We are serious people
Root down
What sickening irony that public archives, including the one where I most often sift through materials about the early years of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, are closed indefinitely due to this new, novel pandemic.
Lamenting this temporary loss is also novel because a few years ago, I’d never set foot in an archive. When I started researching what has blossomed into my book project, I had little idea what I was after. Mostly, I had some extra time to pursue my own curiosities and was following up on a note I took at a public exhibition.
One photo was how this all started. I saw a single photo in a spread of dozens, and when I couldn’t find enough online to sate my interest, I joined a historical society so I could go into their archives and read.
Obvious trajectory, right? (Of course not; I’m kidding.) It seems funny now that I instinctively went rooting around underground (literally, the archives are located in a guarded basement), trying to excavate some documentation, just because I thought it seemed meaningful.
Among journalists, it’s common enough that we stumble onto an idea at an opportune moment—opportune in that we have the resources to devote to it, or maybe we happen upon a story at a moment when the sociocultural mood is right for what we want to unearth and share.
As a career generalist—and a very happy one—what I (re)discovered seemed like a serious story to which I could devote some intense study. A voice echoing in my head for years was that of a colleague-friend, who’d once mused rhetorically, “Do I want the rest of my life to be a series of articles?” (For her, the answer was no; she founded and now runs an arts residency.)
I’ve relished freelancing and found success with it because I’m always seeking to learn something new, then move on. Even when I cover the same topic repeatedly—such as the two-year period when I wrote half a dozen articles about the resurgent interest in amateur and competitive pinball—eventually, I feel like I know enough, and that I’ve exhausted the most interesting angles.
But increasingly, as I kept churning out articles, it felt like my knowledge and attention (and maybe my lapsed-academic fondness for research) could be put to better use. I was seeking a profoundly meaningful story that would take at least a few months to understand. I wanted to craft something powerful that would matter to other people for more than a few weeks.
Again, this makes me laugh aloud when I type it. After I left grad school as a supposed documentary filmmaker who returned immediately to quick-turnaround writing, my line was always, “I want to spend three weeks on something, not three years.”
In what was probably my first archive visit, reading over meeting minutes and outlines for what would become an activist coalition’s mission statement, my eyes scanned down to a phrase as bullet point.
“We are serious people.”
No wonder I ended up spending years in communion with these folks’ stories and the physical space they occupied in a now-historic time period.