Third Space: Queering Blackness from the Archival Fabrics of Middle America

Under a re-invigorated wave of white nationalism and fascism post-2016, the United States’ historical record has descended further into threat of total indoctrination. Americana has always been historicized for the benefit (and thus, through the lens) of the white ruling class. As a result, marginalized-identity discourse as a passively “added'' layer of history often means distortion, tokenization, or erasure that reflects institutional uniformity. This is precedent in national attitudes and cultural perceptions towards the Midwest. Here in Kansas City, Missouri, the far right leans further into that caricature through damning legislation and hyper-capitalist developments––all under the backdrop of our passively-integrated redlining capital. Plainly put, the far right is erasing Blackness from the fabrics of America, so historical collection can no longer be a passive process; it must be applied radically. In my own practice, where I investigate the prevalence of Black queer community in the Midwest, I am coalescing revolutionary politics with archival praxis in promoting physical and digital third spaces, addressing extractive historical collection and fighting against fascism.

Sparkle Iman competes for Kansas City’s Miss Black Gay Pride 2003 at Soakie’s, a Black gay bar in Downtown Kansas City (1993-2004). (Photographed by Starla Carr. ca 2003. Licensed for use as part of the Starla Carr Collection of {B/qKC}, The Kansas City Defender.)

Earlier this year, I launched {B/qKC}, one of the world’s only exclusively Black and queer archives, from its unlikely home in America’s heartland: Kansas City, Missouri. Despite being located almost entirely within the conservative-metroplitian, Kansas City has a deep history of Black queer livelihood that remains undocumented. Through {B/qKC}, I hope to not only document these histories but create a living, fluid archival science that serves as a tool for Black liberation. 

The Current state of archival disenfranchisement in Missouri

In 2023, the Missouri Senate passed an education bill that bans diversity-related topics from being taught in schools, settling for an “implicit language” ban after an initial bill fell through to fine schools $25,000 for any conversations about race. Where the state failed, however, various municipalities in Missouri stepped in to further indoctrination, for example, Francis Howell School District in St. Louis Missouri, whose board voted to eliminate Black History and Black Literature classes across their high schools in December 2023.

Meanwhile, at the international level, we are witnessing how israeli forces are targeting historical institutions to erase Palestinian existence. According to Librarians and Archivists With Palestine, the IDF has deliberately attacked a total of 21 Palestinian archives, museums, and libraries, most notably destroying the Central Archives of Gaza City, which held over 150 years of records pertaining to Gaza’s history.

While the impact of this legislation in Missouri is not as immediate as the genocide of Palestinians, these actions are both products of supremacist ideologies at micro and macro scales of congruence. And in pushing these ideologies, the far right will not even stop at extinction: it will also attempt to cleanse the world of our stories, heirlooms, creations, artifacts, photos, and ephemera so future generations will never know we existed. And that is why it is more important than ever to apply revolutionary politics to how we engage with history.

Kansas City’s archival landscape

Upon graduating college in 2021, I moved to Kansas City for a job opportunity. I had preconceptions about moving to the Midwest, so one of my goals upon moving was finding Black queer community. This was nearly next to impossible.

I figured that most of this could be attributed to gatekeeping as means for safety, but what seemed peculiar to me was that Kansas City had a distinct presence of identity-based archiving institutions. I was curious to know how this might bridge or contextualize the social gaps I was experiencing.

The Black Archives of Mid-America and Gay and Lesbian Archives of Mid-America (GLAMA) are both located in Kansas City and have become stewardships for our histories. I emphasize stewardship in that their main goals are to collect and own, to prove need for fundraising within the nonprofit industrial complex. However, this model breeds an extractive relationship, one where already-tokenized identity-based archival density is politicized in institutional spaces, readily seen in GLAMA, which is operated by the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Considering how this model and word-of-mouth legacy has historically populated many Midwestern archives, layered with the underground Black queer tradition as a means for safety, the result is a generational gap of fragmented information between Black queers today, and a general lack of collective identity between generations.

Kev and Lady Kiesha (L-R), Kansas City entertainers and Black queer community members, embrace during a Valentine’s Day event in St. Louis, Missouri. (Photograph by Starla Carr. ca. 2003. Licensed for use as part of the Starla Carr Collection of {B/qKC}, The Kansas City Defender.)

As I researched, beginning with the GLAMA archives, a repository of over 40 collections, it came to my attention that GLAMA only had a few files pertaining to Black queer people. Reflective of the archival gaps that are result of warehousing materials, my experience was riddled with hurdles: the few Black queer files mentioned weren’t available online, and with the lack of archivists developing community agreements and the general absence of protocol regarding the archival science around Black queer Kansas Citians, it took numerous phone calls, appointments, material request forms, and usage agreement forms in order to navigate viewing materials.

Overlapping themes and the outmodes of historical collections

Over the course of 2022, I felt the need to “liberate” GLAMA’s Black queer materials beyond their holdings in the physical plane. It was a matter of both storytelling and challenging concepts of ownership.

As such, I began working with abolitionist Black media organization The Kansas City Defender, utilizing digital scans of GLAMA’s materials to write longform, free research articles towards populating a Black queer digital footprint. Additionally, I began to physically reproduce these scans in the form of artistic exhibitions, held at coffee shops and a bookstore to lower barriers to entry. I go back to the word liberate because these actions were freeing Black queerness from the forgotten consciousness of Kansas City, but also freeing them from an institution.

“Altar for Quience X. Sykes” install at Café Corazón, as part of a multi-location exhibit for Volume_1 of {B/qKC}. (Photographed by Nasir Anthony Montalvo. February 27th, 2022).

