A nonprofit that documents LGBTQ+ history in the South is raising concerns about possible restrictions to queer representation in the Yellowhammer State.
Alabama Senate Bill 77 could be back up for debate on Tuesday, March 19, when state lawmakers return to Montgomery for the 2024 legislative session.
The bill is sponsored by Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine. It aims to give Governor Kay Ivey and legislative leaders the power to appoint trustees to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, which keeps and preserves state records.
Opponents of SB77 say it looks to restrict LGBTQ+ representation as the Archives partner with queer educational and advocacy organizations like the Invisible Histories Project (IHP). The nonprofit IHP researches, locates and preserves LGBTQ+ history in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.
The IHP makes things like manuscripts, letters, documents, posters, electronic media, memorabilia related to queer history more accessible to communities. Joshua Burford, co-founder and co-director of the nonprofit, said SB77 would intentionally create a lack of access to LGBTQ+ history.
“If you don't know about LGBT history, then you don't know what it means to be a person who was from Alabama, because that history is integral to the entire state's history,” he explained. “This is a history of people who've participated at every level. Community organizing health care, access to the arts, the law. Not knowing queer history is dangerous because you don't really understand the complexity of who we are.”
Last summer, Sen. Elliott introduced Senate Bill 1, which would have moved $5 million from the Archives budget to the University of South Alabama. This was reportedly in retaliation for the department hosting a June presentation on LGBTQ+ history in Alabama with the IHP. The legislation did not pass.
Burford said if Sen. Elliot’s current proposal is approved, it would make it difficult for the Invisible Histories Project to partner with the Archives, as well as other places that might want to have collections from the IHP.
“LGBT history in the states that we're collecting [for] are already underrepresented. So, people don't even have an opportunity to know what they don't know,” he said “At this point, because the collections are so small, if they're accessible at all, the consequence of that is what it's always been for queer people, which is the lack of access to the history of their own community.”
Burford cautioned that the impact of SB77 being passed wouldn't just be felt in Alabama. He said it would also have a ripple effect across the country.
“Because of the way the South is imagine other parts of the country, not knowing that queer people have been here and are successfully here and fighting here, means that you're not getting a sense of how Alabama fits into the history of the entire country,” he said. “It's not an oversight, because the lack of access to history, in some cases, especially when we're talking about the Senate Bill [77], is intentional.”
Sen. Elliott has also introduced Senate Bill 10, which would allow local governments that appoint library board members to remove members of those boards. This comes as state conservatives raise concerns over libraries having books with LGBTQ+ content.
Read more about SB10 here.
