Hello! My name is Payne Banister, and I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance Studies. My research focuses on queer nightlife performance, affect, and cultural memory. As a drag artist and scholar, my work combines performance, ethnography, and archival research to explore the ways in which queer desire is articulated through bodies, spaces, and objects/things.

Thanks to the support from Humanities Engage’s summer immersive fellowship, I was able to spend my summer getting involved with Pittsburgh Queer History Project’s (PQHP).  Pittsburgh Queer History Project is a local and volunteer-operated community archive that focuses on media and oral histories of Pittsburgh’s working-class queers from the 1960s to the 2000s. In addition to its expansive online archive, PQHP hosts community events, such as its ongoing MS89 series. Named after the Miss Pittsburgh 1989 drag pageant that marked its inauguration, MS89 is a live and in-person-only screening of various visual and auditory archival materials.

In addition to experiencing Pittsburgh’s queer archives, each MS89 is hosted by community members who have direct relationships with the evening’s screening materials. Bringing the Pittsburgh queer community together to engage with community-sourced materials simultaneously resists the often-isolated nature of archival research and invites space for intergenerational community-making. While MS89 events look to the past, each event’s audiences are brought together to make new histories and memories.

Under the direction of PQHP’s co-founder and co-director, Dr. Harrison Apple, I spent the summer collecting metadata from archival materials and assisting with the MS89 events. I started my summer researching grants and funding opportunities for MS89. While finding a handful of potential sources, I surprisingly encountered several roadblocks. The first was an overall lack of funding for community-driven archives, let alone queer-centered initiatives. Most funding opportunities I found by searching Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania’s governing bodies’ databases were for large institutions, such as university libraries, and were geared toward youth-focused programming. As I began researching similar queer-centered archive initiatives, I found that many are funded by large corporations, which primarily fund only the literal preservation of archival items in formal repositories. Because these initiatives are preservation-focused, they lack support for facilitating/encouraging public engagement with materials outside databases and stuffy reading rooms. Although there are several queer-focused archives across the United States, the only community engagement was occasional lectures by archivists and scholars. In many ways, MS89 resists these limited engagements by (re)imaging archives as living documents meant to be engaged communally.

I had the pleasure of assisting with the facilitation of two MS89 events—one of which was a screening of a leather pageant and the other was a listening party of The Norm Tapes Collection. While I was fascinated by the source material of both events and I gained a lot of experience helping them, I was especially struck by the screening of the MS PGH Leather 1997 pageant. In many ways, this MS89 followed the format of others—an introduction by the night’s cohost and Dr. Apple, the screening itself, and a community Q&A. However, at this event, the evening’s cohost and former Ms PGH Leather 1997, Tammy, wanted to incorporate performance as an extension of the screening. Banding together with several other Pittsburgh queer community members, we rehearsed, choreographed, and ultimately performed a leather-inspired scene after the screening. This provided a unique opportunity to combine my passions—drag and oral history. As we prepared for the performance, we gathered at Tammy’s house twice for dinner and rehearsal. As we worked, Tammy taught us about the 90s Pittsburgh leather community, which led to us having a lot of essential talks around vulnerability, care, and desire in BDSM practices. Because our performance was innately about elements of desire, our rehearsal process was very consent-driven and filled with care, so everyone felt safe and cared for. Through this process, I made close friends with people I initially met as strangers, and I remain dumbstruck by how transformative engaging with archives can be—and what they can be. Although we watched MS PGH Leather 1997 at the viewing, the wisdom and knowledge I gained from the performance and our conversations about the source material taught me more than I could have learned from viewing the film alone. This experience will stick with me for the rest of my life.

My summer with the Pittsburgh Queer History Project gave me more than I could hope to capture in one blog post. I built upon my critical thinking and research skills while studying grant opportunities. I learned to gather and document metadata from archival objects such as photo albums and videos. I also learned a lot about event planning and how to curate each event so audiences can walk out with experiences they’ll remember. These skills will help me as I advance in my career as an academic, artist, and maybe—an archivist.

Whereas I entered the fellowship knowing how to research using archives, I am ending my summer with a much more profound appreciation of what archives can be and do. This has had a profound impact on my research trajectory. I learned that I am driven to performances that directly incorporate archival materials. Inspired by PQHP’s work, I hope to continue working with their archives to (re)construct Pittsburgh-specific queer performances and events. 

I am very thankful that I had the support of Humanities Engage’s summer immersive program because what I gained this summer is something that I could not have encountered in a classroom or through research alone.

 

Image 1 (from MS89—MS PGH Leather 1997): Souvenir handkerchief from MS PGH Leather 1997. White cloth. The words “COMMUNITY BOTTOM” form a square with “MS. PITTSBURGH LEATHER 1987” in white letter with a black border

 

Image 2 (from MS89--MS PGH Leather 1997): Drag performer, Matilda Rose (aka Payne Banister), posing for a selfie before arriving at the Andy Warhol Museum.

 

Image 3 (from MS89—The Norm Tapes Collection): Souvenir scripts from the Norm Tapes Collection are folded and placed on a table to resemble the shape of a cassette tape

 

Image 4 (from MS89—The Norm Tapes Collection): A still image of the pre-event set-up at Contemporary Craft in Lawrenceville. Seats are covered in black trash bags and face a metallic backdrop that is lit in red light.