 was the person that checked out a book from the library for the first time in 15 years. I've been here before but apparently now you need a little key code and stuff so I have my key code and and so this is just sort of following my brain and my experience in the archives in this month. Heart we will forget him you and I tonight you may forget the warmth he gave I will forget the light when you've done pray tell me that I might thoughts may dim hasteless while you're lagging I may remember him. This poem has defined love in the heart for me since the fourth grade. I found it in our home library in anthology of writing by Emily Dickinson and memorized it in the front yard while my sister's played in the sprinklers on a hot summer day in Hayward, California. The poem describes a heart that wants to forget a mind so tied to love that it cannot. A heart that wants so much to forget that in the meantime it remembers. By 10 my heart already had questions. It searched for answers. Already it tried to force forgetting not knowing that remembering is also part of our survival. The Barbara Greer-Nyad Press Collection at the Gay and Lesbian Center of the Library is made up of 64 boxes and additional containers. The boxes hold corporate archives and personal papers, press clippings, letters, book reviews, lists, t-shirts, buttons, postcards, posters and more. The collection guide alone is 64 pages long and to look at the collection's contents I have to ask for them by call number and file name. It takes me three hours to look through four boxes on my first day with the collection and it's important to understand that every single piece of memorabilia archives something Barbara Greer called Lesbiana. There's a neatly typed document of data gathered from a 1955 biography of Greta Garbo with which Barbara Greer states undoubtedly this will remain completely unprovable but the evidence strongly suggests that the most beautiful and most sought-after woman of all time is a lesbian. Below are the more important points numbered in the order they appear in the book. The 20 points range from Greta Garbo worked out in her garden with a pair of dumb bells to she wore men's clothing in her private hours whenever possible. I have to admit I actually tried to compare myself to the 20 reasons why Greta Garbo may have been a lesbian and she appears to be undoubtedly more lesbian than I am. The boxes contain lists like this one I took oh I take eight photos on my phone and I'm delighted to find the riddle of Emily Dickinson on one of the lists it's number 101 on there. The book published in 1951 looks at a photo of Emily Dickinson and Kate Turner and explores the relationship between the two women. My heart bursts. It's seven years after Barbara Greer's died and 25 years after her collection was donated to the library. It took two vans to bring the item she'd painstakingly archived over the years from her home in Tallahassee to the library. It contains a largest collection of lesbian letters in the world and includes writer-activists like Audrey Lord, Rita May Brown, among others. I'm getting to know this lesbian icon based solely on the memorabilia within the boxes. Object after object it becomes clear that Barbara Greer chronicled everything she could about lesbian life. But what if Barbara Greer's underlying reasons I start to wonder did she have questions she wanted to answer? Was this her was this collection her way of answering them? What does it mean to collect lesbian history as it's happening? I don't know how much Barbara Greer would say love was motivation but I know love for people can provide great momentum to preserve them. Because of Barbara I read names of women I've never heard of like Fran Winnett. Because of this I learned that Fran was part of the Stonewall Riots that she wrote poetry as a child and unable to express her desires she invented a secret language that blended math and Greek symbols to voice them. Because of this I start to become keenly aware that each name within the archive is attached to a life and then how each file and each page each typed line is made up of minutes of Barbara Greer's life. I had a question before this all began before I knew the pieces of the Hormel Center archives I'd be in conversation with. My questions about love and the now I said and love and the past and my own experiences as impetus. Why is it difficult to love during this time and in this place? I ask the archives. More questions emerged. Is it more difficult to love or have queer and trans people of any era felt this way because of the nature of homophobia and transphobia? How does our oppression manifest? How does trauma affect our ideas of fate? Does this city, this place of global capitalism prevent authentic connection? How can we ever tell what is right? My question is about love and the now I said and love and the past. I asked the archives. The archives asked me for an answer back. The night of the 2016 election my girlfriend and I fell asleep with the TV on woke up in the middle of the night to Rachel Maddow appearing more devastated than when we'd fallen asleep. Five years in and we were on the brink