‘A Mirror to Our Best Selves’: Preserving Queer History and Literature in Durham

Crowds in colorful attire fill the streets, holding balloons with the word “OUT!” spelled across them and rainbow signs championing federal funding for AIDS resources. Some are sporting high-waisted shorts and muscle tanks, going hand in hand with one another as they march down the street.

The colors are only slightly muted, with the faded photos protected by a layer of plasticky film. A sticker on the page titles them “Gay Pride March in Raleigh, June 25, 1988.” 

The photo album, curated by a Durham community member and donated by his brother after he passed away, is one of many items in the LGBTQ+ People’s Archive, a collection of mementos housed at the LGBTQ Center of Durham. The archive, together with a volunteer-run library, is a place to house pieces of Durham’s queer history and literature.

“It is really meaningful when people can look and find themselves in history, and so I think it’s important to make sure that we are able to see queer history, especially at a local level,” said Cal Caughron, the volunteer who curated the People’s Archive. “I think sometimes there are narratives about the South, as kind of like this area that is devoid of queerness or really of any diversity, and that just isn’t the case.”

The archive occupies a wall of shelves in the back room of the LGBTQ Center, holding more than two dozen boxes and bins of material: a cast-signed Rent poster from its 20th-anniversary tour at DPAC in 2016, stacks of print INDY issues from the last decade, an award plaque from LGBTQ youth organization iNSIDEoUT180 in 2018. 

In the album housing the Raleigh Pride parade photos sits a clipping of a News & Observer story from April 25, 1993—published the day of the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. In interview snippets, Triangle residents who were planning to attend the march championed visibility and recognition of the movement. 

One 26-year-old law student, who said she planned to specialize in gay civil rights law, said, “I see it as sort of a celebration, a way to be sort of invigorated by and surrounded by gay culture. I know that some people will have political messages. But it’s rare that you get a million people together around one single message.”

The law student, Lisa Grafstein, now serves in the North Carolina Senate.

The collections are carefully labeled thanks to the dedicated work of Caughron, who comes weekly to sort through the donated piles alongside a team of four other volunteers. On the third Saturday each month, the same day the center hosts a food pantry, the archive opens up for the public to view. 

After the center’s launch in 2015, Operations Manager Alix Adrian set items aside from programs and activities that he thought people might want to look at later on. Posters advertising a program the center put on, or a brochure from a performance, got placed into bins. The center changed locations several times after the pandemic, and the bins got moved to each new building. But it wasn’t until Caughron—a master’s student of library science at UNC-Chapel Hill, at the time—took up this volunteer project in early 2025 that the People’s Archive materialized. Community members and local organizations have donated the rest.

“The archive doesn’t really belong to the center; it’s a people’s archive,” Adrian said. “It’s just housed here. It’s the things that people choose to keep that are important to them, or they feel are important to community.” 

Next door to the archive, wall-to-wall shelves are filled with an LGBTQ library collection. Titles like “Best Lesbian Romance,” “Queers in Space,” and “Surpassing the Love of Men” sit carefully organized, with stickers identifying authors’ names but also the identity represented. Blue stickers identify books with lesbian content, red is for gay, yellow is for bisexual, and green is for trans.  

Adrian said the LGBTQ Center has had a library since its founding in 2015, and it was a space designed for queer authors and literature. But when the center closed for the pandemic in 2020, the books sat collecting dust until the center moved locations in 2022 and everything got boxed up.

“‘The library will be returning’—I think that’s what the website said for four and a half years,” Adrian said. Later this fall, the library will be reopened for the public to peruse and check out books. Currently, the library is open by appointment; Adrian said the center is working on solidifying library hours.

Volunteer Stella-Jude Angrist, like Caughron a master’s student of library science at UNC-Chapel Hill, took on this project over the summer. They clocked 135 hours sorting through book donations, organizing the shelves, and creating the identity labels and catalog system. The collection includes children’s books, queer history, parenting, romance, and erotica.

“We’re facing censorship in this community, and if our books are being pulled off the shelves in public libraries, we have to find somewhere else for them to live,” Angrist said.  

In June, Durham County directed its libraries to remove Pride Month displays and then reversed that decision a day later. WRAL reported that librarians had been instructed multiple times over the previous year to alter programming related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). 

“We’re a space that creates and curates queer joy, and that is exactly what this library does,” Adrian said. “It is a mirror to our best selves, our truest selves, and that just eases someone’s soul.”

To make an appointment to visit the library at the LGBTQ Center of Durham, email [email protected]. Scan mementos to add to the People’s Archive on September 27 at Durham Central Park.

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