About us
Some months ago, a question was posed on twitter asking people to consider one object that would best represent their cultural heritage.
Immediately, I thought of a brick.
The Stonewall Riots loom large in the cultural memory of LGBT+ people across the world. I am not American, and yet this New York uprising was the first thing that came to my mind when questioned about my cultural heritage.
Being a member of the LGBT+ community is a unique cultural experience. Wherever you find humans, you can find us - no matter what we call ourselves or what we look like, people have been having experiences like ours since time immemorial. This is why it can be difficult to connect with a history that we can recognise that we are a part of. Most of us do not grow up in the LGBT+ community; most of us will not be taught our history in our homes or in our schools. The community we have is the community we find and grow.
To understand what this project hopes to accomplish, we should start out with a few definitions.
The anthropologist E. B. Tylor is considered to have come up with the best definition of culture: "knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." As for cultural heritage, UNESCO uses the working definition of "the entire corpus of material signs - either artistic or symbolic - handed on by the past to each culture and, therefore, to the whole of humankind". Cultural heritage is the things that are inextricable from our culture that we want to conserve and pass on to future generations, such as drag, Pride, or musical theatre.
Our goal here is a simple one. We want to document the cultural heritage of the LGBT+ community as widely and deeply as possible. We want to preserve and pass on our knowledge, our art, and our customs to the coming generations. We want to show young LGBT+ people across the world that they have a community and a culture - that they have a place in history, and what they carry, mould, and create has a place in history, too.
Connecting with heritage is also a form of personal and cultural healing.
The LGBT+ community has undergone, and continues to undergo, incredibly traumatic experiences. From AIDS crisis that took so many of our family, to the purges of gay and bisexual men in conservative countries, corrective rape of lesbian and bisexual women, and the extreme levels of violence facing transgender folk, it is often so easy to lose sight of the what lies at the heart of LGBT+ culture: joy, perseverance, found family, and love. And we see time and again that people who undergo great cultural trauma find peace and purpose in reconnecting with the things that are most meaningful to them.
Perhaps the most ambitious dream we have is that this project will help combat transphobia, racism, and xenophobia within the LGBT+ community.
When we explore and celebrate the achievements of a given LGBT+ community, we will acknowledge that "LGBT+" is often not the full story. For instance, how could we talk about voguing without talking about the fact that it was born in the black Harlem ballroom scene, which developed out of racism and exclusion from the white LGBT+ community? To ignore the context in which voguing and other forms of LGBT+ culture arose would be a disservice to you at best, and cultural appropriation and racism at worst. We must and will acknowledge that simply because something counts as LGBT+ cultural heritage, does not mean that we can blindly claim it for all.
By showing the diverse contexts that our culture has come from, we hope that people can bond over our similarities, and celebrate our differences. We hope that it will always be a part of LGBT+ culture to stand with those who experience different forms of oppression - especially within our own community. There can be no place for racism, antisemitism, anti-Romanyism, ableism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and all other forms of oppression within the LGBT+ community. The bricks that we once used to fight against our oppression can be used to build a community that we all feel at home in.
We hope you find this site useful and inspiring. If you have any questions, comments, or something you want to share with us, please send us a message using our contact page.