Queer collective memory during the time of COVID: Timelessness,isolation,and resilience in the United Kingdom

Background and methodology

The Queer Britain Museum launched as a charity in 2018, with the goal of establishing the United Kingdom’s first national museum of LGBTQ+ history. In addition to the financial and political work involved in establishing a physical museum, Queer Britain established that its other primary goal was to begin collecting the life stories of everyday LGBTQ+ people. Therefore, by summer of 2018, one of the authors of this piece (Merryman) was named as research director of Queer Britain, and the first digital-video oral histories were gathered. ⁶ In October, these interviews were featured in the museum’s inaugural exhibition at the Salisbury Arts Centre in Wiltshire, with funding provided by the Heritage Lottery Fund (Queer Britain, 2018b). The following year, these videos became the start of the museum’s online Virtually Queer collection (Queer Britain, 2018a). Central to the Virtually Queer collection is representing interview subjects visually (in video format), which means that subjects are identifiable, and thus named. ⁷

The next cluster of field interviews was interrupted in March 2020, when the global pandemic resulted in travel bans and rolling lockdowns in the United Kingdom. That same month, an interdisciplinary team of scholars from Goldsmiths, University of London and Kent State University, anticipating that the pandemic would have an impact on LGBTQ+ people, launched the Queer Pandemic project. Following best practices of oral history methodologies ⁸ and informed by queer theories and methods, the team created project protocols, explored technologies, and developed a scaffolding for training that involved students as interviewers and transcribers. For us, the methods are systematic and careful—we see the queering of history not in our methods, but in the act of creating a collection for a queer museum and as queer scholars who invoke queer theory and who “queer” the approaches used in our overall work. One of the projects that influenced Queer Pandemic, particularly in terms of its wide scope and use of volunteer interviewers was the comprehensive Twin Cities (Minnesota) LGBTQ+ oral history project, which collected more than 100 interviews. That project’s researchers noted,

We have argued that oral history requires a systematic approach to collecting and archiving personal narratives, but we also want to stress that there should be no rules when it comes to interpreting those narratives. It is precisely this open-ended, ephemeral quality that makes queer oral history different. (Murphy et al., 2016: 23)

Differentiating the Queer Pandemic project from other aspects of the larger Virtually Queer oral history collection is its focus on immediate experiences. As such, they are part of the emerging genre of oral history that seeks to document events as they occur, particularly ones in which many groups, including the government and media, have a stake in defining the public meaning. As an oral historian who worked on the 11 September 2001 Oral History Memory and Narrative Project observed, this type of oral history

investigates the “silences” that oral historians often write about decades later as they try to recover the conversations—from the vantage point of memory—that took place on street corners, in private places, in public protests, or in spontaneous memorials. (Clark, 2011: 257)

The first interview subjects were reached through “Open Letters to Queer Britain,” a joint outreach campaign co-sponsored by the Queer Britain Museum, Levi’s, and the Post Office (n.d.). Bengry and Merryman met with the marketing team and drafted language that was used in the campaign website, posters, and print materials. The campaign invited people to send letters for free to become part of the museum collection and to indicate interest in being interviewed for the Queer Pandemic project in their letters or with a check box on the envelope. Social media and social networks have been used throughout the project to invite people to participate, and at the time of writing, additional outreach efforts are targeting geographical regions of the United Kingdom that are currently underrepresented in the overall collection, an initiative coordinated by our fourth project partner, research assistant Moira Armstrong.

A short interview guide with thematically organized question categories was written by Bengry, Merryman, and Vachon, and Vachon further developed teaching modules so that students at both universities would have the same training in theory, ethics, interview techniques, and protocols. This pedagogically integrated field methodology for conducting video-based oral history field work was first developed by Merryman with Kenneth J. Bindas for a project on northern racial segregation that produced the broadcast documentary “Invisible Struggles: Stories of Northern Segregation” (Merryman, 2006). ⁹ Merryman and Vachon further refined the methodology, interview guide, and pedagogical approach for “Highland Lives,” a 2014 broadcast documentary about an LGBTQ+ neighborhood in northeast Ohio (Merryman, 2016).

Project researchers have coded responses using grounded theory and content analysis, as well as entering transcripts into NVivo to help identify insights and themes. Because the project is ongoing, the themes and observations presented in this article are not intended to be definitive, overarching, or final expressions of the collection. ¹⁰ Our team of researchers continue to gather stories using remote technologies and will continue until the pandemic becomes endemic as declared by the World Health Organization. At the time of writing, 48 interviews have been completed and archived.

