New Hope will mark the 10th anniversary of its New Hope Celebrates festivity this year, and residents and visitors alike now have the chance to walk down the town’s memory lane via their home computers.
Retro-Scope.org, which launched last month, will serve as a clearinghouse for memorabilia documenting the places, people and events comprising the town’s rich LGBT history. Art exhibits featuring ephemera from the site will be on display at a number of venues throughout the Pride festival.
Retro-Scope founder Daniel Brooks, the founder and president of New Hope Celebrates, said the idea for the project came to him after a friend remarked on the changes New Hope has been through in the past few decades.
“A friend from Philadelphia was walking through town and noticed that a lot of the gay-scape had changed, in terms of both the attitude and the venues,” Brooks said. “Some of the old LGBT venues have disappeared and been replaced by banks or strip malls. And there’s a lore more mainstreaming within the village itself. Instead of specific LGBT hangouts, everything’s been integrated, which has its plusses of course. But, what’s going to happen to the decades of history before this?”
To answer that question, Brooks said, he ultimately envisions the town creating a physical space to house it’s LGBT artifacts.
And Sara Scully, whose ScullyOne Productions focuses on multimedia community-engagement projects, said the site will build the foundation for such a venture.
“I felt the first step would be an online archive that is programmed in such a way that would allow for a crowd-sourced collection of items and stories to help establish the history and engage the community,” Scully said. “We thought that, if we can have a website where people can help build the history, it’d be the first step towards figuring out exactly what the history is and how we can best tell that story.”
Scully, an LGBT ally who grew up in New Hope, spent five months producing the site.
Brooks said NHC provided the startup funds until grant support can be found.
The site launched last month with an initial docket of about 300 photos, documents and other materials regarding LGBT life that organizers collected.
Residents and visitors are also encouraged to submit their own materials online or to give them to NHC for upload, and can interact with the site through blogging and commenting.
“I think that’s an extremely important part of this and makes people feel like they’re a part of the process,” Brooks said. “And involving the community in this process is 50 percent of our goal.”
In addition to allowing users to search for specific information, Scully added that visitors can also navigate with such features as a map and a timeline.
“With the map, you can click on a spot and it’ll tell you what the spot was, why it was significant to the gay community and can give you everything we have related to that place all in one spot,” Scully said. “And with the timeline, you can find out things like when The Raven opened, and when you click on it, you get all the items related to The Raven. It’s really cool and organized.”
Scully echoed Brooks’ sentiment that, while the town has lost such LGBT spots as The New Prelude and Cartwheel in recent years, the integration of LGBT culture into the town’s fabric has both pros and cons.
“Those places are passing away but at the same time there’s more mainstreaming,” she said. “There are now gay families with kids in the high school and a gay residential community. So, for an older generation, I think this site is a social service because it pays tribute to the community that these people built. This generation helped forge this community at a time when they faced a lot of discrimination. They made a beautiful, colorful community. And without that community, we wouldn’t have the gains that we have today.”
But, Scully added, the site can be enjoyed by New Hope fans of all ages.
“I always say to people, ‘Go on this site and I dare you not to smile.’ It’s full of so many happy times. You’ve never seen a community that had so many incredible parties, themed events, drag shows with incredible performers. Regardless of your generation or if you’re gay or straight, if you’re a person who likes fun and believes in the capacity of human beings to be creative, you’ll like this site.”
For more information, visit www.Retro-Scope.org.