Mobile Homecoming Project

Through performance and video narratives Julia Wallace and Alexis Pauline Gumbs share the LGBT/queer history they are collecting and discuss the significance of oral histories, the arts, and community building to LGBT/queer life in both the past and present.

The Mobile Homecoming Project:
Two young queer black women, Julia Wallace of Queer Renaissance and Alexis Pauline Gumbs of BrokenBeautiful Press, travel the country collecting oral histories of queer black same gender loving elders, learning about the people who have been integral in transforming the black queer movement since the 1980s or earlier, piecing together an intergenerational connection.

Wallace and Gumbs are dedicated to the creation of an experiential archive widely accessible through v interviews, performance, new media, blogs and scholarly articles, and to collecting artifacts to supplement existing archivesideo. Their mobile studio is an eco-friendly RV; it is both a means of transportation and a physical “home”for the project and for the artistic, organizing, and intellectual work of its creators.

The Mobile Homecoming Project has been called a “reminder that histories that are erased from mainstream circles cannot be erased from our memories. We hold the power to preserve our stories and draw our family trees as we know them.”

For more information about the Mobile Homecoming Project, go to http://www.mobilehomecoming.org/

The Mobile Homecoming Project's University of Maryland residency is sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department; African American Political Culture Workshop of the Department of History; College of Arts and Humanities; African American Studies Department; American Studies Department; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program; and the Curriculum Transformation Project.

For more information on thsi event, contact Dr. Elsa Barkley Brown at barkleyb@umd.edu

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