Isolation and timelessness

Explorations in oral history and memory studies reveal that memory is grounded in time and place, including embodied physical space. Alistair Thompson (2011), in noting the experience of tastes, smells, or images triggering recall writes, “The physical, sensory elements of the original experience have lingered in memory—not necessarily in the same regions of the brain that remember the event—and the sensory cue now elicits that associated memory” (p. 83). Memory is connected to dramatic moments. “Flashbulb memory,” is a particular type of recall connected to extreme events, even those only witnessed on television, such as 9/11, in which “people talked vividly and in much detail and suggested that this meant that such memories were quite different from other kinds of memory” (Thompson, 2011: 203). Even naming a place can return the interview subject to an experience. “Interviewers find the narrators’ memories are stimulated by mention of a place and that they anchor that memory to a place” (Yow, 2005: 210). We measure time by connecting it to the physical—what apartment or house we were living in, what friends and family we were with, the office or the bar or the corner shop we visited.

As the pandemic enters a third year and another round of lockdowns in the United Kingdom, many have lost these physical links to time and space, which in turn impacts memory. In interviews conducted after the first year of the pandemic, subjects frequently struggled to remember timelines and experiences, such as recalling which waves connected to lockdowns and other experiences. For example, Rachel Dawson, a 32-year-old White lesbian woman who lives in Cardiff, Wales, interviewed in October 2021, states,

It’s really hard to, like, think back and my memory is definitely affected. There’s whole patches that it’s hard to remember now. I remember like the early days going for our daily walks when we were only allowed out once a day for a walk, taking my sort of proper DSLR camera and taking pictures and I remember thinking I should really turn this into a bit of a project and write a sort of vignette for every day and I didn’t do it, just ’cause it was too depressing and I wish I had now, ’cause there’s whole bits of—that I don’t really remember.

Unlike Dawson, those interviewed in 2020 were able to specifically recall the distinct rules of various lockdowns and other COVID regulations. For example, Jason Kattenhorn (2020), a White, 28-year-old gay man from Banbury, when interviewed in October 2020, was able to recount several different “waves” of lockdowns, and although he noted that it was a challenge to keep track of the varying rules and restrictions in different places that he, family, and friends had to abide by, he was able to recount them and link to different stories about his work, shopping, and socializing. The longer that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have continued, the more difficult it is for interview subjects to be able to link experiences to time. Furthermore, subjects discuss increased feelings of isolation and expressions of losing community connections the longer that the pandemic continues. In interviews conducted in 2020 and early 2021, respondents discussed renewed connections with friends and family through the use of video-based technologies such as Zoom and FaceTime. Others talked about virtual parties, events, and sexual encounters with excitement. By the middle of 2021, such technologies were referenced with trepidation. Mark Pendleton, a 43-year-old White gay man living in Manchester, describes life during COVID as a “constrained existence” and grieves not being able to visit with family who live in Australia. Loneliness and confinement are themes in many of these later interviews. As Pendleton (2021) says, “I mean, essentially my life just reduced to a one square kilometre kind of radius of my—of my house.”

COVID-19 and LGBTQ+ communities

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered many oral history interview subjects’ relationships with the LGBTQ+ community. Lockdown measures in the United Kingdom caused bars, clubs, community centers, bookstores, social groups, and other LGBTQ+ spaces to adapt their offerings to virtual space or pause entirely. Isolation and quarantine also removed individuals from casual social contact with queer friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. These circumstances caused widespread isolation, which is evident in the way subjects responded to questions about how COVID-19 has affected their relationship with the larger LGBTQ+ community. Many raised the theme of isolation, both for themselves and for other members of the community. For example, Dawson described that she is “just desperate to get back to queer spaces. I’m just desperate to get back to pride. I really want to go on holiday somewhere gay” (Dawson, 2021). Dawson was deeply affected by the loss of access to queer community, and her words illustrate her strong desire to return to that community, detailing her plans to not only return to places that she had frequented in the past—queer spaces and pride—but also make up for lost time, in a sense, by also going on vacation to a place she considers queer. Dawson (2021) also works for an elders’ charity and reflected on how one of her contacts there, an elderly gay man who was high-risk for COVID-19 due to his age, was affected by the isolation caused by COVID-19, saying,

He would go to the gay pub and he wasn’t really interested in cruising but he just liked being there. He liked the atmosphere and the drag and chatting to people but he lived alone and I—I don’t think he’s on any social media.

