The challenge in documenting LGBTQ+ history in the South, said Maigen Sullivan, co-founder of the Invisible Histories Project, is that much of it has been purposely destroyed.
In her work with the project, a nonprofit based out of Birmingham, she once went to archive items of a recently deceased man who was gay. But a family member rid his house of his belongings.
“The biggest thing is it’s not that we’ve hidden all this, or we forgot about it,” she said during a talk at the Alabama Department of Archives and History on June 15. “It’s that it has been intentionally erased.”
