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MEMORY AND THE POWER OF PLACE: MEDITATIONS ON ARCHIVES AND COMMUNITY AT THE LA&M T he collections of the <strong>Leather</strong> <strong>Archives</strong> & <strong>Museum</strong> are not passive, idle. These materials are living and active. Sweat stains on the armpits of a bar vest; Etienne murals, handwritten letters of adoration and worship; newsletters about S/ M technique; organizational bylaws, event ephemera, run planning documents; t-shirts, leathers, denims, uniforms; thousands of original artworks by greats such as kd diamond, Rex, Steve Masters, Jacki Randall. Mistress Mir’s corset; homemade and distributed pornographic films; oral history interviews. At the <strong>Leather</strong> <strong>Archives</strong> & <strong>Museum</strong>, these are just some of the sexual objects, memories, histories, club and organizational records, and artifacts that have become museum, library and archival materials. As a community archive, we have been on the forefront of collecting, describing, preserving, and providing access to leather history for the past <strong>25</strong> years. Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd are U.K.-based archival scholars, and they provide the following definition of community archives: Community <strong>Archives</strong> are ‘collections of material gathered primarily by members of a given community and over whose community members exercise some level of control. This allows both for collections that are sustained entirely independent of mainstream heritage institutions and those that receive support in some form from such organizations. Indeed, we argue that the defining characteristic of community archives is the active participation of a community in documenting and making accessible the history of their particular group and/or locality on their own terms’. (Source: Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories, Whose <strong>Archives</strong>? Independent Community <strong>Archives</strong>, Autonomy and the Mainstream’, Archival Science, 9 (2009), 71-86). At the LA&M, archival work is guided by principles and best practices of the professional field while simultaneously integrating the unique language, descriptors, and cultural meaning of the materials we collect. It has been incredible to apply both of these methods and practices to the LA&M collections. From preservation assessments to deacidification, 55
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LOCATED IN CHICAGO… SERVING THE W