A grassroots community archive to document local trans + queer stories
The Lavender Library Oral History Project
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Oral history is a way of preserving history through people’s own accounts of their lives. Oral histories rely on recorded interviews with narrators, who talk about their memories of specific events, daily life, and everything in between.
Top-down, single-author histories tend to overlook ordinary people’s experiences and relationships, and those histories can be easily manipulated to marginalize people by distorting their experiences. Oral histories can be a grassroots technique to resist that marginalization.
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Our goal is to build an accessible archive of local trans and queer life stories, starting with our queer and trans elders, so that others in our communities have access to our shared, collective history.
This project is entirely community-led—which means you’re invited to contribute, collaborate, and help make decisions!
Building this archive helps us foster community memory, practice care, and grow intergenerational connections.
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-Reaching out to trans and queer community members to share their stories with the LLACE oral history archive
-Arranging interviews (each one lasts about an hour)
-Recording and transcribing interviews using our in-house tech
-Making interviews and transcriptions accessible online
-Writing and sharing project guides for those who want to participate and collaborate
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INTERVIEW 1: Off-the-record conversation about the narrator’s life and experiences
INTERVIEW 2: On-the-record conversation about specific experiences the narrator wants to share
Interviews typically include questions about narrators’ first understandings or experiences of their gender and sexual identities, about their first experiences with queer/trans community, and about how their impressions of queer/trans life in Sacramento have changed over the years.
