Behind the Scenes 

As a curatorial team, we spent many hours of the Fall Semester looking through the collection of journals in the Zoom Room at Stonewall House, pictured above. The journals were stored in cardboard archival boxes, and while we read we made sure to note significant themes or events across entries in order to create an outline of the exhibit. Reading through the journals was also how we identified a majority of the alumni we would eventually collect oral history interviews from. Another way we found people to interview is that we searched through the Brown Daily Herald of the 80's and 90's to identify students who may not have contributed to the journals themselves, but were still members of LGBTQ organizing at Brown during that time period. 

After finding names of alumni through the journals and the Brown Daily Herald, we spent the beginning of the Spring Semester reaching out to and meeting alumni, formulating questions oral history interviews and drafting our post and pre interview consent forms. Over the next three months, we conducted 15 different interviews with alumni who had written in the journals, or that had been a part of LGBTQ student organizing at Brown in the 80s and 90s. The picture above is a screenshot of our first recorded interview call, with Bill Jesdale. 

Eventually, the full transcriptions and audio of the oral history interviews that we collected will become a part of the Pembroke Center Oral History Project. If you're interested in collecting oral histories and would like to know more about our process, leave us a note on the Google Feedback Form: https://forms.gle/BQAMz8vxc6ycrCpy9

After identifying which entries we wanted to have in the exhibit, we had to mark their place in the journals so they could be scanned by Andrew Majcher's team at the John Hay Library with their book scanner. (Thanks to Andrew Majcher, Heather Cole, and everyone else who helped us out at John Hay!) 

We tried several different plans for where things would go on the second floor of Stonewall House; the top picture is an early draft of our exhibit design from the Fall semester which was submitted as part of our final paper in "Black Archival Experiments" with Dr. Kiana Murphy. The picture below is a later draft of our exhibit design, which had a more concrete plan in terms of locations of the different sections and how they would flow together. 

Assembling the exhibit was an all hands on deck endeavor; we spent the last week of the semester around the clock at Stonewall House, printing out wall labels, coloring in the title letters for different sections, and arranging journal entries on the wall. With the amazing assistance of Keri McDonough at Stonewall House, we were able to get everything up in time for graduation weekend and the BAPA (Brown Alumni Pride Association) Brunch, where alumni could come and visit the exhibit!

To get the word out about the exhibit, we made posters, stickers and pins for the LGBTQ Journals exhibit. The posters were were made with Letraset dry rub-on transfer letters and Sharpie, then were copied onto colorful paper. They were inspired by those that alumni remembered creating and posting around the Brown University campus, particularly in the 1980s. 

We also created stickers and pin-back button for visitors to take home with them, featuring our logo for the exhibit. The logo features a pink triangle, an important symbol of LGBTQ pride used in the 80's and 90's, and also pays homage to the pink triangle hung outside the office in Faunce Hall in which members of the LGSA/LGBA/LGBTA  would meet with each other and write in the journals. 

At the BAPA Brunch, it was amazing to show our family and friends the final results of the exhibit - and we even got to meet some of the alumni that we had interviewed!