Hollyn-Reid is a civilian archivist living in Ashland. Since the anguish of November 2024’s presidential election, their “brain-on project” has been to organize “Our Community Filing Cabinet,” a quest to document queer people in their local community by saving hard copies of everyday objects. Their brain-off project, good for the soul in other ways, has been braiding fabric into ivy to decorate their home.

Our Community Filing Cabinet is a three-part project consisting of a real filing cabinet for community archiving, a micro-library lent out to community members, and a resource library that includes helpful references for queer living in small-town Kentucky. The ephemera Hollyn-Reid collects is made up of what you’d think—the things that surround us in everyday life that could easily be tossed or go unnoticed in the corner of a desk: ticket stubs, fliers, zines, business cards, “things that were not supposed to be preserved,” as he says. 

He also includes “born-digital” documents most people wouldn’t think to save: photos, emails, even PDFs. These things live in digital spaces on our phones or somewhere on some cloud, and when combined, they tell the stories of our lives. When a whole community’s ephemera is added up, we’re talking about whole histories that can be erased. 

He’s not the only one with a recent impulse to document. When Trump’s Administration began taking aim at queer terminology across the broadest swath of public records possible–the internet–many public-facing historians took matters into their vigilante hands and downloaded entire websites. The National Park Service is a good example that has since lost both data and personnel. “A lot of it started with us just mass downloading–a kind of royal Us but not really an organized group,” Hollyn-Reid recounts. “Just trying to archive things like the government databases that went down and the original language that was in those. We, as queer people across the entire spectrum of queerness, have lived so long making sure our lives are ephemeral that we forget we’re not supposed to be that way.”

Materials from “Our Community Filing Cabinet.” Image credit: Atlas.

“If we lost the internet tomorrow, what would we have access to?” Hollyn-Reid said. “What information would we know? What would be in our heads, in our houses, on our bookshelves that we could use to help our community get to the things that we have otherwise been getting online?” He claims it would be very little. 

I tend to agree, but I asked Hollyn-Reid how he convinces people that the digital realm isn’t necessarily immortal and that printing off their selfies–an action that might sound like it comes from an apocalyptic mindset–is worthwhile.

“I think the best way is being like, hey, where are the servers that hold your Discord messages?” he answered. “Where are the conversations that you’re having with your friends? Where are these heartfelt messages that you send?” “Where in the world are these servers? I personally do not know.” And if a platform like Discord decides to wipe their servers, all that data is gone.

Hollyn-Reid used the compelling example of Nazi book burnings. He asked, when you picture a Nazi book burning, what do you think of? The photographs included in many textbooks are of the burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s materials at the Institute of Sexual Research–an institution that supported sex change operations and gender affirmative care in Weimar Germany. “That institution was a beacon of so much queer life in that country,” Hollyn-Reid said, “and it got burned. Losing that institution was losing so much because he didn’t just keep the books; he kept the fliers and the ephemera, and he kept the photographs and the party invites—” all now gone.

Zines from “Our Community Filing Cabinet.” Image credit: Atlas.

People in Hollyn-Reid’s own community are at first very excited about Our Community Filing Cabinet, but their second thought is often how and why? “They say, why would you bother? Because that’s just like Joe from down the road. That’s just every day,” Hollyn-Reid explains. “People don’t realize the value they hold within history,” he continued. “We are pushed to the margins. You’re on the side of the page. We’re not in the body–” but we should be. 

Even when we’re talking about how easy it is for fascists and governments to wipe entire histories free of queer mentions in the blink of an eye, it’s hard to argue with Hollyn-Reid’s enthusiasm for documentation. “The biggest hurdle I’ve personally had to face is archiving my own work,” Hollyn-Reid said with a smile. “I am so excited to collect the work of my peers and my friends. I realized, oh, my gosh, I’m doing the thing that academia has been doing to push queer people to the margins to myself as a queer person. But I’m part of it. It’s hard to remember that you have value, historical value.”

One of Hollyn-Reid’s goals is to encourage others to archive within their communities. “What you need is a box,” he laughs, and a place to start: what he calls your “comfort food.” “That’s the artwork that your friends made. That’s the bad literature that you’ve collected. That’s the zines from your coffee shop. Nobody else is going to collect that. You can have 100 copies of Stone Butch Blues,” he continued, “but if you don’t save the work of Joe down the street, then that work is gone. And you have 100 copies of Stone Butch Blues.”

He concluded, “we are not inconsequential to here, to wherever we are. We just have to put just a little bit of effort into cementing that consequence of our existence.”

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If you’re interested in preserving your community’s stories, read more from these resources:

The Trans Feminine Review 

Invisible Histories