A marshall in love. Remembering and forgetting queer pasts in the Finnish archives

Abstract

This article analyses the formation of the queer archives in Finland. In Finland, the close links between the civil society and the state affect the archiving of social movements’ history. One of the publicly funded private central archives, the Labour Archives (Tyovaen Arkisto), has taken responsibility of preserving the documents of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) past. This includes documents of activism and associations as well as personal archives and narratives. The article presents the position of the Finnish LGBT collection within the Finnish archival sector and evaluates it in the light of archival theory. The Finnish model of queer archives offers an example of preserving queer pasts in a social history archive that is neither strictly a mainstream archival institution nor an independent activist archive. The article describes the development of queer history and the need to find sources telling about queer lives and discusses the role of the archival institutions and archival science in remembering and forgetting queer pasts. The article reflects also how the archival policies and archival practices affect which pasts are officially remembered and which are forgotten.