The Explosion in Grandma’s Attic, the Cabinet of Curiosities, and Chance Encounters at the GLBT History Museum

This article proposes that objects might be instrumental in museum exhibitions that promote critical thinking around issues of human rights and social inequity. Objects have the potential to present histories that have been marginalized for far too long and to get away from rehearsed narratives, while also engaging the visitor through emotional connection — making the visitor care about the histories that are being presented. In looking at the GLBT Historical Society Archives and History Museum in San Francisco, this article claims that new museums that grow out of community-based archives might provide the opportunity for the kinds of critical engagements with objects that national-scale museums that attempt to address social problems often do not have. Specifically addressing the GLBT History Museum’s inaugural exhibit, “Our Vast Queer Past,” this article argues that the organization of objects on display, greatly influenced by their archival roots, gives viewers the opportunity for chance encounters with histories that come to matter to them.

A Martyr in the Archive: The Life and Afterlife of Harvey Milk's Suit

This paper analyzes the history of a visible, visceral artifact of a violent event. What was Milk's message, and how is it still deployed through the relics of his life? Harvey Milk argued for gay rights and for the full inclusion of gay bodies into the body politic. People can be pictures and Milk's assassination was an act of iconoclasm. The suit he was wearing at the time of his assassination now resides in the archives of The International Museum of GLBT History. In its journey from the tailor to the shop, through the closet, the legislative chamber, the evidence room, to the box under the surviving lover's bed and finally to the archive, the suit picked up meaning. In exhibition, as part of Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr it acquired more. Its original owner, the assassin and the curators are all contributing authors. Reading audiences complete the act of historical inscription. The visitor to the shrine of ‘Saint Harvey’ stands in for the assassin, stands in for the murdered man, stands where an artist would, and stands in dialog with the shroud. Milk the man was a man, but Milk the martyr is a myth. The suit is a relic, the reliquary not a closet but an archive. Objects can be articulate. The suit, produced reverently for an exhibition, a year-long saint's day, speaks.