"When they try to erase you, survival starts with remembering."
Across banned bookshelves, censored timelines, and disappearing queer spaces, a new generation of archivists is fighting to make sure we are not forgotten.
This isn’t nostalgia. This is resistance stitched from urgency—and strategy.
Over the past year, PEN America documented more than 4,000 book bans across the United States, disproportionately targeting LGBTQ+ stories and authors. Simultaneously, major platforms like TikTok have been accused of algorithmically suppressing LGBTQ+ content. In this climate, preservation has become an act of defiance.
"We’re not just saving artifacts," says Jordan Reece, a community archivist in Rhode Island affiliated with Queer.Archive.Work. (Name has been changed; composite character based on real archival practices.) "We’re saving proof that we existed outside of the official record."
Groups like Queer.Archive.Work operate radical print collectives to protect zines, art, and independent voices that mainstream institutions overlook. In Brooklyn, the Lesbian Herstory Archives continue to expand their living collection, run entirely by volunteers, archiving decades of resistance often invisible to history books. Meanwhile, digital collectives like the Queer Digital History Project race against time to save early LGBTQ+ internet spaces that are rapidly disappearing.
Their methods are decentralized, creative, and often underfunded. Flash drives labeled "recipes" actually store banned books. "Drop drives" are passed peer-to-peer. Downloaded TikToks preserve queer content before shadowbans can silence it.
"People assume archiving is passive," says Reece. "But every file we save is a refusal to vanish. Every flyer, every protest chant, every livestream—it’s all a battlefield."
For queer archivists today, the fight is not just against time. It is against coordinated legislative erasure, social media censorship, and cultural amnesia.
When the next generation looks back—after the bans, after the burnings, after the forgetting—they will find evidence.
Proof that we were here.
Proof that we fought to remember.
Proof that resistance was never silent.
