Charles Francis, author of "Archive Activism: Memoir of a "Uniquely Nasty" Journey", is President of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, an LGBTQ history society with the motto "Archive Activism". Using original archival research, Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation, Mattachine uncovers and rescues the deleted, erased history of LGBTQ Americans. Research = Activism (R=A) is the formula growing out of Francis' personal story as a gay Texan born and raised the 1950s and 1960s in Dallas. The Society conducts original archival research and educational programs that are used in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ civil equality. Francis co-founded the Kameny Papers Project in 2005 which purchased, conserved and donated the archive and original picket signs of gay civil rights pioneer Dr. Franklin E. Kameny---signs carried high in front of LBJ's White House in 1965---to the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. This experience, rescuing gay and lesbian and queer history, inspired Francis to become an Archive Activist.
Francis and his groundbreaking work with the Mattachine Society have been featured in "The Washington Post", "The New York Times", NPR's "All Things Considered" and became the subject of an award-winning documentary film entitled "Uniquely Nasty" produced and reported by Mike Isikoff in 2015 for Yahoo News.
Francis is the author of "Freedom Summer Homos, An Archive Story" published by the "American Historical Review" in 2019. "Freedom Summer Homos" tells the story of how the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission used homophobia to crush in 1964 the student civil rights organizers at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Francis resides in Washington, DC and Homer, Alaska with his husband Stephen Bottum and their ten year-old son.
“An intimate memoir and a stirring rallying cry, Archive Activism is required reading for anyone fighting the erasure of a community’s history. From the Eisenhower Administration to the January 6th insurrection, this book shows us how the first drafts of history are written — and crucially, he explains how we as citizens can correct them. His work to recover buried history has been essential for activists and historians alike, gifting us the opportunity to learn firsthand from the queer pioneers who paved the way for our generation. Without Charles Francis, my book and so many others like it would not have been possible. Archive Activism is an urgent, inspiring text that belongs on every bookshelf.”
– Dr. Eric Cervini, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Deviant’s War
“...a fascinating and illuminating addition to the history of gay liberation.
An informative memoir that fills in some gaps in the social justice record.”
– Kirkus Reviews
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
ARCHIVE ACTIVISM
BY Charles Francis • POSTED ON Sept. 27, 2023
Francis writes about recovering gay history one document at a time in this debut memoir.
What’s past is prologue, not only for individuals but for whole communities. “But what if you cannot find the past?” asks the author in his introduction. “What happens when all evidence, every shred, has been erased, deleted, sealed, or purposefully forgotten? What if the past is torched or stuffed into garbage bags and dumpsters? For LGBTQ Americans this has been the way of our world.” Archive activism, the process that Francis describes in this book, is the attempt to recover that history in the form of whatever archival materials have been squirreled away in attics, basements, government archives, and law libraries as a means of furthering social justice causes in the present. The author’s passion for reclaiming gay history led him to resurrect the Mattachine Society—a 1950s-era gay rights group—in 2011. Through the Society, Francis was able to retrieve troves of records related to such actions as Nancy Reagan’s refusal to help Rock Hudson get into a leading hospital for his AIDS treatment and attempts by President Lyndon Johnson to hide the sexual orientation of one of his aides. The author makes his own additions to the corpus of gay history, recounting his exposure to gay cinema as a graduate student in Los Angeles and his eventual involvement, beginning in the 1980s, as an out gay man in Republican Party politics. (He even helped presidential candidate George W. Bush connect with gay and lesbian voters.) Francis writes with candor and conviction, as here when he describes his meeting with Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove: “I emphasized this would represent a new generation ready to make homosexuality a nonissue for the Republican Party. There could be no going back to the Reagan years of psychologically self-tormented, closeted cases…” Though Francis may not be who readers first think of when they think of an activist, his account is a fascinating and illuminating addition to the history of gay liberation.
An informative memoir that fills in some gaps in the social justice record.
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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