Privacy and a Community Archive (in Insite Magazine, Nov-Jan 2015)
By Graham Willett, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives; and Steve Wright, Monash University
The current era of digital access and the availability of personal information online has highlighted the need for attentiveness in managing online resources. Graham Willett and Steve Wright share the concerns of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archive for retaining the history of the Gay and Lesbian community while protecting the privacy of individuals.
The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives [ALGA) was established in 1978 to collect, preserve and celebrate the lives and experiences of lesbians and gay men and the broader LGBTIQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer) community in Australia. The Archives is an independent organisation based in Melbourne that is community-based, volunteer-operated and a not-for- profit.
Currently the collection holds 150 collections of organisational records and personal papers, 1765 titles (over 45,000 issues), 50,000 newspaper clippings, 2600 ephemera files, 3000 posters, 900 badges, over 20,000 photographs and negatives, 5,500 books, over 200 oral history interviews, as well as scrapbooks, court records, banners, t-shirts, artworks, objects, costumes, film scripts, plays, radio broadcasts, mixtapes, moving image etc. It celebrates its history through exhibitions, publications, history walks and its website, and makes materials available through regular and facing small community archives. As part of the preparation for this project, we looked into the problems of ethics and privacy as they apply specifically to small archives whose collections include sensitive materials, including materials relating to behaviours that were, in the case of sex between men, illegal (as recently as 1997 in Tasmania). While it is almost inconceivable that police forces would revisit criminal behaviour such as homosexuality based on material in the Archives, criminality is not the only matter to consider. It is a fact that some people would prefer that past behaviour, writings, activities, political stances around the question of homosexuality not be in the public realm.
Over the past forty-five years the gay and lesbian movement has profoundly transformed laws, public and professional attitudes and social behaviours-overwhelmingly in the direction of greater openness and acceptance. On their own these achievements do not resolve the issues that arise for the Archives. The fact that something can or can’t be legally published matters, of course. But so do questions such as, how might a person who was happy to be named publicly in the past feel about being named in the present? And is 'public' in a small roneoed newsletter really 'public' in the same way as it is on the web?
Take, for example, the case of Coming-Out, a roneoed newsletter produced in 1973 in Tamworth, a rural town in northern New South Wales best known for its country music festival. The establishment of a gay rights organisation there was an important indication of how far the tides of change had begun to extend beyond the big urban centres on the country’s eastern seaboard. The chief documentary legacy of the Tamworth group is the Coming-Out newsletter which aimed to introduce readers to iconic gay events such as New York’s Stonewall Riot (often taken as the founding moment of modern gay and lesbian activism), and to address common misconceptions and prejudices ("Do homosexuals kiss each other?"). But the articles that really stand out are the ones written in the first person, conveying what it is like to be queer in a small country town, and seeking to let those individuals too afraid to give their name and address the knowledge that "there are gay brothers and sisters who fight for them.”
The question of how to reproduce such materials intersects with a number of privacy and ethics issues. The main mover and shaker in the Tamworth group, who had already written under a pseudonym on a number of occasions for the national gay magazine Camp Ink, used his real name in the Tamworth group newsletter. In the forty years since, however, he seems to have dropped from sight; indeed, given the distance of time, he might not still be alive. Is it appropriate to reproduce his name today? Should efforts be made to seek his permission to use his name and the names of the other individuals who had provided their names in the pages of the newsletter?
Certainly it is true that if personal details have been published in newspapers, flyers, oral histories or the like they are already in the public realm and legally the situation is straightforward. The National Library of Australia, for example, is currently digitising newspapers up to the 1950s and has no qualms about what it is bringing to light in the new digital world. But for those of us who have a concern for the lives and reputations of members of marginalised and vilified communities, the decision is not so simple because information is more easily accessed when online than if in hard copy alone.
Simply deleting such information is not necessarily the right choice-there is a cost to protecting privacy in this way. Recently, searching some federal public service files in the National Archives, we came across the Tamworth individual, writing to a minister in 1973. It was only by having had access to his real name and his pseudonym, that his efforts were recognised and given their wider context.
If such information is withheld, then our history work is, in some small way, impoverished. The legal protections afforded to privacy are of less importance here than the ethical claims. In a society in which homophobic discrimination still exists (if much less virulently than in the past), it might not be unreasonable to protect people from the public exposure that online accessibility provides. But how to do this, and where to draw the line?
The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, for example, has a published version of its ephemera file list that excludes files relating to still-living individuals who are not public figures. There is no suggestion in these cases of criminal behaviour, or even of views that they might no longer endorse-it is entirely a matter of protecting them from the level of scrutiny that the electronic age provides and which they could not have envisioned.
Similarly, in Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne the editors made a decision to excise the name of a man when reproducing a 1950 newspaper report (1). The newspaper is available in libraries and online, but the editors felt a responsibility not to make this potentially embarrassing information more easily available than it already was. But publishing newspaper articles from gay or mainstream press, or photographs, or signed leaflets and so on, is the very purpose of any digitised archive, and the sorting out of the legal issues surrounding copyright still leaves these ethical issues to be dealt with.
There are no easy answers here, but that fact does not absolve us from addressing them as seriously as we can.
(1) Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, Eds. Willett, Murdoch and Marshall, 2011. p.77.
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