Non-normative Identities Research Articles

‘Harsh’ SoMa vs ‘Beige’ Castro: The cross-modal construction of contrasting femininities in queer San Francisco

The study of gender in sociolinguistic variation has long concerned the ways linguistic variables pattern with binary gender identities like male and female, with the implicit assumption that masculine individuals will use variants that index masculinity, and feminine individuals will use variants that index femininity. The emerging field of trans linguistics has built upon insights from queer linguistics and challenged the idea that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic variants and gender identities. Studies of transgender speakers have illuminated that indexing gender is a process of bricolage, where multiple variables collaborate, and only one needs to index gender in a particular way for the speaker's overall semiotic construction to carry that gendered meaning. Here, I investigate cross-modal bricolage, by exploring how visual gender presentation and three different linguistic variables come together to construct contrasting feminine styles among San Francisco drag queens. Linguistic patterns and aesthetic choices illuminate that bricolage involves a semiotic division of labor, in which only some signs (or modalities) need to index gender to give the overall style that gendered meaning. Concurrently, other signs can contribute qualia to a style's overall qualic cloud, that distinguish the style from others in the semiotic landscape. This exploration illuminates the role of the body in conditioning the indexical potential of linguistic signs, destabilizes monolithic essentializations of trans linguistic practice, and acknowledges the varied ways that gender non-normative identity can manifest across communities.

Divine Power and Fluid Bodies: Tirunaṅkais in Tamil Nadu

This article analyzes the complex ways in which religious practices influence the formation of identity and community among tirunaṅkais, male-to-female transgender people in Tamil Nadu. I argue that tirunaṅkais draw on longstanding religious resources to enact nonnormative identities that operate outside of the secular constructions of the modern subject that undergird governmental “uplift” efforts as well as the liberatory projects of Western feminist scholars such as Judith Butler. I focus in particular on three arenas in which tirunaṅkais negotiate their identities in specific religious and social contexts: the kinship network, the annual Kūttāṇṭavar festival, and public rituals associated with Hindu goddesses in Tamil Nadu. The tirunaṅkai kinship network deploys multiple religious rituals while at the same time transcending boundaries of religion, caste, and class in its inclusivity. The enactment of marriage and widowhood at the annual festival to Kūttāṇṭavar foregrounds the divinity of the male-female form that tirunaṅkais emulate. Serving as vehicles of the divine who embody particular goddesses through ritual possession in public temple spaces provides affirmation of their ritual efficacy and power to mediate between the human and divine worlds.

Negotiating Non-normative Identities: Gender Nonconforming Malaysian Muslims on Instagram

This paper delves into the utilisation of Instagram as a platform for self-expression and the establishment of non-normative identities among gender nonconforming Malaysian Muslims. Specifically, the research focuses on Malaysian Muslim males who identify as gender nonconforming and analyse their video posts on Instagram. These individuals construct and manifest their nonconforming identities while navigating the complexities of Malaysian Muslim identity, cultural norms, and religious influences. The deeply rooted Malay identity, combined with the adherence to Islamic principles, presents a challenging conflict for gender nonconforming Malaysians seeking to establish their identities. To address this, many gender nonconforming Malay males adopt the “femeskulin” mode of micro-celebrities on Instagram, blending gender nonconformity with religious values. The findings highlight the potential for coexistence and the significant role played by gender nonconforming individuals in shaping “femeskulin” identity and expression among Malaysian Muslims within the social media platform.

Applying feminist translation strategies in audio description

Abstract Intersectional feminist translation provides visibility to the historically hidden or marginalized characters and narratives. This article interrogates the strategies we can apply to translate images into words, that is, to audio describe non-normative identities while adhering to the particularities of audiovisual productions. It poses the question of how to provide a feminist audio description that aligns with the creators’ intent. The objective of this study is to analyse the strategies applied to create a gender-conscious AD of a documentary on lesbophobia where ten women share their experiences as non-normative persons. They are defined by a series of intrinsic features such as race, gender expression or age and present a myriad of differences that have irremediably influenced their experience of lesbophobia and how society reads and identifies them. The visual contents in this documentary provide essential information that complements the understanding of the problem by people with visual impairment. This action research study analyses the challenges emerged during the AD production. It aims to emphasize the mediating power of AD professionals and how they influence the understanding of blind audiences.

Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton

Reviewed by: Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France by Anne Linton Céline Brossillon Linton, Anne. Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-316-51182-4. Pp. 250. Anne Linton's book offers an important contribution to the history of sexuality by discussing intersex people, "individuals whose bodies, or senses of self, challenged binary sex" (2), otherwise known as "hermaphrodites" in the nineteenth century, in medical archives (first part of the book) and literature, both high and low (second half of the book). The archival research Linton has undertaken is massive, bringing to light over 200 newly uncovered case studies of gender ambiguous people from 1800 to 1920. She also analyzes how long-forgotten popular fiction influenced several well-known texts, allowing Linton to propose fresh readings of famous authors like Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Unmaking Sex is the first book to explore why "hermaphrodism" was a central theme in nineteenth-century medicine and literature, and to discuss the social anxieties around those "gender outlaws" (2). Because of the Napoleonic Code (1804) which required the sex of the baby to be recorded on the birth certificate within three days of birth, Linton claims that many scholars have assumed that the nineteenth-century French had a very rigid binary vision of its individuals, but she shows that some doctors and authors actually challenged the concept of "True Sex" (the one-body-one-sex rule) as they realized that some individuals fell outside of this binary. Linton believes the literature supports the claim made by some doctors that the observation of the external body might not tell the whole story about someone. Some therefore advocated for adding a "neuter sex," "doubtful sex," or "third sex" category to article 57 of the civil code to better acknowledge the variation of bodies. Even though Balzac, Gautier, and Zola seem forward-thinking, she warns us not to "assign too revolutionary and subversive a status to our novelists" as they "also announce that non-normative identities have no place in nineteenth-century France" (134). A growing medical discourse connecting external signs of "doubtful sex" with mental deficiencies throughout the nineteenth century allows Linton to establish a link between the discourses around intersex and Zola's theory of degeneration, a connection which had been overlooked in scholarship. "Hermaphrodism" was sometimes therefore perceived as the result of "degenerate heredity," linking "doubtful sex" and teratology, and "hermaphrodism" with homosexuality. Throughout her book and then more specifically at the end, Linton draws parallels between those nineteenth-century sources and contemporary concerns and debates around intersex individuals in the United States. She discusses how medical protocols to assign gender at birth have been met with growing resistance and criticism since early sex assignment surgeries and treatments are considered damaging to the child. Mental health rather than sex assignment, and a more patient-centered medicine, are the path forward. Since France is the focus of the book, addressing the state of the debate around intersex [End Page 195] individuals from a medical, legal, and literary standpoint in France would have been a nice way to loop the loop, even though the discussion of the case of the United States is also invaluable. [End Page 196] Céline Brossillon Ursinus College (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

Queer Transgressions in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction: Gender, Nation, Politics

“The Slovenian Word For These People is ‘Degenerates’!”: Examining Negative Attitudes Toward Non-Normative Sexual and Gender Identities in Slovenian Online Comments

ABSTRACT Numerous reports have documented the discrimination, physical, and verbal attacks on LGBTQIA+ people throughout the world and the situation in Slovenia, a Central European country, is similar, albeit with its own national and historic specifics. Therefore, we see it as crucial to identify the prevailing negative discourses about the LGBTQIA+ community within this country. In this paper, we identify different negative discourses about non-normative sexual and gender identities in Slovenia by analyzing hateful online comments posted under different LGBTQIA-related articles on the most frequented Slovenian news websites. We identified seven different themes within anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses with the current article focusing on themes of the Hegemonic binary and Non-normative identities. The anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses identified in this article often denigrate the non-normative LGBTQIA+ identity and discursively construct it as inferior to the prevailing cis-heterosexual identity. We argue that identified discourses are linked with the resurgence of the anti-gender movement and the retraditionalization of society and also constitute a form of violence, which is especially true for violence directed at subjects constituted as dispensable, whose life is seen as not worth valuing and not worth living, which are often members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Visibility, solidarity, and empowerment via the internet: A case study of young Portuguese activists

