Brightly colored posters and black and white newspaper clippings were scattered in a room at Casper College. A scanner’s shrill whine punctuated the background.
The news articles featured stories on Wyoming’s response to the legalization of gay marriage in 2015 and the obituaries of prominent queer writers. Pride month posters from years past bore rainbow-hued taglines like “Pride reimagined” and “Partners in Pride.”
That was the scene during public archiving events hosted by the LGBTQ+ community group Casper Pride on April 6 and 7. The events were meant to “save Casper’s queer history,” according to one flyer, by establishing a locally-sourced digital archive.
“We were collecting some books for the Casper Pride library, and people were just bringing these old books from their own personal collections. Some of them had little handwritten notes in them,” said Amber Pollock, a Casper City Councilor who’s helping to lead the archiving effort. “That got me thinking: There’s all these stories floating around that are just not being really recorded and not really being preserved in any way.”
Locals brought photos, letters, journals and artwork from queer Casperites of the distant past and the present. Then, Amber and Mallory Pollock, the executive director of Casper Pride, catalogued and uploaded digital copies of the memorabilia to the nascent website.
The idea was to preserve parts of Casper’s history that some people may not know about.
“A lot of people don't know that there was a gay and lesbian center here in the early 1980s,” said Joe Rogers, a Casper resident who attended the event. “One woman had the courage, before she moved back to California, to put down the money on a space, talk to the police department and say, ‘This is what I propose to do.’”
That center drew attention to efforts to fight the HIV/AIDs epidemic in Wyoming in the 1980s, Rogers said. Rogers’ hope is for the archive to benefit younger generations of LGBTQ+ people and allies in the city as they learn more about their identities and community.
“They won't hopefully have to go through a lot of the soul searching and digging for information and weeding out the lies and the false truths that I and other generations have had to go through,” Rogers said. “We have to have it where our voices are heard, because so much of history we only know about what's inferred and what little bit has survived.”
The archive comes after the Wyoming Legislature passed a series of bills restricting where transgender people can go in public and what sports teams they can play on, and following the Trump administration’s executive actions that established similar bans nationwide.
The funds to build the archive came to Casper Pride from Wyoming Humanities, which recently had $850,000 of federal grant support canceled as part of a reduction in federal spending on the humanities.
The Wyoming Humanities cancellation comes alongside reports that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had made numerous visits to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in recent weeks.
Casper Pride’s grant funding for the archive isn’t affected by the cuts since the money was disbursed to the group last year.
The digital archive will eventually be available on the Casper Pride website starting in Pride week in June. According to Pollock, it will be designed with current events in mind, too.
“If [people] have access to a scanner for digital files, they can upload their own at any time,” she said. “So we can just keep it going.”
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
