Outing the Past Conference

Skeivt arkiv were present at the conference Outing the Past, which took place in Liverpool March 16th-18th and was part of LGBT History month in the UK. Here we presented our oral history project Skeive livsminner, or "queer memories", and talked about the interview process, how the interviews are being used, and the importance of collection oral histories when working with queer and lgbtq history. The conference participants are both academics and activists, mainly from the UK but also from Ireland, the U.S., Sweden, Bulgaria, Georgia and Uganda to mention some. 

A main theme for the conference was the challenges queer and lgbtq immigrants meet, with three different plenary panel sessions focusing on respectively Africa, South Asia and Eastern Europe. In addition to this, amongst the paper sessions was a presentation by our colleague Elisabeth Engebretsen from University of Oslo who spoke on norwegian pride-history, swedish researcher Dagmar Brunow who spoke on queer film archives, and british-german Julia Maclachlan who spoke on transationalism in the british gay rights activism. Maclachlan has used Skeivt arkiv as one of her research sources, and amongst other things spoke about how Kim Friele and Det Norske Forbundet av 1948 contacted the british Albany Trust for advice on how to repeal anti-gay laws. 

We are thrilled to be able to participate in this conference every year, this being Skeivt arkiv's third year attending. It's important for us to present our work, but also to meet activist, historian and archivist colleagues from all over the world and discuss how to best collect, conserve and communicate queer and lgbtq history.