Building on the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project’s legacy of documentary advocacy, this project employs a community-driven methodology designed to address institutional erasure.

By using a queer lens to address questions of community resiliency, this project also speaks to the interrelation between open space and social justice. It posits that the right to the city includes the right to self-recognition in the cityscape and aims to promote agency and autonomy among queer communities to preserve narratives outside the canon.

The work is organized around three interconnected goals: 

Archival Support...

The project strengthens our partner’s queer archival and programming initiatives, expanding the documentation and preservation of histories that have been marginalized or overlooked.

Workshop...

18 February 2026

A one-day workshop explores what constitutes “queer memorialization,” drawing on the shared experiences of those who died during the AIDS crisis and those who lost loved ones, as well as the forms of community care that emerged in response. The workshop brings participants and invited speakers into a collective storytelling environment. Participants are invited to contribute to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, engage in other creative activities, and collectively imagine ways to commemorate sites of queer death, dying, and care in the context of renewed attacks on LGBTQ+ communities and histories.

Hart Island Intervention

Hart Island, the city’s public cemetery, contains numerous AIDS burials that lack formal recognition or interpretive context. This project aims to create an event or installation that translates the strategies developed in the workshop into a visible public acknowledgment of these histories.

 Above: Hart Island burial ground, where several thousand AIDS victims were buried in unmarked mass graves during the AIDS crisis, as many as 1,400 in one year alone (1988). Image credit: Harriet Harriss, 2024.