Tucked away in a nondescript Charlotte office park, two historians have been quietly building what may be the largest collection documenting the South's queer history.
The archive contains photos, videos, love letters, political memorabilia and costumes dating back to the 1940s.
When I visited the small office on Queen City Drive, historian Josh Burford was in the middle of moving boxes. He led me through rooms packed floor to ceiling with posters, books, magazines and archival boxes before stopping in the back to unzip a garment bag.
Inside was a ruby red dress worn in the 1990s by a Tuscaloosa drag queen named Cliche.
"It quite literally is the only thing left from her drag collection at that time," Burford said.
The rest of the collection, he said, was lost in a house fire.
The tiny dress hangs beside a bedazzled tailcoat worn by a Mississippi drag king, a pageant gown from Alabama, and a feathered headdress and KFC tip bucket used by a performer in Georgia.
They are among thousands of items Burford has collected with fellow historian Maigen Sullivan through the Invisible Histories Project, which they founded in 2016 to preserve queer stories across the South.
A collection almost lost
Not every collection has come easily.
Burford reached onto a shelf and pulled down a velvet hat box containing a silver, crystal-studded crown. It belonged to Mobile drag performer Lawrence McDavid, he says, who arranged to donate his collection to Invisible Histories after his death.
But when Burford contacted the family, a niece objected.
"I got a really nasty phone call from his niece," Burford recalled. "(She) accused me of trying to steal from them, and said, 'I don't want him remembered this way. This was not a thing we should be proud of.' She called me a few homophobic slurs on the phone, and we almost lost the entire collection because of it."
A few days later, a nephew called to apologize and agreed to honor McDavid's wishes.
"It was just that one little bit of intervention," Burford said. "Otherwise all of his stuff would have been in the trash."
Beyond the crowns and gowns, the archive documents decades of LGBTQ political history.
Burford pointed to a campaign poster for Sue Henry, the first openly lesbian candidate to run for Charlotte mayor in 1995.
"She got five percent of the vote, which in the '90s, as an open lesbian running for mayor, not too shabby," he said.
The poster's slogan reads: "An alternative to intolerance."
The collection also includes signs from the 1987 and 1993 Marches on Washington for LGBTQ rights, a t-shirt from Florida protest declaring "Anita Bryant sucks oranges," and a half dozen boxes of unredacted transcripts from Florida's anti-gay Johns Committee that were secretly preserved by the committee's stenographer.
Building an independent archive
For years, Invisible Histories partnered with public universities, libraries and state archives to store and catalog its collections — until Burford said the arrangement began to feel increasingly precarious.
In 2023, Sullivan was scheduled to give a talk at the Alabama Department of Archives and History when, Burford said, two Republican lawmakers got wind of the event and stirred backlash on social media.
"They brought all this attention to us and then they threatened to defund the state archives because of it," Burford said. "The response that we got from archivists on the ground was fear."
The experience convinced Burford and Sullivan to establish an independent archive of their own. They chose Charlotte, where Burford had previously taught queer studies at UNC Charlotte.
Over the past several months, they've been building up a new collection in Queen Ctiy with some of their rarest and most valuable items.
The everyday history that's missing
One of Burford's favorites is a diary kept by a queer Alabama ambulance driver named Robert Aycock who was stationed in Paris during World War II.
"He wrote in this the entire time he was in Europe," Burford said.
Wrapped carefully in tissue paper, the diary is the oldest item in the archive.
It documents Aycock's same-sex encounters while serving overseas, but it also captures something historians rarely find: ordinary daily life.
"Dear diary. I had an easy day today. I painted a little. This afternoon I was sent among the boys," Burford read aloud. "He talks about Charlie Chaplin when he saw a film."
Burford said it's that ordinariness that makes the diary remarkable.
So much of queer history, he said, is documented through stigma, loss and major political milestones — and through places like New York and San Francisco. Far less has been preserved about everyday LGBTQ life from queer people from Alabama or North Carolina.
"We need the every-single-day life of people so we can have a fuller picture," he said.
As Invisible Histories prepares to open its doors, Burford is searching for more overlooked stories from Charlotte and across the Carolinas, and he's encouraging people to come forward with their own collections.
"Take the summer. Look through your garage," he said. "Let me know. I can guarantee you we can find out why it's so important."
Invisible Histories plans to begin welcoming visitors by appointment in August before holding a grand public opening on Nov. 14.
