The Brooklyn Rail

In 2019–2020, I worked on a project titled “Insufficient Memory.” It began when I stumbled upon the first commercially successful digital camera in my new office at Tulane University, while I was engaged in a project researching the history of queer hate crimes. The time when this Sony Mavica Digital camera became popular was also a turning point for queer rights in the United States. In October 1998, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, and in January 2000, Bill Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that he wanted Congress to update the national hate crimes bill to include LGBT people. From 1999 to 2000, politicians debated whether queer people should be a protected class (Obama signed the bill in 2009 after ten years of debate). Coincidentally, the Sony Mavica Digital had just come to market. I remember these years; I was twenty and twenty-one.

When I came across a spreadsheet of murdered queer people during my research in 2019, my heart sank. I zoomed in on the years 1999–2000, certain that I would remember some of these names, and discovered that I didn’t recognize a single one. I quickly googled the first name, confident that the internet would jog my memory, but there was nothing to be found. I searched the second, the third, the fourth name… Nothing, nothing, nothing. I went down the list to find that very few of these people had any presence on the internet. I asked myself: where are these stories?

I reached out to the research librarians at Tulane, and worked with them for months, attempting to reconstruct any part of these stories from the tiny shreds of mentions in the massive repository of digital catalogs and collections I had access to through our library. The librarians reached out to their friends on other campuses to see if they could access any local archives that we couldn’t.

After eighteen months of research, I decided that in order to organize my thoughts, I had to put all the significant sites of hate crimes against queer people on a map; the location they were murdered, the bar where they were targeted, the last place they were seen, their home, their grave. Once finished, I looked at the map and knew exactly what I needed to do. Two months later, in the summer of 2020, I was driving out of New Orleans with the 1999 digital camera I had found. I drove 25,000 miles to thirty-eight states to photograph all these sites with the popular camera of the time: the Sony Mavica Digital.

As I type these words, my heart aches. The first location I arrived was outside of Dallas, Texas. It was in a development of condos with winding lanes and parking lots. I was looking for the location where a mother killed her three-day-old child because they were born intersex; she fed her baby glass and strangled them. When I arrived at the location, I started weeping and felt a lightning bolt of fear in my stomach. What if somebody discovered what I was doing here and attacked me? This combination of sadness and angst would accompany me for the entirety of my trip. At each location, over and over again, there it was, a kind of queer heartbr(ache) like I had never felt in my life. After spending so much time searching for evidence of these queer lives lost, I could suddenly see them right in front of me.

I started bringing flowers to every site I went to. It felt important to mark these locations. Documenting the sites with my camera, I often found myself running out of disk space, at which point the camera would say “insufficient memory.” I realized that, as a community, we had insufficient memory about our histories. I wanted to remember.

When I got home, I created an interactive Google Earth tour that allowed anyone on the internet to travel across the country and see the images I took of these locations, as well as read about the person being memorialized. To mark these locations more tangibly, I teamed up with Maureen Towey and the Mass Design Group’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab to design Queer American Memorials: five-hundred augmented reality triggering site markers for every location in the country where queer people lost their lives in deadly hate crimes while Congress debated (1999–2009). When this part of the project started, it seemed like a huge pipe dream, but after having received an immense amount of support, we are close to being finished. Every time I discuss this project in a lecture, grant proposal, dinner conversation, or this piece I’m writing for Ksenia’s critic’s page, I have to revisit the heartbreak I felt at every single location where a queer person had been murdered. But I hope to turn this heartbreak into a sacred memory.