Abstract The last few years have seen the development of a new line of research around the relationship between digital platforms and activism. The influence of the internet and social media on the civic and political engagement of young people in particular has become clear. Digital platforms perform in this regard a set of functions crucial to activism in terms of communication, mobilization, and logistics. These are indispensable tools, especially to young people belonging to informal structures. Digital platforms have also been shown to facilitate emotional and solidarity networks thus fostering a sense of community and a strengthening of collective identities. In this article we aim at examining this aspect based on in-depth interviews with young activists conducted in Portugal during a three-year project (2020–2022). We have concluded that, especially in certain activism contexts involving social groups of neglected or non-normative identities, digital platforms function as a crucial empowerment tool. These are linked to the emotional support for and recognition of the identities of these young people, incentivizing the creation of fields of political and social intervention.

Choreographing Queer Social Bodies: Chinese Choreographer Hu Shenyuan’s Cross-Stage Practices

Mainland Chinese society heavily stigmatizes nonnormative sexuality, and the government imposes strict censorship on media representations of homosexuality. It seems improbable that choreographer Hu Shenyuan, whose dances do not hide homosexual themes, would be so successful as a performer and artist in the Chinese context, which signifies a tension between state control and audience demand. This article reads Hu’s choreography and its reception as queer texts. While queer identities might seem virtually invisible and unspeakable in China, I argue that Hu’s choreography makes visible a culturally unrepresentable queerness and incubates collective reflection about nonnormative identities.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

Madness, Authorship, and the City: Elvira Navarro’s A Working Woman

ABSTRACT This essay is a reading of Elvira Navarro’s globally acclaimed novel A Working Woman, offering to open up Navarro’s text to what Robert McRuer calls “cripping” – a form of reading that raises awareness of mental illness and indeed privileges such positionality. Since the novel’s publication in 2014, a majority of its critical readings have focused on the text’s description of the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008 and its discussion of the physical and psychical displacement of Spanish citizens into spaces of precarity. However much critical potential such reading of “madness” offers, metaphorizing mental illness weakens the narrative’s potential. I propose to move away from the metaphoric and into a more literal reading of mental illness and disability; and to redress the lack of literary representations of mental illness, expressed over the last two decades. I read the central theme of madness along the lines suggested by the proponents of Mad Studies, and I argue that the novel can be read as a critique of the medicalization and pathologizing of the stigmatized non-normative body, which is placed within the economic and socio-political context of neoliberalism, regulating the existence of non-normative identities.

What Is at Stake in the Recognition of Non-Normative Identities?

The deconstruction of the binary sex-gender system that sustains modern western states demands the deconstruction of its dichotomies and their excluding effects on non-normative identities. This demands in turn that gender self-determination be recognised as a right. In Spain this right has been given constitutional status (STC 99/2019), yet it is currently not articulated in legislation. Proposals of a new legal framework have met with resistance and an ensuing need for compromise. Unless it grasps and upholds the full constitutional extent of the right to gender self-determination, however, legislation risks being born both unconstitutional and obsolete, out of pace with social demands.

Trans Rights: The Ongoing Debate in Latin American Legal Agendas

This article offers an overview of the Trans people's rights agenda in Latin America. It focuses on various Latin American countries to reveal how the route towards rights has been marked by a binary and medicalizing approach to non-normative identities, directly influenced by the traditional and conservative moral projects prevalent in the region. It also accounts for some recent normative and case-law developments, which however coexist with restrictive norms that criminalize the rights of gender-diverse people. It concludes that the recognition of Trans people’s rights is often insufficient, that it contributes to rendering Trans diverse realities invisible, thus reinforcing discrimination.

