What is the Heartland Queer Youth Collective?
As a recovery project, our goal with the Heartland Queer Youth Collective is to shed light on Midwestern queer spaces and communities. Growing up as a queer person in the Midwest can be a challenging, painful, but also deeply joyful experience. Finding queer fellowship presented its difficulties, and we often resorted to online places, corner booths in small coffee shops, in our teacher’s classrooms after school. This collective highlights and gives thanks to those spaces that supported and nurtured us as we came of age.
While many LGBTQIA+ archives and museums have come together in the last 20 years, these collections often pay the most attention to queer communities in coastal areas of the United States—like San Francisco and New York. These areas are rich in queer history, but so is the Midwest. As Samantha Allen traces in her book Real Queer America, many LGBTQIA+ Americans could not and/or did not choose to migrate to the coasts in search of a more accepting or “queerer” life. As kids, teens and young adults, these moves were impossible or unthinkable for many of us. Instead, we found (and made) queer community and friendship in our own cities and towns.
What’s in the collective?
The Heartland Queer Youth Collective is a public collection of oral histories/interviews which show-and-tell us about the artifacts, items, images, and documents that represent queer people. These artifacts represent how we found acceptance, support, and education about queer issues growing up in the Midwest. The goal of this project is to collaboratively build public access to oral histories, material culture, and correspondence as a way to honor and revisit our experiences growing up.
In a typical museum (or archive), curators would collect and describe artifacts into exhibits that tell a specific story. By asking our collaborators to tell their own stories in their own words, we believe that these stories will better reflect the people they come from. As we expand and share this collection, we hope you can search for stories and artifacts within your own cities using our tags and explore categories that most reflect your own experiences.
Getting Involved
If you are interested in submitting your own oral history or learning more about the Collective, we’d love to set up a time to talk! Send us an email at heartlandmemorycollective@gmail.com.
