Birdie is a volunteer for Queer Norfolk who helps out with online archiving. They have lived in Norwich for 18 years, going on holiday to Waxham every summer. She studies English at the University of Cambridge.
This blog is by volunteer Birdie Reeds.
The Norfolk Heritage Centre archive is made up mostly of ephemera; that is, flyers, leaflets, and other things made to be discarded. In this blog, I want to pay special attention to the throwaway nature of these things. Along with their everyday presentation, this might leave them easily overlooked in a telling of queer history. I argue that it is precisely because of these aspects that ephemera can present a grounding and politically vital queer heritage. Along the way, I bring in queer theory and poetry to illuminate the parts that inspire me most. In ephemera we can locate the lived hope of Norfolk queers past and, using this footing, orientate ourselves towards Norfolk’s queer futures.
We appear to be in a bloom of queer histories at present. From Bad Gays and The Log Books to the poetry of Richard Scott, we are glancing back to our histories as we enter an unstable period for local communities. Histories are told through evidence, and queerness has had a trying relationship with evidence. Evidence was once used in this country to catch and punish queerness. Perhaps because of this, the telling of queer histories now often has the feeling of a defiant excavation. In his searching poem Oh My Soho! Scott writes: ‘We’re a people robbed of/ ancestors – they were stolen, hooded, from us.’ Here, we can see queer heritage as something to be unveiled and reclaimed. Many projects take on this powerful method, pulling back the covers on a phobic history to prove that queers were always there. In doing so, they demonstrate that we belong here now. To take ephemera as the evidence, however, steps to the side of the undeniable drama and fun of the gay archaeological dig. It feels like there is little in the way of an uncovering, or any revealing flourish. What ephemera can offer us, in its brief account of the everyday and sometimes mundane efforts of queer people in Norfolk, is a moving impression of a hoped-for future. This utopian feeling, bound to local community resistance, is vital for us as we realise the concrete ways that we will fight uphill now.
My ephemeral jumping-off point is a flyer advertising a “Kiss-In” in haymarket square. The flyer is from 2009, the year of the very first Pride in Norwich, though the protest took place two months or so before the big event. No doubt there was excitement in the air for the community, and likely some of those organising the Kiss-In would have been volunteers for Pride. Like many of the items in the archive, the flyer anticipates a future event. Looking at the flyer today I can imagine the hope of those who handed it out around town and at queer third spaces. I imagine the nervousness of everyone walking into the city centre and the rush of being surrounded by queers familiar and unfamiliar (I’m thinking here of Travis Alabanza’s speech at London Trans Pride this year, where they briefly reflected on the simple joy of being around so many others who just look like you do). The saturated pink that floods the paper is striking, suggesting an overflowing of passion appropriate for the occasion. Of course, this bold black-on-pink chiaroscuro is also just good commonsense design for political art. When I read in the flyer those feelings of hope and anticipation, however, this aesthetic only emphasises the lingering emotional charge of the object. Despite its everyday presentation and ephemeral nature, it moves me as queer evidence in a powerful way.
The bit of theory I would like to turn to here is from the wonderful Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia is a radical text, grounded in marxist, queer of colour and queer feminist critique. I quote the opening of the book in full, because I think it is genuinely wonderful; then, I engage it on a personal level, alongside a poem by Ocean Vuong, and finally bring it back to the Kiss-In flyer:
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.
Though Muñoz’s argument can seem a little counterintuitive, his writing resonates deeply with me. Growing up trans in Norfolk has been an odd time. This is something I think many of us can attest to. We have felt at odds with Norwich city centre, at odds with the North-Norfolk coast, at odds with fellow travellers on the bus or on the train home, at odds with friends and family. This is a part of what it means to be queer as I have learnt it here: we are gender outsiders, rarely at home. It’s similiarly clear to many of us, however, that this is only one side of the coin. Queerness can allow us to look beyond the gendered lives and relationships set out for us. Perhaps because we are unable, or refuse to fulfil them, some queer people have realised ways of being in the world kinder and more equal than those found within the often surreal circles of cis-heterosexualty. Sometimes, I have even felt queerness as ecstasy. Howling a Perfume Genius song into the sea at 16, having wandered halfway to Winterton trying to escape the dog walkers obviously trying to crash my party, I felt like nothing could stand me down (apart from the dog walkers). The future opened up in a rush, the ‘warm illumination’ of that horizon flooding in. What Muñoz tasks us with is to ‘hope in the face of heartbreak’: to lean into this utopian side of queer life, despite setbacks, failures and disappointments. He argues that it is only in this way that queerness can form a radical force for change.
This is a small part of a favourite poem by a favourite poet, Beautiful Short Loser by Ocean Vuong. I turn to it briefly here because I think it articulates my own experience, and a Muñozian sense of queerness, particularly well:
That one time Jaxson passed out beside a triple stack of jumbo pancakes at Denny’s after top surgery.
I can’t believe I lost my tits, he said a minute before, smiling through tears.
The sadness in him ends in me tonight.
It ends tonight! I shouted to the cop who pulled us over for dreaming.
I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time.
Tomorrow, partly cloudy with a chance.
Here Vuong sketches the two sides of queerness I have attested to. Jaxson’s sadness is held at once alongside the joy of top surgery. The queer dreamer is pulled over by the cop; a nerdy 16-year-old listening to Perfume Genius on the beach reads the next day about NHS waiting lists and psychological evaluations. Faced with this heartbreak, Vuong lifts the hopeful chance of tomorrow above sadness and brushes off the cop with a pithy line. Similarly, Muñoz would have us lean towards the kind of utopian dreaming- tomorrow, partly cloudy with a chance– that fuels more radical change. As a young trans person, Muñoz’s writing has a certain bite to it. I have sometimes found my future hard to hope for, wary as I am of the NHS, of this government’s commitment to transphobic legislature, of public and workplace transphobia. I see the Kiss-In flyer as a small monument to the kind of dreaming that Muñoz calls for, sometimes so difficult to find. Beyond the kind of hope that is absolutely necessary to go on living, these are dreams that have ticked over into action.
It is precisely because they are made to be chucked away that ephemera represents a unique opportunity for those invested in local queer history. Just as it documents the Kiss-In itself, the flyer reminds us of the anticipation that led up to it. I find it easy to follow this emotional thread all through the archive. From notes on the annual general meetings of the Women on Women group in the 90s, to a ‘we are gentle loving people’ placard donated by Sing with Pride from 2022, the gathered ephemera documents the lived hope of the local queer community. Admittedly, it’s an abstract thread to follow, but it shares nothing in common with the banal “hope” often appropriated by politicians. The archive documents specific, communal and local works of queer hope. Muñoz tells us that ‘queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.’ Taking ephemera as evidence is the glance to the past that orientates us towards Norfolk’s queerer futures.
Queer Norfolk is a volunteer-led archiving project that hands ownership of queer collections back to communities, empowering people to access, discover, and contribute to local collections that reflect our shared histories.
