Our New Project: Queer Distance

Those of us with a queer identity are not strangers to distance. We have not been able to take for granted the predominant conventions of gender and sexuality. This has often made us queerly questioning, standing back to reflect at a distance, devising new and radical ways of being.

However we define ourselves in terms of gender and sexuality, many of us are experiencing strain and difficulty with the physical distance required to combat the spread of coronavirus. This makes it especially important to strengthen solidarity across the distance, to contact and support each other while physically separated, and to use this queer time to review our past, renew our present and regenerate our future. Physical distance does not have to be socially distant: make it a queer distance that is supportive and creative.

In OurStory Scotland we are playing our part in this by maintaining our dedication to collecting, archiving and presenting the stories of the LGBTQ+ community in Scotland.

We are still collecting life stories, maintaining a queer distance by focusing on the online storytelling. Why not tell your story using one of our online forms? See the links to our online forms in the right-hand column of this webpage. You can complete a Questionnaire to tell about key aspects of your life in as many words as you like. You can tell of an Episode that was a turning point in your life, or complete a Diary for a day, perhaps a Corona Chronicle, a distancing diary that tells of your life during some typical or special day(s) in lockdown, queering the quarantine. You can recall queer places that have been important to you, queering the map of Scotland through Observation and memory.

We are taking advantage of lockdown to continue archiving our materials, especially our wonderful range of oral history interviews, by making sure these have detailed summaries to guide listeners and researchers, and by getting everything archive-ready for the OurStory Scotland Collection at the National Library of Scotland. Stories that we collect online will also be archived at the National Library of Scotland, to act as a resource for future generations, so that they can know how we lived our lives.

We shall be presenting on our website a selection of stories collected online. Get writing now so that you can add to our fabulous collection!

If you would like to be involved in any of the aspects of our work or become one of our volunteers, contact us!

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