever the collective consciousness determines it to no longer matter. This is of particular importance to me, someone looking to get my librarianship in the professional realm, and who also is extremely concerned with taking back autonomy on the internet. One such community born from this desire is Neocities, a personal website host for those who are, “tired of living in an online world where people are isolated from each other on boring, generic social networks that don't let us truly express ourselves. It's time we took back our personalities from these sterilized, lifeless, monetized, data mined, monitored addiction machines and let our creativity flourish again. ” (Drake). Working as a tribute and direct continuation of a website host like Yahoo’s Geocities, Neocities has provided a space for a small but dedicated user base who have grown disillusioned to the modern internet to share their creativity and grow a community in a more grassroots manner. My involvement on Neocities started in 2017, and over the years I’ve met countless queer people looking for a place to share their lives, their writing, and their art in a way that doesn’t make them censor themselves, where mainstream social media or oppressive governments have. Many of these people, for whatever reason, have also had their personal websites lost to time, just like so many unarchived Geocities websites at the turn of the century were in recent years. Individual people and small communities that have sprung up organically are under the constant threat of being partially archived through the sole means of the Wayback Machine at best, and completely destroyed at worst. These are just a small, isolated examples of the queer stories that have been snuffed out by what I would describe as the doomed, late-stage capitalism of the internet among other factors, but I think it still serves as an alarming case study for any number of LGBT communities to be aware of and work to prevent similar things to happen to their work.
For a person to have worked up the courage that Lorde suggests, to share with the world by any means necessary, I believe they should be extended the same courtesy for that knowledge to remain available and accessible to the widest audience as possible. It is not only vital to preserve your own work as a creative and LGBT person for future generations to examine, but to also work in tandem with other queer people to preserve and interlock their work with your own to make a much more robust story survive and thrive. Cameron and Lorde set up an irreplaceable groundwork for modern scholars and everyday people alike to work off of, but as we’ve seen, these only could have survived by the literal intervention, encouragement, and strength of the communities they were a part of. The internet as a medium through which queer stories can be shared is not immune to being torched and destroyed at any point in time, and I cannot stress how important this is for queer scholars to be aware of, lest they lose works like the next hypothetical Man Tool to the sands of time. This is a history that is quite personal to all of us precisely because it concerns all of our lives in some shape or form, and that makes the issue of historical amnesia directly concern our own lives if we are not connected. Myself and countless other queer people understand the pain that isolation can put one through, and we do our younger selves and the future generations of queer people a disservice by not informing them of the true vitality and importance that preservation right here, right now, has. Looking ahead to the future of the queer community, scrutiny will continue to face us at every turn from those who wish death upon us all. So, at the very least, we owe it to ourselves to keep our own history close to our hearts as a group, bonded by these stories that we will never be silenced from sharing.
Cameron, Loren. Man Tool: The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery, 22 Aug. 2007, web.archive.org/web/20070822002522/www.lorencameron.com/mantool/.
Drake, Kyle. “About Neocities.” Neocities, neocities.org/about.
Larson, Susan. “Stub on Man Tool: The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery.” Susan’s Place Transgender Resources, 3 Mar. 2009, www.susans.org/wiki/Man_Tool:_The_Nuts_and_Bolts_of_Female-to-Male_Surgery.
Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” American Queer, Now and Then, edited by David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 2006, pp. 5–7.