of breaking up. The world outside of us is falling into shit and we can't believe we're thinking of not doing this together we'd say. Our childhood pains hooked. She was a raised poor Irish Catholic butch from Boston with many sisters like me and we fell in love with the familiarity of one another. We loved how we could talk unassimilated smack text all day about headlines in the news and then hold each other all night but the closer we looked at our hurts the farther we got from healing. The tighter the outside stresses the more internal world came apart. By morning Trump was president and we woke up to quiet streets blanketed by somberness. We ate breakfast at Brenda's soul food and we're seated next to two queer women of color. The four of us looked at each other shook our heads and we started to cry. We drink coffee and ate eggs and biscuits with unrestrained sorrow. When they finished eating one of them said good luck have a good life as though it were a wish that may not be granted. Have a good life we repeated. Diane Revinold says the cost of ignoring deeper psychological implications of economic and political oppression is great. In her book that called Love Politics and Rescue and Lesbian Relationships she describes internalized oppression, economic and psychological oppression and the concept of lesbian rescuing and how to stop it. The booklet was part of the archives and I find it at the third floor page desk of this library because I can't check it out. I sit at a round table and I read it in one sitting. She describes romantic mythology in which Western culture has conditioned us to believe love is all, true love is constant bliss, true love lasts forever. She believes that the most psychologically damaging consequences of lesbian oppression is the revulsion by which our love life is greeted by mainstream society. How damaging it is to have such an important aspect of our lives treated with contempt or complete silence. As we work on these intense personal issues of love and relationship she says we should not lose sight of the profound connections with the politics of society and of these times. These words were published over 30 years ago and though they speak about lesbians they hold truth about oppression. My question is about love and now I said in love in the past I thought I could reach my hand into history and be handed answers but I found I have to reach back into myself. I too have been guilty of searching for what is right and who is right and guilty of searching for perfection outside of myself. How could I not? How could we not when depression is intent on telling us exactly how we aren't right so we carry this inside us every day something we must reckon with. Careful the thing you love that walks the line of destruction and creation. Careful the part of it that lives within you. Barbara Greer a white woman was born in 1933 in Cincinnati Ohio. At 12 she went to the local library asked for books about homosexuals and announced to her mom that she was one. She combatted her loneliness and isolation with books and she grew up determined to make lesbian literature accessible to women everywhere. She was known for her sharp tongue, incredible drive and was very controversial. She used multiple pen names including Gene Damon, Lennox Strong, Vern Niven when writing literature reviews about books in which lesbians were central. Not long after graduation from high school she fell in love with Helen Bennett a librarian and had a 20-year relationship she described as a marriage. The relationship ended when she fell in love with Donna McBride another librarian and she was with her for 40 years. With Donna she describes falling as deeply in love as anyone ever could. I don't know if all my loves would call themselves my loves but they were mine. I can close my eyes now and still feel the imprint of their bodies. I see word for word the letters they sent the outline of a building on a postcard the way my name looked in their handwriting. This is the downside of my memory. When it works it's photographic. The sweetness of Palo Santo brings one close to me, Cedar brings another, wafs of amber transport me to a tiny bathroom on Scott Street. I've had over 20 years of queer loves in my life. Unlike me they aren't all defined by femaleness. Their love finds a home in gender ambiguity and nonconformity though my love for them lives in this fem of color body. Shortly after the election I loved a queer Latinx person. I didn't say it out loud that I loved them. Instead I said you're my people. Instead I said I love our people. A love for people can provide great momentum to preserve them. Because of this I believe each one of us is worthy of being archived. Tonight I want each of our hearts to be recognized against the backdrop of forgetting. Our nameset allowed a collective archiving, a remembering of you, a remembering of Candice, of me, of Hannah, of Via, of Kasha, of Mason, of Asa, of Virgy, of Dia, of Thad, of Dan, of Cynthia, of Kyle, of Marcella, of Hamil, of Frank, of Chris, of Martha, of Roman, of Juliana, of Didi, of Jeff, of Gio, of Celeste, of Jewel, and all of us. Thank you.