Some know Germantown’s history as a place that has long been reckoning with race. In 1688, the neighborhood housed the first religious body to ever make a formal protest against slavery. Later, Germantown’s YWCA intentionally sought to integrate Black and white neighbors before integration was law and participated in protests demanding racial justice for students.
But Rasheed Ajamu, a reporter and editor at Germantown Info Hub, is interested in capturing and preserving what they describe as a “hidden queer legacy” of LGBTQ+ people residing, pursuing community and organizing movements in the neighborhood.
“How do we make that more visible?” they asked.
Ajamu has been talking with current LGBTQ+ neighbors and conducting research about Germantown’s LGBTQ+ history as one of the first participants in the Preserving and Archiving Community Media Fellowship with the People’s Media Record.
“We were really excited about their emphasis on shifting the narrative around what news gets circulated, what stories get told, what stories get centered,” said Winter Schneider, who runs the fellowship as director of People’s Media Record with their colleague, archivist Lila Chaar-Pérez. “We love that their work centers stories that can help people belong to each other better.”
“It’s really important to us, like, how stories get told, how stories get saved, how they get shared,” they emphasized.
People’s Media Record is supporting organizers, archivists and storytellers from Asian Americans United, VietLead, the MOVE Activist Archive and other communities through this year’s fellowship. Schneider, who said the program received many more applications than they had money to fund, noted that applications for next year’s fellowships will open at the end of September.
Schneider said the program isn’t dictating any aspects of Ajamu’s approach to the project and instead is supporting their vision. This includes partnering the project’s first community event — a gathering for storytelling and visioning that Ajamu has called “Envisioning Our Stories: Help Shape Germantown’s LGBTQIA+ Archive” — on Sept. 15 at Black.Bird.Rising.
Schneider said the event will help to ask, “Along what lines has archival work already shaped the way we know ourselves as people and the ways that we can get in touch with our own histories? What does the archive typically leave out? Who does the archive typically silence?”
Ajamu wants to use this first event as a conversation-starter — to gauge people’s interest in getting involved, identify skills that could be useful for the project, name the values — such as queer joy, queer resistance or Black queerness — the archived stories should embody, and begin mapping people, places, topics and experiences the project should explore.
Attendees will also have an opportunity to tell their own stories. Ajamu expects that these stories will highlight positive memories as well as experiences of oppression and discrimination.
The goal is for this archive to be digitized for the community, which means some stakeholders who want to be involved long-term will become stewards of the records — updating and maintaining a website at the very least to ensure continued access.
Ajamu wants to capture stories that show average experiences of life — such as the social lives of those who gathered in each other’s homes before public queerness was more acceptable and the mundane moments at local queer bars as those establishments first started to take shape.
Preserved stories will include notable figures, including Anita Cornwell — the first Black writer to publish essays about her experiences as a lesbian, and Dr. John Fryer — a Germantown psychiatrist who came out as gay at a 1972 professional convention and helped to shift the field’s approach to LGBTQ+ identity.
Ajamu is also preserving some interviews and recordings from their work as a reporter and editor with Germantown Info Hub as part of the project.
“Nobody’s going to preserve our stories and tell our stories for us — at least not accurately,” underlined Ajamu. “So this is a way to empower people to do accurate storytelling from their own recollections — and for it to be cared for, valued and amplified in the ways it needs to be.”
“Envisioning Our Stories: Help Shape Germantown’s LGBTQIA+ Archive” will take place Sept. 15 from 12-2:30 p.m at Black.Bird.Rising, 5838 Germantown Ave. To register for this event or get in touch about the project, visit https://bit.ly/47hq697.
