An archive is never neutral. What is included on the record \u2014 as history \u2014 determines which stories and facts are legitimized, and what parts of collective memory shape the world around us. Andrea Horne is a San Francisco-based Black trans archivist and historian creating new guidelines for collecting, preserving, and sharing the stories of Black trans women and transfeminine people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Horne\u2019s work as an archivist began when she was just nine years old. Her uncle gifted her a book titled, \u201c100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof,\u201d by J.A. Rogers, originally published in 1934. She recalls reading it as \u201cthe moment you realize the whole world is lying to you.\u201d This moment reshaped her whole sense of America \u2014 a country known to warp and erase the customs and culture of marginalized communities. But this early realization didn\u2019t make her cynical, it made her determined. She began researching on her own, trying to locate herself, her people, and Black history in a country built on our disenfranchisement and disempowerment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Horne calls this sense of understanding <\/strong>\u201cthe knowing.\u201d <\/strong>When you know who you are and the people you\u2019re descended from, you move through the world differently. You gain a steely strength and a voice that others may want to take away. That\u2019s part of why archival work matters. It\u2019s not just about remembering \u2014 it\u2019s about protecting that knowing<\/em> from being stolen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Horne\u2019s version of history is not detached, nor is it \u201cobjective\u201d in the institutional way. Her authority comes from lived experiences, community research, public libraries, travel, her own lineage, and a refusal to let outsiders define Black trans women through stereotypes. She puts it plainly: \u201cBlack history is not a side dish. It is the spine of America. When people perform ignorance around this history, it is not na\u00efvet\u00e9 \u2014 it is a deliberate choice to protect the dominant culture\u2019s narrative at the expense of historical truth.\u201d To Horne, this isn\u2019t solely a Black issue \u2014 it\u2019s an American issue and a literacy issue. Learning about the ritual of \u201cwomanless weddings\u201d made this crystal clear to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From around 1900 through the beginning of World War II, womanless weddings were popular as community fundraisers, especially in Black churches. A wedding would take place, but the brides were trans women and transfeminine people, and the grooms were butches and transmasculine people. Audiences paid to attend a show with glamour, humor, and pathos. While some of the brides and grooms participated to entertain and raise money, many queer couples also used these events as a covert way to get married in community spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This history upends the modern myths that gender variance is a new phenomenon, and that Black communities have always had a rigid relationship with gender. Horne\u2019s research suggests something more complicated, especially in regard to working-class Black life: gender-nonconforming people have history in Black community spaces. Sometimes they were celebrated, sometimes simply tolerated, but they were integral to the fabric of everyday society, performing clerical jobs, childcare, entrepreneurship, party and event planning, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Womanless weddings traveled into mainstream America and became a broader cultural phenomenon, eventually morphing into the kind of gender play and performance people recognize today in other areas, like drag. This is one of many instances in which Black cultural practice has been borrowed, stripped of its context, and credited elsewhere while the original community story disappears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After World War II, America\u2019s global dominance, conservatism, and the respectability politics of the Civil Rights Movement converged. The need to appear proper and acceptable for white approval created a schism, and Black queer and trans people were pushed out of public spaces. We became persona non grata \u2014 a demonstration of how communities restructure themselves under pressure, and who gets sacrificed to meet the new standard. Respectability politics doesn\u2019t only police behavior, it rewrites history. And when collective memory is rewritten, people believe the new story is the old truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Horne\u2019s research makes our current sociopolitical climate legible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anti-trans backlash and respectability politics aren\u2019t new developments; neither is the act of discarding society\u2019s most marginalized people in order to perform propriety for white supremacist patriarchy. Once you see how the girls were integrated into working-class community life and then pushed out to fit a national narrative, you recognize the same mechanisms at work today, just dressed in updated language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Community archiving requires discipline to avoid harming people. Too often, marginalized communities are studied by outsiders the way insects are \u2014 pinned or picked apart. Horne comes from an old-school survival culture where disclosure could get you hurt, or even killed. Being a Black trans historian means practicing an ethic that many mainstream archives don\u2019t: privacy as protection. Trans women have been called many names over the course of history, and some language has been used specifically to expose and humiliate us. That\u2019s why Horne\u2019s approach isn\u2019t to tell all; it’s to disclose the truth without turning people into spectacle. Archiving, in her hands, becomes a discipline of truth-telling \u2014 a record that honors people as dignified human beings, in life and in death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Horne\u2019s archival practice is rooted in knowing, New Orleans-based community historian Sultana Isham\u2019s practice is rooted in trace. An accomplished composer and filmmaker, Isham understands archival work as listening, transcribing, recording oral histories, and learning how to work responsibly with fragmented sources and information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Isham traces her archival instincts back to her classical music training, where preservation is central to the culture, even as Black people are routinely excluded from the curricula. She grew up in a strong Black classical community shaped by elders, teachers, musicians, and mentors who supported the next generation and modeled what it means to carry history into the present. In college and through independent study, Isham began researching Black composers, transcribing and writing about their work, and collaborating with their descendants. In New Orleans, her practice expanded into a broader community historical method.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her entry point into Black trans historical work was through learning about Frances Thompson<\/a>, a formerly enslaved Black trans woman whose testimony after the Memphis massacre of 1866 helped shape legal and civic history in ways that remain underrecognized. For Isham, that history is not niche. \u201cBlack trans history is not just our history as trans people, but as Black history, as American history, as women\u2019s history,\u201d she says, underscoring how Black trans archival work clarifies the foundations of America itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n