ARCHIVE ACTIVISM

Francis writes about recovering gay history one document at a time in this debut memoir.

What’s past is prologue, not only for individuals but for whole communities. “But what if you cannot find the past?” asks the author in his introduction. “What happens when all evidence, every shred, has been erased, deleted, sealed, or purposefully forgotten? What if the past is torched or stuffed into garbage bags and dumpsters? For LGBTQ Americans this has been the way of our world.” Archive activism, the process that Francis describes in this book, is the attempt to recover that history in the form of whatever archival materials have been squirreled away in attics, basements, government archives, and law libraries as a means of furthering social justice causes in the present. The author’s passion for reclaiming gay history led him to resurrect the Mattachine Society—a 1950s-era gay rights group—in 2011. Through the Society, Francis was able to retrieve troves of records related to such actions as Nancy Reagan’s refusal to help Rock Hudson get into a leading hospital for his AIDS treatment and attempts by President Lyndon Johnson to hide the sexual orientation of one of his aides. The author makes his own additions to the corpus of gay history, recounting his exposure to gay cinema as a graduate student in Los Angeles and his eventual involvement, beginning in the 1980s, as an out gay man in Republican Party politics. (He even helped presidential candidate George W. Bush connect with gay and lesbian voters.) Francis writes with candor and conviction, as here when he describes his meeting with Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove: “I emphasized this would represent a new generation ready to make homosexuality a nonissue for the Republican Party. There could be no going back to the Reagan years of psychologically self-tormented, closeted cases…” Though Francis may not be who readers first think of when they think of an activist, his account is a fascinating and illuminating addition to the history of gay liberation.

An informative memoir that fills in some gaps in the social justice record.