Two exhibition views and three participants with their match archives.

            TL: You describe your role in this project as “one part matchmaker, one part art director, and one part medium to the dead.” You even researched various matchmaking traditions to prepare for it. And yet you had very few rules for pairing the living artists with the figures who are represented in the archives: the person represented by the archival collection wasn’t to be well known; the person represented by the archival collection had to be dead; and the person and the artist they were paired with had to be from different generations. How did you go about finding pairs who would resonate with one another and how did you experience your role as matchmaker?

            EC: I researched matchmaking out of curiosity, and to get into the spirit of the project. I needed to prepare for the performative act of formally introducing someone to a match archive. It was a way for me as an older woman (older than most of my participants) to embrace what turned out to be a wonderfully voyeuristic process of inviting people into my work. As it turned out, the research didn’t provide many tips for how to matchmake living to dead queer people. For that, I used some combination of instinct and knowledge of the two people--some kind of radar about who might turn someone on from the other side. And since absolutely no one turned down their match, I felt like I was on to something.

           TL: The topic of family – both biological and chosen – is a recurring theme in the book, from the exhibition title, LINEAGE, and your reflections on your mother, to Chris E. Vargas using the term “trancestors” and Michelle Tea (and others) using the term “queer ancestors.” This sort of queer inheritance often appears in literature, film, art, and politics coming out of 2SLGBTQ+ communities. Why do you think this is and how did you see it play out in your pairings, especially since most “couples” represented different generations?

            EC: The vague concept of lineage is where I started. In 2007, artist Lauren Crux and I orchestrated a performance event called Affair-on-the-Green in which we invited twelve women of different genders/ethnicities/ages to a table for a formal cocktail party. Each woman was presented with a napkin that had an embroidered question about concepts of lineage: “What will you leave behind?” “Who do you claim as ancestors?” “How has marital status affected your life?” ”What ancestors would claim you?” etc. This piece was research for my GLBTHS residency, to see if concepts of lineage were even interesting to people. My personal motivation had to do with alienation from my own bio family, being disowned, kept away from my younger brothers so as not to be a bad influence. The queer community offered me at a young age a sense of family I really needed. And my experience is far from unusual--so many queer people have to find family in inventive ways. Our lineage, unlike most lineages, is not generally passed down through traditional families; it has nothing to do with DNA!

            TL: In the book, you write: “I wonder if this is our most accessible way into history – not through grand narratives or identity politics, but through a simple one-to-one connection that we partially read and partially imagine.” As someone very interested in the role affect plays in garnering interest in queer histories, I love this idea. Certainly, it sounds like many of the artists you worked with found their way into particular histories through the project and their identification with, or attraction to, their matched partner. For example, as Troy Boyd writes in a letter to activist George Choy (1960-1993), “How do you admit that you are attracted to someone who died over ten years ago?” In reflecting on her match to songwriter and performer Janny MacHarg (1923-2003), interdisciplinary artist Lauren Crux writes, “At first, I related to Janny as my butch buddy” before finding out that she was femme. You also speak about your own connections to history as emotional – as driven by desire, as a form of seduction, or as sometimes causing anxiety about intruding on others’ lives. Can you speak to the emotional aspect of doing this kind of historical research?

            EC: It came as a surprise to me just how emotional it was to become embroiled with these archives. The fact that I was poring over the archival remains of someone who is dead made each exploration feel loaded. I was often sad, aroused at times, curious all the time. So much is left out of what friends and family gather after someone dies. I wanted to know more, and in some cases tried to find out more. And then I discovered what a friend of mine dubbed the historical crush. I found myself attracted to someone like Helen Harder. It was because of her photos, of course, and her sad poems, but I think there was also a generational factor: She was born the same year as my parents, and she served in World War Two in the same capacity as my father did--as a simulated flight instructor. She was a lesbian and became a single mother. In the context of my parents’ homophobia, it was a turn on to meet someone like them but not like them, more like me. An older confidant maybe? A lover to teach me, back when I still thought queerness was the worst perversion imaginable? Like any romance, I invented her from whole cloth, in this case, the fabric of what was in her archive box. It was also emotional for me to see how the relationships I fostered unfolded, to see my living participants speaking to their dead matches, writing about them, realizing things, finding unexpected connections. The whole process was intoxicating.

            TL: Those of us who frequently work with archives tend to glamorize archival research and the kinds of emotional discoveries we make in the archives. Did any of your pairings simply not work or were any of the relationships between your pairs more uneasy?

