Digital Queer Archive
Words by Luke Fawcett, Artist, Urban Designer and Architecture Design Teacher
Project Summary
Queer Places is a creative archiving project – resulting in a 2024 digital archive, workshops, educational talks, and an exhibition – dedicated to celebrating and preserving the history of Liverpool’s LGBTQ+ spaces – past, present, and future.
The project documents venues, ephemera, and stories that have shaped the city’s queer community, offering insights into the evolution of these spaces and their cultural significance. An integral component of the project is the remodelling of historic LGBTQ+ venues using 3D models, sculptures, collages, and illustrations. With little-to-no information available of these addresses in our city archives, these models rely heavily on personal memories and photographs to provide a rare view of these lost spaces.
The project started as part of an artist development programme called QueerCore with the Homotopia Festival based in Liverpool. Homotopia supported me with funding and mentorship from a curator at the Museum of Liverpool. I worked with and had support from a number of other organisations along the way such as the Homotopia Festival and the Liverpool Architecture Festival.
Queer Places: Jody’s Club
Please describe any challenges or opportunities you faced and how you responded to those challenges and opportunities
One significant challenge was the scarcity of documented information about LGBTQ+ venues, leaving limited archival records. Information that was available within institutional archives often misrepresented LGBTQ+ communities, depicting queer people as criminals, mentally or physically ill, with biased, racist and queerphobic narratives. To address this, we instead relied on living people’s memories, personal stories, and any available ephemera to reconstruct and document these spaces. This approach not only filled archival gaps but also empowered communities to share their heritage, through creative and engaging ways.
Queer Places: Community records
What were the outcomes for service users or the parent body?
First launched as part of the Homotopia Festival in 2023, Queer Places has since created an accessible digital platform where individuals can explore, learn, and add their stories to our growing archive. By providing detailed accounts, images, and models of historic venues, Queer Places is proud to say it has enhanced awareness and appreciation of the community’s rich heritage, whilst sparking deeper conversations about queerness and our relationship with the spaces we inhabit. Additionally, the project has facilitated intergenerational connections, enabling older community members to share experiences with younger individuals, passing on skills, advice and empowering stories of joy and resilience.
Outside the Queer Places exhibition
Describe what you learned from the process: What went well? What didn’t go quite as well?
What went well:
The deeply collaborative nature of this project has brought together beautiful, joyful, and intimate stories, enriching our records of the past in ways that traditional archives have often failed to do. By engaging creatively with the community from the very beginning, people felt empowered to share their memories openly, leading to a more personal and authentic collection of queer histories. Seeing people interact with the models has been a true highlight – some got goosebumps, others debated how they remember these spaces differently, and many have laughed as long-forgotten memories resurfaced. It has been incredible to witness the depth of connection people have to these places and the communities they built within them.
What didn’t go as well:
There are still so many voices missing from this project, particularly those at the intersections of the LGBTQ+ community. LGBTQ+ archives are sparse, and what we do have tends to be focused on white, cis gay men, often living in cities like London or New York. Queer Places is trying to broaden its audience to support and represent the voices of sapphic, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals, global majority backgrounds, people living with disabilities and working-class communities. As we move forward, we are committed to expanding our outreach, collaborating with underrepresented communities, and ensuring their histories and spaces are visible, valued, and celebrated.
Queer Places workshop
If someone was thinking about taking on a similar project, what would be the one piece of advice you would give them?
While museums, libraries, universities, and galleries have made incredible efforts in recent years to protect and enhance minority culture and heritage, they have also historically excluded, misrepresented, or erased it. They have failed to represent LGBTQ+ lives in full, and often don’t have the capacity or trust to hold such personal and vulnerable histories. When I started this project, I recognised these gaps and instead turned to where queer history truly lives – in the memories of those who have experienced it and the places they call home. Queer heritage has largely survived through personal archives: memory boxes, oral histories, and everyday ephemera kept safe in people’s homes. This kind of decentralised preservation isn’t a limitation – it’s a strength.
So, the advice is to seek genuine, reciprocal relationships with communities and let those communities lead. The invitation here is for archives to step outside of institutional walls, invest in long-term relationships, and support the safeguarding of memory in ways that respect ownership and lived experience. Building trust and fostering partnerships will not only create a richer, more authentic archive but also ensure that the people whose histories you are preserving feel seen, heard, and represented on their own terms.
Queer Places: The Magic Clock Pub
How will this work be developed in the future?
Queer Places aims to expand its archive by incorporating more personal stories whilst exploring additional mediums such as sculpture, installations, and urban interventions. The goal is for me to work on the project full time and eventually have others collaborating. I am currently working on larger funding applications for the future. Although Queer Places is currently focussed on Liverpool, I would love to expand the work to other regions, particularly in areas where LGBTQ+ heritage is rarely celebrated. Queer Places will also continue to develop and host workshops, educational talks, and exhibitions to further engage the community and educate the public about LGBTQ+ heritage, in Liverpool and beyond.
We are exploring options for long-term preservation in collaboration with community archives, local LGBTQ+ organisations and other platforms that align with the project’s ethos — regenerative, creative, accessible, and community-led. The website will be maintained as long as possible, and we’re currently developing a plan for long-term funding and/or archival partnerships that respect the community-led nature of the project. I also acknowledge we haven’t yet resolved what happens when contributors pass away, but this is something we’re beginning to engage with sensitively. Common feedback around these discussions has been about the memories being turned into something new, rather than gathering dust. Again, this shapes the mission of Queer Places.