During my research at GLAMA, I came across an ad in a 1993 issue of KC Exposures, a former LGBT periodical. The ad was titled “Soakie’s: Kansas City’s only Black gay bar.” That Kansas City could have had such a space was shocking, and GLAMA had nothing else on the bar. I scoured the internet for any trace of Soakie’s and came across one hit: an article written by Starla Carr, local Black lesbian, in the Hip Hop Dance Almanac.

After I got acquainted with Starla, she connected me to a slew of elders who were part of Kansas City’s booming Black queer community beginning in the early 90’s. These elders were nothing short of incredible, and they would tell me Soakie’s story.

Initially an Italian sandwich shop in Downtown Kansas City, through an unlikely partnership between the mob and two Black gay men, Soakie’s became a booming Black gay nightclub in 1993. It was dazzling, glamorous, and an inflection point for Kansas City’s Black queer pageant scene. But in 2004, Soakie’s was closed down by the City of Kansas City, MO to make way for Cordish Companies: an out-of-state, privately-held development organization that morphed Downtown into the $850 million dollar gentrification project now known as KC’s Power & Light District. Gentrification and redlining are pervasive conversations in Kansas City, but I had never heard how this specifically displaced our Black LGBTQ2+ community.  

So along with the work I was doing to liberate history beyond GLAMA, I was now thinking about gentrification. I was thinking about how frustrated young Kansas City queers are in our lack of physical spaces. I was thinking about building Black queer community across generations. I was thinking about, then, building collective power in Kansas City. And, overall, about how to pay homage to the Black queer elders who came before us. These themes were overlapping and working in tandem, so I decided to explore them on my own, outside the institution.

A new way to archive

In Kansas City, this exploration has led me to the creation of {B/qKC}: a Black queer archive. While I call {B/qKC} an archive for clarity’s sake, I more readily see {B/qKC} as an abolitionist, transdisciplinary tool. At its core, {B/qKC} preserves Black queer Kansas City histories, notably by circumventing extractive institutional models, then utilizing these histories to fight indoctrination.

Images from {B/qKC}: The Archive Launch Party (+ Volume_2 Exhibit Preview) on March 1st, 2024. (Photographs by Gabriella Salinas.) (Left): Attendees view the curatorial statement and entrance installation. (Right): Former patrons of Soakie’s, including Tisha Taylor (center, black baseball cap) and Gary Carrington (far right), pose behind a quote from Jerry Colston, who founded Soakie’s as a Black gay bar.

{B/qKC} launched with three inaugural collections named after their eponymous shareholders: Gary Carrington, Starla Carr, and Tisha Taylor. They are not donors, as their relationships with {B/qKC} are rooted in co-ownership. This means that each shareholder temporarily loaned their materials to be digitized, as a free service in exchange for a partial license to storytell with them. This also meant that these elders were able to both keep their materials and full copyrighting over them, and too, were paid a stipend, fundraised through local organizations and various grantors, towards rectifying harm they’ve faced.

Montalvo inserts a VHS tape into a combo television unit. For this exhibit, Montalvo created a series of video histories, starring inaugural collection shareholder Tisha Taylor and telling the story of Soakie’s. (Photograph by Jade S. Williams. March 3, 2024.)

Each of these shareholders’ collections tells their own story of Soakie’s and their personal journey in the Midwest. Gary Carrington’s collection is a more generalized view of Soakie’s from his lens as a managing partner in the club, as well as what life may have been like for your neighborhood butch queen. Tisha Taylor shares her larger-than-life story as a legendary drag queen at the Midwestern level. Starla Carr oscillates between binaries of butch and femme in the lesbian community, critically questioning the binary’s existence at all while she founded Kansas City’s first drag king circuit. All of these materials come together in groundbreaking research and gallery displays that share the beauty of Soakie’s and its people while not divorcing how the nightclub was destroyed by our municipality.

Soakie’s itself is symbolic to the themes mentioned thus far: when our physical world is under threat, what safeguards and revolutionary acts can we take to preserve ourselves beyond the meta? {B/qKC} both asks and answers this question, and it was officially announced to the public with a Launch Party on March 1st, 2024. The party celebrated the creation of {B/qKC} through a curated exhibition of its collections, including the Soakie’s archive, commemorating the respective archive shareholders and overall acting as a celebration of and for Black queer Kansas Citians. The party was attended by over 200 people and sold out weeks before the event date.

Following the party, I’ve heavily leaned into public art installations with the inaugural collections. In April 2024, folks were able to explore {B/qKC} through an immersive, multi-location exhibit across five coffee shops and bookstores. Most recently, the archive was selected to create a special installation for the KC Streetcar’s Power & Light Northbound Stop––just one block away from where Soakie’s used to live. My goal by the end of year is to develop a digital database for the archive where folks are more easily able to peruse the archive beyond an article or these public installations. I am also working alongside the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) to launch a series of public workshops where folks can learn more about community archiving, audiovisual preservation, and how we can use these to create better Black futures.

 A red-toned, collaged art installation depicting Soakie’s, the former Kansas City Black gay bar on the KC Streetcar Power & Light Northbound Stop. Co-created with Zach Frazier. Tisha Taylor and Starla Carr pose in front of the installation. (Photo by Zach Frazier.)

In sharing this story and this archive, I don’t mean to be a blueprint. This work is fresh and fluid. I share it because, in the spirit of abolition, I want to envision a future outside of our current reality, where our access to community memory is subdued by the infrastructural facade of post-modern development. Our communities––our world proper––are under threat by the way the dominant culture centralizes information, and I am afraid. But I am also energized and compelled to use the historical, in ways that can actively educate, challenge, storytell, pay homage, repair, destroy, and build anew.