ABSTRACT
Memory activism has been a constitutive feature of LGBTIQ+ social movements since their re-emergence in the 1970s. Efforts to publicly commemorate sexual minorities have taken many forms, including annual parades and marches, the installation of plaques and monuments, walking tours, the recreation of historical queer spaces, and funerary or memorial rituals such as wreath-laying. Most crucially, the creation of archival repositories, queer museums, special collections, and the “queering” of larger public equivalents has been considered a core activist project in resisting what Thomas R. Dunn has called “willful forgetting.” Past symbols and experiences have been used to mobilize, cohere, and galvanize action in the present and envisage an alternative or changed future, both in physical and digital form. This chapter provides an overview of forms of memory activism within LGBTIQ+ social movements and shows how, in this sphere of action, it is less a case of memory activism in queer space than the necessary use of memory activism to create that space.
