Making Lavender Legacies: LGBTQ archives, invisible labor, and the counterhegemonic boundary object, 1988–1999

Between 1988 and 1999, the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA’s) Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable (LAGAR) produced Lavender Legacies: Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable Guide to Sources in North America . Developing the concept of the counterhegemonic boundary object (CBO), we argue that Lavender Legacies shows how marginalized communities may construct reference infrastructure that contests the exclusions built into a profession’s dominant tools. The labor behind the guide went unseen twice over. Not only did volunteers perform it without pay, but also they belonged to a constituency the profession admitted only at its margins. After Bowers v. Hardwick , visibility carried professional risk, and SAA, which classified roundtables as “informal groups,” withheld its imprimatur. AIDS, meanwhile, imperiled the collections the guide set out to locate. Analyzing the guide’s production through information work, articulation work, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), we demonstrate how a committee working on borrowed time built a legitimate scholarly resource that its own professional association declined to fund. Because archivists had chosen not to apply their established methods to LGBTQ holdings, the committee improvised much of its information work. Lacking authority to settle disputes, it relied on persuasion alone. Working unseen, members forfeited credit for their labor but escaped the risk that visibility carried. This article contributes to archival studies, LGBTQ history, the sociology of work, and boundary object theory.