Wearing Gay History

Wearing Gay History is a digital archive that contains t-shirts from the past 40 years gathered from archives across the United States and other places in the world. The project uses an everyday item, the t-shirt, to uncover and make available often unknown narratives regarding LGBTQIA history, defeating coastal biases and exhibiting the diversity of the queer community. Each t-shirt tells a story in relationship to specific historical and social locations. The shirts prove that by having them at different archives and owned by different people at different times, people were exchanging ideas and shirts and advocating for rights.

Site navigation is very straightforward and intuitive, making it easy to find what one needs. Arriving on the main page, users are present with a t-shirts wall of highlights from the collection, click on a t-shirt to go to that item’s page. Below the wall of t-shirts on the homepage, are links to a handful of categories that users can explore: themes of the collection’s contents, a featured exhibit, and a links to map showing where the t-shirts are from. Being able to browse by theme or location is particularly helpful for students who are not familiar with the topic. The section of tags also comes with a table of contents and a brief summary, which allows for quick evaluation of the archival material without needing to open it up. 

To explore the t-shirts collection, users have a choice of simply browsing through the items, or filtering results according to keywords, tags, collection, exhibits, map, or type of t-shirts. For the items themselves, each comes tagged and described, the metadata includes a description of the creator, date, place of origin, subject, tags, and geolocation (map). Each item includes a citation and information about copyright, which is a great help for students wanting to refer to these t-shirts in their work. One of the best features of this archive is that it includes both collection-level and item-level records. The inclusion of these additional materials helps a lot with viewing individual items within a broader context and allows the possibility of highlighting new connections between different records. Clicking the "collection" tab will link out to a new page that contains a list of the whole collection, one of the important collections is Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives' t-shirts, the CLGA collects material relating to the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Canada, the archive provides 649 t-shirts items in collection. Each collection page also comes with a table relating the scope and content of the collection and a brief summary that provides an overview of the collection including short notes about its content and general themes/subjects. 

The other great resource on this website is its online exhibitions. The Wearing Gay History has seven online exhibits, for example, one highlights lesbian activism in Washington DC, and another explores humor in the LGBTQIA community, a topic often overlooked in American queer history. Each exhibition consists of different webpages with a text section displaying different photographs and videos, and the pictures of t-shirts Users can click the pictures of t-shirts to explore different content according to their own interest. By placing these digitized t-shirts in context, these exhibits can provide context and historical background, through excellent overviews, while also serving as accessible entry-points to the site’s numerous materials. Teachers may use the exhibitions’ contents to teach students how different items and collections can inform queer history. 

Some aspects of the archive could be improved to assist teachers and students. For example, the search feature may be a bit complex for students and other amateurs, containing many fields that have little use for the non-expert, and the section “collection” may need to move under the “t-shirts” to allow students to find t-shirts easier. Also, as the LGBTQIA movement changes over time, users may want to see more queer communities be included in the archive, which would also mean making the site more complicated to use as more identity categories are added. Despite this, Wearing Gay History is a hidden gem for history education, the site on the whole is well explained, user-friendly, and includes adversity of materials, all of which makes for an excellent user experience. This project features sources that are nontraditional (material clothing) to uncover LGBTQIA histories from not only San Francisco or New York but also from other U.S. cities, to combat what can be a bicoastal bias in queer history. The most meaningful thing for students is the archive is also designed to uncover the diversity of LGBTQIA culture, which is often oversimplified or ignored queer students can also have a chance to see their history and that may encourage them to explore, negotiate, and engage with it in different ways. The archive provides evidence to students that the familiar LGBTQIA slogan of "We are everywhere" is true.