Pride or Closet? Unpacking Experiences of Minority Stress, Coping, and Resistance among Gender and Sexual Minorities in India

ABSTRACT In India, sexuality has long been a silent battleground, which has led to the legal acceptance of non-heteronormative practices in recent years. Given the risk of facing difficulties and social discrimination, questions may arise on the consequences of revealing non-heteronormative gender identity and sexual orientation. Using data from a two-year qualitative immersive study on the queer individuals in India and extant theories on Concealed Stigmatized Identity and Minority Stress, we explore the dynamics of disclosure, or “Coming-out of the closet” and construct a narrative on their lived experiences of stress and coping associated with marginal gender identity. Thematic analysis reveals that informants elaborate, borrow, and adapt perceptions and experiences of denial and loss of agency as queer individuals. Disclosure and Coming-out help them to find the “safe others.” The findings indicate that this kinship and entitativity result in measurably higher well-being, happiness, and meaning in life. We conclude that rising above the minority stress can be the beginning of endless possibilities in different spheres of life for gender and sexual minorities. Participants’ narratives unpack the embodied and contextual stereotypes and taboos and the precarity of living with non-normative identities. The paper makes a compelling argument that coping with gender marginalization, vulnerability, and loss of dignity can be achieved through a sense of purpose and meaning.

Explain, label, or ignore? Exploring LGBTQ-parent families’ communication about family identity

ABSTRACT People and policies in the United States have become more affirming of LGBTQ individuals, yet LGBTQ parents face ongoing challenges in the heteronormative, cisnormative family space. The current study identifies contexts in which LGBTQ parents perceive their family identity to be non-normative and examines parents’ psychological and communicative responses in such contexts, including how parents address family identity with non-family members and with their children. Twenty-five LGBTQ parents provided written responses to open-ended prompts. Thematic analysis found that a range of social and institutional contexts prompted parents to perceive their family identity as non-normative – a generally negative psychological experience for the parents. To manage family identity-related communication with non-family members, parents primarily enacted the strategies ignoring/avoiding, explaining/discussing, and labeling. Parents tended to use the strategy narrating to communicate about family identity with their children, who expressed understanding in response. Results demonstrate the salience of non-normative family identity for many LGBTQ parents and the variety of strategies LGBTQ parents use to manage potentially challenging communication within and outside of the family. Findings also provide insight into children’s communication with parents in such contexts. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Queer Korea

Queer Korea

Surrealist Nuance and Postcolonial Subjectivity

In its origins, surrealism transpired as a radical subversive culture within advanced capitalist societies in Europe during the first few decades of the twentieth century. In colonial and postcolonial societies, however, surrealism variously assumed a quintessence of a protracted struggle between, on the one hand, the old and neocolonial cultural hegemony and, on the other hand, the subversive resistance by the neocolonized, with all the paradoxical elements that are part and parcel of that struggle. One of the few manifestations of a surrealism-inspired cinematic work in the Arab world during the last century is Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990). This critically acclaimed film is a rich example of Arab cinema that celebrates non-normative personal identity while simultaneously rethinking traditional notions of nation under colonial rule. This third installment of Chahine’s autobiographical film quartet, which he intermittently drew over the course of his thirty-year career, indulges a complex exposé of Chahine the man, the artist, and the political activist. It also draws on mostly imagined, and partly real, episodes in the filmmaker’s life. As such, and rather than using a typically grand anticolonial metanarrative, the film favors the depiction of multiple surrealist proliferations of difference, juxtapositions, dislocation, and distortions seen not as embodiments of a single truth but rather as energized political and aesthetic forms of a collective project for revamping Egyptian and Arab identity and reality.

Troubling Secondary Victimization of Bullying Victims: The Role of Gender and Ethnicity.