She realized that “a lot of my friends were of a similar age and we’ve all had a—a fairly similar experience,” but that was not the case for everyone (Dawson, 2021). The pandemic affected other groups, like the elderly, differently, and she voiced concern that those people were feeling the effects of isolation even more acutely.

Alessandro Portelli, a prominent scholar of form and meaning in oral history, believed that “the process of remembering, the telling, illuminates the investments narrators have in specific versions of the past” (Krahulik, 2012: 48). Viewed through this lens, the specific language used by interview subjects demonstrates how they conceptualize their relationship to the community during the pandemic. Specifically, the verb tense chosen by subjects to describe their communities reveals varying degrees of distance and isolation from those communities. Subjects who were interviewed in 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic, used the present tense to describe their feelings of engagement with the community, as did individuals whose work is directly tied to the community—a queer historian, a queer and feminist film programmer, and a queer archival researcher. Selina Robertson, the film programmer, is a 51-year-old White British lesbian woman. She explained,

I’m part of this queer feminist collective called Club des Femmes. So we curate film screenings and events and cinemas. So when we do that, we are kind of sharing culture and creating these kind of communal experiences of cinema-going and queer culture, LGBTQ film history . . . we started doing events online and we, with Club des Femmes, we did a—a sort of a film—a mini film season online and stuff. So we sort of—we did stuff virtually. (Robertson, 2021)

Although Club des Femmes changed to an online model during the beginning of the pandemic, Robertson still spoke about their work in the present tense, demonstrating that her work provided a feeling of present connection to the queer community that others who were interviewed later in the pandemic and do not work in queer-specific fields lacked.

For example, Mark Pendleton (2021) was interviewed in July 2021 and described that during the pandemic,

I did engage with a bunch of those things, so I—you know, you know, I think I logged onto one of those house parties and then there were, like, you know, other performances that that people would host. There was a kind of a drag queen bingo that I kind joined once . . . I’ve, you know, maintained contact with my friends.

In contrast to Robertson, it had been over a year since Pendleton engaged with queer community in a traditional way, and his distance is reflected in his use of the past tense to refer to his relationships with that community. Pendleton (2021) also reflected that,

I think, like everybody, the first phase there was lots of Zoom kind of parties and, you know, trying to watch, like, live performances online and, you know, playing Among Us with friends, that kind of stuff, but I kind of—I mean, at this point, I don’t really want to do any of that.

Pendleton’s recollections of socializing during the pandemic illustrate the burnout that resulted from virtual community during the beginning of the pandemic and demonstrates the increased isolation that occurred as the pandemic progressed.

The lack of ability to access queer community has significantly impacted how these subjects view themselves and their connections to their communities. Memory does not exist in a vacuum. It is “a social as well as an individual process” that operates within the framework of collective memory and leads to the development of a collective identity, particularly within well-defined social groups such as the queer community (Thompson, 2000: 132). Contact with other queer people and engagement with queer spaces has long been acknowledged as crucial to forming an understanding of oneself as queer because these experiences build familiarity with queer cultures, histories, and relationships, allowing the individual to situate themselves within the larger context of queerness (Anderson and Knee, 2021: 120–121). With the removal of that larger queer social context during COVID-19, several subjects have found this process disrupted, which caused distress. For example, Adam Zmith (2021), a 36-year-old White British queer man, described that before the pandemic, the LGBT community was “a huge part of my life” that he connected to by “going to friends’ houses and hanging out in pubs and clubs and stuff, gay ones or else queer ones, or non-queer ones . . . cinemas, arts festivals, film festivals, theatre festivals, shows.” He also works on a podcast made by LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ people. His work has continued online, and he has tried to connect through other online events; however, he was unhappy, saying, “I just found it quite awful. So I’d rather not try to replicate that online and on Zoom than—than just not have it” (Zmith, 2021).

Zmith’s words reflect Luisa Passerini’s definition of oral histories as “statements of cultural identity in which memory continuously adapts received traditions to present circumstances” (Krahulik, 2012: 47). As a queer man, Zmith received the traditions of queer arts, bars, clubs, and social circles—traditions that are part of the queer collective memory and contribute to collective queer identity. Before the pandemic, he was able to participate in these traditions and feel connected to the associated collective memory and identity. However, once those factors were removed, memories of the ways he had engaged with those traditions in the past and new memories made through virtual alternatives were insufficient in helping him feel connected to queer collective memory and thus, queer identity.

