Ben Miller

This chapter examines the author’s dual role as historian and board member responsible for the archive collections at Berlin’s Schwules Museum, focusing on its extensive collection of LGBTIQ* periodicals in German from the 1869 coining of ‘homosexuality’ to the present. The chapter explores the complexities of working with such print media, reflecting on the labour of collecting and archiving these historical sources. The author questions the debates, exclusions, and desires that emerge from these media, contemplating how archives may replicate the silences within their collections and seeking ways to address these gaps. The chapter highlights the emotional and labour-intensive relationships between archivists, users, and the materials, illustrating moments such as gifting surplus periodicals to volunteers or exhibitions, carefully assembling photocopies of rare periodicals for researchers, and grappling with archival practices that balance the collection’s inherent silences and biases. Additionally, the author discusses the political dynamics within the Museum, focusing on the archive’s role, its importance relative to other museum functions, and its intended audience. By addressing these layered interactions and challenges, the author emphasizes the complex labour and ethical considerations of preserving and managing a queer historical archive.

Throughout this piece I want to engage the productive tension between a romantic understanding of queer temporality and the correspondences between those forms of temporality and the haunted relationship between queer identities and colonial systems of production, exchange, dispossession, and exploitation. I am committed to the romance of the archive and firmly adhere to the notion that history is far more poems about ghosts than a social ‘science’ (‘Thou shalt not … commit a social science’—W. H. Auden). It is nevertheless crucial to be attentive to the violence of and in the archives one loves too much, and to depart from mistaken notions that this attentiveness requires, or is even possible with, a renunciation of embodied experience.