Bullying is a severe public health problem, and bystanders' reactions are a key variable in its perpetration and maintenance. This study aimed to assess the level of secondary victimization of bullying victims as a function of the student's sex and the victim's category (nonnormative vs. normative) in three experimental conditions (feminine, masculine, and ethnicity) from a socioecological perspective. Specifically, two dimensions of secondary victimization were evaluated: avoidance and devaluation/blaming of the victim. A sequence of mixed-design ANOVAs was performed with a sample of 553 Spanish (53.3%) and Portuguese (46.7%) students, aged between 14 and 19 years. Results show that nonnormative victims, those who transgress feminine and masculine gender stereotypes, and those who belong to a minority ethnic group (gypsies) are avoided more than normative victims; and that boys perpetrate more secondary victimization than girls. These results reveal the situation of vulnerability suffered by adolescents who transgress the gender norm as well as those who belong to minority ethnic groups, and highlight that the motivations concealed by the secondary victimization of bullying victims originate in the group processes of identity construction and categorization that configure the boundaries of "legitimacy" and are strongly influenced by social beliefs about normative and nonnormative identities. This socioecological approach could guide prevention strategies, so generic antibullying policies that do not explicitly address biases about gender, sexual, and cultural identity can be overcome to reduce the high levels of stigma occurring in the schools through critical and culturally responsive pedagogy.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman

Reviewed by: Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman Dennis Denisoff (bio) Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman; pp. xii + 234. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $34.95. In Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, Dustin Friedman asks us to consider aestheticism not so much as a cultural movement or an aesthetic philosophy but as a theory—a theory of sexuality preceding the institutionalized discourses of desire. As such, the book proposes a conceptual pivot to existing scholarship on the articulation of Victorian notions of sexual identity through discourses of aesthetics, particularly Paterian aestheticism. Dozens of scholars have addressed aestheticism as a crucial concept through which some non-normative identities attained conceptual cohesion and cultural recognition. Early works such as Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) reflect the heavy influence of poststructuralism on queer studies, and in particular that of Michel Foucault's models of biopower. With more than a third of Before Queer Theory focusing on Walter Pater and the rest on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field, Friedman positions his study squarely within the context of aestheticism studies. He differentiates his contribution in two key ways. First, he places particular emphasis on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on Pater's queer aesthetics and the aestheticism that developed under its influence. Second, his study is not a reading of the history and works of aestheticism through recent queer theory but a recognition of aestheticism as, in part, a queer theory in itself. When Friedman says, "Aestheticism is one of queer theory's unacknowledged ancestors," he is not denying the decades of groundbreaking scholarship that has explored the queerness of aestheticism (5). Rather, he is emphasizing a Victorian, politicized, theoretical paradigm that arose before sexology, criminology, and related discourses attained cultural coherence and, eventually, became foundational to much of what is now recognized as modern queer theory, principally under the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Avoiding anachronism, Friedman defines the term "queer" rather loosely, allowing it to address a range of attractions, including what we might today read as gay and lesbian desire while also remaining open to forms of aesthetic desire that do not adhere to particular subject/object relations. Friedman argues that contributors to the aesthetic movement "consciously departed from the essentialist understandings of sexual identity promoted by the sexologists. They realized that the aesthetic, as a space located within the social yet not strictly bound by its rules, was a realm where sexual difference could be embraced without being pathologized" (15). It is worth noting that the field of sexology was itself inchoate when Pater began writing. It is true that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis (recognized by Foucault and others as the first work using psychology to articulate sexual regimes) had appeared in Latin in 1844, but it still situated non-normative practices—which included tribadism, necrophilia, and agalmatophilia (sex with statues)—in an ambiguous notion of general excess rooted in the non-procreative act of masturbation. Pater, Simeon Solomon, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other key contributors to early aestheticism would have been open to configurations of sexuality that were less constricted than Foucault's technology of power might imply. Aestheticism, that is, explored desires that preceded the historical moment when sexological identity [End Page 154] formation and institutionalization became dominant fixtures, maneuvering within a more ambiguous sexual "chaos," as Kaan called it (Psychopathia Sexualis, edited by Benjamin Kahan, [Cornell University Press, 2016], 44). One of Friedman's most useful insights arises from his focus on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on aestheticist notions of sexuality specifically. Hegel was perhaps the most influential German philosopher at later Victorian Oxford, although Kate Hext, Billie Andrew Inman, and William Shuter have demonstrated the importance of recognizing the various German philosophers who influenced Pater's aesthetic views. Other scholars have also richly analyzed Hegel's influence on Pater, including Giles Whiteley, whose Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (2010) addresses Pater's oeuvre with particular attention to what Pater calls a Hegelian "radical dualism...