            EC: Out of more than nineteen matches, there was considerable variety in how much effort people put into the project. I think all the pairings worked on some level, and everyone expressed enjoyment in the process. Some continued to work with their archive outside the boundaries of my project. Some made work that expressly addressed ambivalence or transformation in their affection for their match person. I matched two or three people who for various reasons were not able to follow through. So my book focuses on the nineteen who did. I think the continuum could be described as on one end, studying the match archive to directly make a piece about it. On the other end were those who got more passionately embroiled with their archive, immersing themselves in the process, allowing a range of responses to materialize. It became important to me not to control the output--to give everyone free rein about how they responded to their archive match. In a couple of cases, the participants were not artists, so I worked with them to help come up with a response piece. This was true of Troy Boyd, who you mentioned.

            TL: I was recently at a conference on global audiovisual archiving and, to my surprise (and delight), many of the participants were artists who work with archival materials. You are an artist yourself and, for this project, you chose to pair historical figures with artists rather than those who might typically be more familiar with archives, such as historians. You even taught a course at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on “Artists in the Archive.” Why do you think artists are drawn to archival collections and what do you think their work can do for the telling of histories, especially marginalized histories?

            EC: Artists, more than traditional historians, are allowed to imagine gaps in the archive. It’s a difference between disciplinary regulations. I’ve had two or three historians express envy about this to me. Artistic disciplines are material, so we respond to the materiality of an archive, even when it’s all paper in folders. We respond with stuff, with our bodies, with our imaginations, with a process the archive inspires. Archives will always be incomplete, and artists can play with the invisible as well as what’s concretely there. I’m drawn to archives out of a desire to render what is invisible more visible.

            TL: In the third section of the book, you include meditations on queer history from curator Jonathan Katz, writer Michelle Tea, and artist Chris E. Vargas – each offers an interesting and often personal reflection. Why did you choose to include these other voices in your book?

            EC: Since I was writing the book years after the project ended, I wanted to create continuity, to start up and expand the project into the present. Instead of matching three writers to three specific archives (I initially thought of doing that), I decided to let them choose their own archive. Inviting Katz, Tea, and Vargas into the project allowed other perspectives to become part of my book. It helped make the project feel alive and current. Plus, I thought it would expand the audience for the book.

            TL: When conducting archival research, we rarely get a biography of the person who is represented in the collections (maybe something very brief in the finding aid, if that exists). In Matchmaking in the Archive, you provide short biographies for each of the nineteen little-known figures who were matched in this project. Did you feel a sense of responsibility to your participants, especially considering that one of your stipulations was that they not be famous queer figures?

            EC: I identify strongly with the archives of little-known figures. My interest came out of my own questions about what will happen to my lineage. Who will remember me? What will I leave behind? It seemed important to honor ordinary individuals who can more easily drift into invisibility. I wanted to widen their circle, bring more people into knowledge of them, bring them out of obscurity into our present lives. It also was a strategy that worked. Famous people like Harvey Milk take up so much archive space--boxes and boxes--that it might be overwhelming to make a project in response to their archive. Presenting a living person with a simpler archive--one or two boxes, a few photos, an article of clothing--gave participants a way to more easily focus their creative attention. It also gave them motivation to bring that person into the limelight, to make them knowable in compelling ways. I believe art has that power.

            TL: Has LINEAGE now become an archive itself, or, in other words, what’s next for LINEAGE and for you?

            EC: I donated the remains of the Lineage project to the GLBT Historical Society. Now, someone doing research can find my framed photographs of each matched pair, some parts of the work people created, documentation, and artifacts from various exhibits, such as a few of my transparent archive boxes.

            My hope has always been that others would take over and continue the lineage process. And this has happened in certain ways. When I speak publicly about the project, someone usually comes forward to tell about a similar project, or asks about how to launch a matchmaking process. People I’ve met at other archives such as Cassero in Bologna, Italy, and AQUA in Melbourne, Australia, have told me they wanted to try a matchmaking process in their archives. As long as people acknowledge me, I don’t feel proprietary about the process and hope it spreads because it’s such an effective way to bring new people into engagement with archives.

            Over time, the Lineage project morphed into several projects I call Migrating Archives in which I carried archives over international borders to foster new relationships between queer archive organizations. In 2017-18, I initiated OUT/LOOK & the Birth of the Queer, which was based on the historical journal from the late 1980s. I mailed an issue to each of thirty-eight participants, asking them to invent a creative response. Since then, after much procrastination, I’ve been working on my archive. Right now I’m immersed in writing a memoir through the lens of my severely disabled sister. It’s called Jo Ellen, Her Galaxy.