Imagine living your life in a political ad.
Not the sort of spot where the world is monochrome; the air is filled with ominous bass notes and a guttural voice accuses you of kicking puppies or flipping off military widows. No, the kind where the candidate tries to come across as a normal Alabamian.
You’d start your day walking through a green field, hand-in-hand with your opposite-sex spouse and your 2.5 children, nodding knowingly at the youngest.
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.”