Once removed from queer contexts, Zmith began to feel very isolated and question his own relation to queer identity. He described,

I live with two straight women who are great in many ways, but they’re different from me in the sense that they’re not queer and that makes a difference . . . there were big periods last year where I felt like I wasn’t being queer and a friend pointed out to me that, “well, of course, you’re always being queer if that’s who you are, you’re just not doing it as you normally do it.” (Zmith, 2021)

He eventually found that watching queer films served as a better substitute: “What I was doing there was—was doing the—the queer stuff that I couldn’t normally do and being queer and holding space and time with queer people, even if it was fictional people on a screen” (Zmith, 2021). Zmith struggled to see himself as queer and had to re-adapt to regain the feeling of queerness. His interview reveals that queerness, while often viewed as a personal label depending solely on one’s sexuality or gender, functions similarly to memory in that it is both an individual and social process, and losing the social reinforcement of queer identity can lead to doubt and distress.

Although some sectors of society are returning to a version of pre-pandemic normalcy, not all subjects felt as though this had fixed their feeling of disconnect. Syeda Ali, a 44-year-old British Asian Pakistani queer woman, was interviewed in October 2021, and some in-person events and interactions had resumed in her life. She is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge living in a residence hall and attending in-person classes. In her interview, she describes attending an AIDS memorial and a queer boat party. However, she still said that she felt “a bit in limbo” in regard to queer life and community (Ali, 2021). “If you can’t be around people, you can’t have that sense of ‘yeah, actually, we do exist, we . . .’. You can’t affirm each other and yourselves in that way and that—that’s been quite difficult,” she said (Ali, 2021). Ali’s narrative shows that the isolation prompted by the pandemic has not fully ended and raises the question of whether there is a current collective memory shared by the queer community as the memory of in-person engagement is eroded by greater distance from pre-pandemic times. Since she has not been creating shared memories with queer people, she has not felt affirmed in her queer identity, and the losses that began during COVID-19 lockdowns and other restrictions have not been immediately fulfilled when she returned to queer spaces. Her words demonstrate that collective memories and identities will take time to rebuild.

COVID-19 and AIDS

Although collective memory of traditional engagement with queer community appears to be lacking due to the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, another collective memory emerges strongly: the collective memory of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS has long been considered a uniting force of the queer community. Simon Watney argues that it has created an international unity among gay men that is “forged in relation to our direct experience of protracted illness, suffering, loss, and mourning, together with the cultural solidarity we obtain from what has always been a diasporic queer culture”; Daniel Marshall extends Watney’s definition to incorporate “generalized sadness and anger about the losses of affectional relationships that homosexuals have endured, of which AIDS is perhaps the cardinal sign” (p. 176). Such generalized sadness and anger have extended beyond gay men, becoming a collective memory for the entire queer community through “new communication technologies such as the internet” and “greater geographic mobility” that allow the stories of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to reach all demographics (Green, 2011: 106).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, “many grasped for ‘usable pasts’ with which to orient the precarious present and uncertain future, resulting in striking analogies to historical epidemics” (Catlin, 2021: 1447). For many queer people, the “usable past” that was most relevant and accessible was HIV/AIDS. Several subjects who lived through the crisis years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic reflected on their firsthand memories of that time in connection with COVID-19, even before they were asked to do so. Geoff Hardy (2021), a 70-year-old White British gay man, described it in detail, saying,

I noticed what came into play then, with the homophobia that got whipped up around HIV and AIDS. But also, I say that it strengthened the community, so . . . so my first reaction was fear. And then a part of me—and I’m not—I can’t remember how long it took, but [his partner] Peter and I talked about it. And we went, “Hang on a minute. What did we do in those years? What was it that we moved into doing?” And what we moved into was safer sex work . . . So I had a sense where I realized that what had got us through was, number one, a sense of community. What connects us rather than what divides us.

Without prompting, Hardy connected his experiences of HIV/AIDS to COVID-19. He was afraid of a similar backlash against a minority population and felt fear, but also recalled the sense of community and communal work to recover from the pandemic that provided a path forward. His memories of the past informed how he responded to the present, relieving some of his fear because he viewed surviving one public health crisis as a sign that he could survive another. Specifically, he discussed his memories of HIV/AIDS with his partner, and the recollection of those memories allowed him to regain a feeling of safety despite the fears that arose since the pandemics had many parallels. Hardy’s process of remembering and telling can also be contextualized through Portelli’s theory; he is invested in one of the “specific versions of the past” that allows him to feel secure, even in the face of a pandemic (Krahulik, 2012: 48).