Passing It Forward: Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk

Passing It ForwardBlack and Latinx LGBTQ+ Elders Sharing the Wisdom from Their Walk Juan Battle (bio) In this moment of racial reckoning throughout the united States, how are the voices of older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals being captured and stored? While large collections of archives exist curating LGBTQ+ local, regional, and national artifacts, far too few of those collections are digitized, fewer are one-on-one interviews (where respondents are allowed to be heard in their own words), and even fewer are one-on-one interviews with older LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx individuals. This project—Passing It Forward—seeks to fill that gap by conducting 150 one-on-one interviews, via Zoom, from January 2021 thru June 2021, with this very unique population. The interview protocol gathered information about the respondents’ background, professional and political activism, as well as their insights on prescribing a more inclusive future for racial minorities, sexual minorities, and their intersections. Within this collection of papers, some of the undergraduate and graduate students who collected the data then wrote these articles exploring a plethora of research questions. Because the researchers tended to be one— or two, and sometimes three—generations younger than the person they interviewed, this project will provide a venue to allow these changemakers to educate and inspire. So then, how do racial and sexual orientation identity enhance or inhibit the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) changemakers? For this target population, three specific areas were investigated: (a) their personal life history; (b) their ‘activism’ life histories, and how their personal life histories are interconnected with their activism life histories; (c) their perspectives on current topics versus historical ones; for [End Page 1] example, what are the similarities and differences between the resources and responses to Covid-19 in 2020 versus HIV/AIDS in the 1980s? Simmel (1955), a pioneer in research on identities, developed the idea of “crosscutting social circles.” Blau & Schwartz (1984) expanded Simmel’s work and argued that membership in multiple identity-based groups could be a positive attribute (allowing access to more people) or a negative one (when differences are consolidated). Early work on how individuals navigate the space between means, goals, and social structure (see Merton 1949/1968) highlights the ongoing struggle between changing identities and cultural expectations. Though multiple roles can create opportunities (Coser 1975 & 1991; Lifton 1993); other researchers—primarily Black feminists—have argued that multiple roles can serve as interlocking systems of oppression (Collins 1990 & 2003; Crenshaw 1989 & 1991). Subsequently, a new generation of scholars have expanded upon the work of these feminists and have explored the “intersectional imagination,” a term used to describe the analytic process that occurs when examining individual-and group-level oppressions based on identity (Pastrana, 2006) and their interaction with social structures. More recently, scholars have applied these theories to transborder constructions of racial and cultural hierarchies (Patil, 2013). Central to producing as well as impacting research, policy, and evidencebased knowledge is examining how issues that affect the broader population of people in the U.S. (i.e. healthcare, language proficiency, immigration, and reproductive health—just to name a few) continue to disproportionately affect populations who live at the intersection of non-normative identities, like people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender populations. In sum, longstanding and central to research being conducted by sociologists are issues of identity—including racial (Frazier 1939), sexuality (Foucault 1990), and their intersections (Collins 1990 & 2004; Crenshaw 1989). Documenting and dissecting those identities can be uniquely done via video archives of one-on-one interviews. The interview structure notwithstanding, in terms of archives focusing on LGBTQ+ populations, one of the largest collections located at a university is the one at the University of Southern California. As their website boasts: ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. [End Page 2] Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs, artworks, organizational records and personal papers. However, unfortunately, only a small subset of this material has...