These themes—the scapegoating of a minority during a public health crisis, the strengthening of community in the face of tragedy, and the resilience of queer people—did not only appear in firsthand memories like Hardy’s. As Maurice Halbwachs theorized, events beyond an individual person’s lifespan can be linked to their own lives through collective memory. Collective memory is created from the total contributions of group members, and is communicated and affirmed to the group, as well as its future generations, through commemoration. Commemoration then allows memories of the past to be “reflected through the prism of contemporary needs and perspectives” and re-cemented for each generation (Green, 2011: 99). The queer community is filled with HIV/AIDS commemoration, and HIV/AIDS has contributed to queer people’s understandings of homophobia, community, and activism since the 1980s, and this legacy continued during COVID-19 as HIV/AIDS became their “usable past” of choice. Kush Varia, a 44-year-old Indian gay man, stated that he became aware of

some people in the queer community saying, “we’ve had a pandemic before,” you know, with—with the AIDS crisis, is something that directed us—affected directly. And I think maybe there’s some—as a community, and as individuals, maybe there’s a further—maybe there’s a resilience there that, in terms of responding to—not this sort of being told how to behave, but the fact that we’ve been there before, I think makes it—made it less scary. (Varia, 2021)

Varia was not an adult during the crisis years of HIV/AIDS, but regardless, he understood the resilience that was exemplified by gay men during that time period and applied that to his own experiences during COVID-19.

The links made between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 are particularly important in regard to activism. The legacies of HIV/AIDS activists, such as the members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), participated in highly evocative and memorable protests, many of which were recalled by activists battling against government responses to COVID-19. For example, artist David Wojnarowicz’s highly photographed jacket, which read “IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A,” was recalled by Jesse Gough, a 24-year-old White British queer nonbinary person as they reflected on HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.

The only thing that I can think of is, like, that picture of this guy with a jacket that says, “if I die, put me on the steps of”—like, I can’t remember where the place is, but I’m assuming it’s some kind of, like, health services in the States. (Gough, 2020)

This “act of borrowing from the archive of past crises” raises the “twin processes of mnemonic premediation and remediation, in which cultural elements and scripts from the past shape discourse and action in the present” (Catlin, 2021: 1451). These parallels in imagery are not necessarily meant to imply that HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 are complete parallels, but instead to highlight how issues of power over life and death have been raised by both pandemics and the ways that lessons—particularly lessons about fighting back against institutions that engage in ignorance and discrimination—from the first can be utilized while living through the second. Gough’s interview shows that those questions and lessons are relevant even to someone who was not alive during the crisis years of HIV/AIDS. Because queer collective memory centers that time period, they still incorporated the cultural elements onto their understanding of the present.

Collective memory of AIDS activism has the potential for immense political power, particularly when paired with the anti-government sentiment that many interview subjects hold. For example, Gough refers to Boris Johnson as “a waste” and observes that many of the precautions taken in the United Kingdom during COVID-19 were “too little, too late” (Gough, 2020), and Hardy directly draws parallels between the government’s lack of action on HIV/AIDS to the lack of action on COVID-19 (Hardy, 2021). The memory of HIV/AIDS is also not always so straightforward. Ted Jacobs, an 84-year-old mixed-race South African, did not feel connected to the queer community during the crisis years, saying,

I took precautions . . . because I’m a doctor, but I didn’t want to engage in any way with this calamity because somehow it didn’t concern me. It was the others, the ones who—who lived as gay people. I—I mean, it’s wrong now, but at the time, it didn’t seem wrong. I counted myself lucky that—carried on unthinkingly, and unfeelingly, more—more to the point. I counted myself lucky that, uh, carried on unthinkingly and unfeelingly more—more to the point. And I did know of people who—who died, and, you know, I just shrugged it off that they were unfortunate, and I feel sorry now that it—I was so immature and so unfeeling about this. (Jacobs, 2020)

As he looked back on his memories of the time period, Jacobs felt guilty for his own lack of action and negative emotions about HIV/AIDS and wished he had acted differently. As these emotions and memories are shared, they can “embody the experience of previously invisible people and thereby lead to action” (Balay, 2016: 71). The sharing of COVID-19-related memories can be a springboard for COVID-19-related activism in the style of ACT UP and other HIV/AIDS activists.

Conclusion

Queer Britain was created to fill the absence of LGBTQ representations in national museums. Its primary mission is the creation of a bricks and mortar museum that will feature permanent, temporary, and rotating exhibits, along with education, outreach, and community activities. In 2022, the museum acquired leased space, opening with a showing of photographs from its permanent collection in spring before having its first curated exhibition open in July 2022. “We are Queer Britain” recognizes the 50-year anniversary of the first Pride March in the United Kingdom, includes items on loan and from the museum’s own collection, including a video installation of the “Queer Pandemic” oral histories. In addition, in June 2022, a traveling exhibition and reception of the Queer Pandemic project featuring videos, discussions, and transcript-based blackout/erasure poetry activities received US Embassy funding. This outreach encouraged more individuals to get involved in the project.

In recognition of the absence and active erasure of queer lives throughout history, the museum has made collecting stories of “everyday” LGBTQ people central to its mission. The critical practice of Queer Britain reveals that museum organizers are mindful that it exists to subvert and reclaim prior cultural practices: even its title nods to its active queering of the museum itself. One central aspect of this queering is a mindful inclusion of elements of queer theory and queer research and museum practices. Within this epistemology, Virtually Queer is more than an oral history collection—it is a means of transforming, of queering, the mission of the museum; in part, because it is the museum’s acknowledgment that histories of LGBTQ lives are histories of erasure and of absence, and that standard museum practices of passively gathering historical items will not suffice. This (and other practices) support claims from queer museum studies, most notably that “museums can, and should, be active participants in the articulation of critically engaged and socially transformative ways of knowing, being, doing” (Sullivan and Middleton, 2020: 109).

The Queer Pandemic project exemplifies active participation by engaging in systematic oral history research of LGBTQ subjects during the entirety of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is represented in Queer Britain’s inaugural major exhibition in its brick-and-mortar museum, and is being transcribed, coded, and indexed so that future scholars (perhaps during future pandemics) will have access to LGBTQ perspectives and experiences during this global crisis. By having a larger research mission, the museum queers its own existence.

As the Queer Pandemic project has collected oral histories in the United Kingdom throughout the global spread of COVID-19, key themes have revealed how LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced the ongoing crisis. As the pandemic has lessened the variety of embodied physical space in which people exist, many have struggled to keep track of time as well as memory. This struggle has worsened as the pandemic and lockdowns have continued, particularly as online ways of connecting grew fatiguing rather than exciting. Interview subjects also expressed being disconnected from a sense of being part of LGBTQ+ community, as physical community spaces were closed, a feeling that increased as the pandemic progressed as well, and their language changed to reflect the distance. In addition, some subjects struggled to feel queer throughout this isolating time, even as some in-person spaces opened up again. Despite the isolation, the AIDS epidemic and activism became a touchstone for queer people navigating COVID-19, whether or not they lived through the acute crisis years of that pandemic. Even those who did not engage with queer communities at the time expressed emotions about AIDS, which, as a collective memory, could lead to important activism in the face of today’s public health crisis.

Following the release of Queer Britain’s exhibition of the Queer Pandemic project, our research team has reached out to organizations representing LGBTQ+ people of color and LGBTQ+ people with disabilities to expand interviews of people who are currently underrepresented in the study. A notable limitation of engaging in video-based research that names and visually identifies oral history study participants is that this design excludes those more vulnerable people who are not publicly out as LGBTQ+ as well as those who lack the technological and housing access to participate. ¹¹

The observations gathered through the Queer Pandemic project reflect concepts, theories, and methods that have long been established in the field of oral history, highlighting their relevance to queer populations and the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this project documents events as they occur, particularly important given the fragility of recall we have documented related to different stages of the pandemic. The Queer Pandemic project also aligns with Queer Britain’s goal (as articulated by its co-founder and CEO, Joseph Galliano) of “helping progress Britain’s understanding of itself by giving queer stories their rightful place. So that means rightful place within the culture, and also a rightful place . . . that can be their own” (Galliano, 2019). This project has revealed the silences and provided a rightful place for queer stories, which demonstrate what Ali calls “great resilience in the community . . . pockets of resilience as well that come out” during times of hardship (Ali, 2021).