The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation

This roundtable brings together key voices in the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project including co-directors Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette along with Ain Gordon and Moe Angelos. The discussion offers a behind-the-scenes look at a significant initiative to preserve the legacies of eleven pioneering LGBTQ+ performance artists including Ain Gordon, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Lola Pashalinski, Carmelita Tropicana, John Kelly, Richard Move, and Ishmael Houston-Jones.  

The project, which began in 2024, is housed under the Pick Up Performance Company and was born out of a shared recognition that queer performance histories—especially those emerging from the experimental downtown New York scene—remain vulnerable to erasure. The group discusses the logistical, political, and ethical stakes of preserving ephemeral theatre, dance, and performance work, particularly when much of it was created in non-traditional theatre spaces such as bars and clubs and beyond institutional frameworks. Overall, the roundtable explores questions of archival accessibility, digitization, and the necessity of preservation from the unique perspective of living artists shaping their own histories and how they are told. 

This wide-ranging conversation reflects on personal and intergenerational connections and the role of community in shaping how queer art is made and remembered. It also considers the archive as an artistic undertaking that resists linearity through embracing the complexity and contradictions embedded in queer history. Finally, the respondents offer an intimate and pragmatic look at how queer collective memory, aesthetics, and activism intersect to shape a more inclusive historical record of performance. 

This roundtable conversation was conducted on May 23, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Benjamin Gillespie: I thought we could start by having each of you briefly introduce how you got involved with the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project. 

Linda S. Chapman: I left New York Theatre Workshop in 2020 after twenty-six years with the company. In 2023, Alyce and Ain asked me to join the board of the Pick Up Performance Company following the death of Ain’s father and co-artistic director, David Gordon. They asked me to help develop new projects for the company, extending the work that Ain and David did to making new work with “friends and family”, very much a part of the ethos of the Pick Up Performance Company.

I had already begun preliminary work on organizing my longtime partner Lola Pashalinski’s archive. Alyce had worked with David Gordon on creating an incredible digital archive for him over the course of six years (https://davidgordon.nyc/) which I had followed closely, and I thought maybe she could advise me on creating an archive for Lola. Understanding that, for a performer, it’s more difficult to raise funds to support archive work, we started thinking: Who else might we invite into this idea to help?

Of course, Ain and Alyce were right there—and would need Ain’s work organized. And I had been in conversation with Moe and the Five Lesbian Brothers about their thoughts around archives and where they might go. There was some nascent interest already, and then, organically, the rest of the group came together. The project evolved out of our conversations together. Carmelita Tropicana joined in. Alyce was doing work with John Kelly and so he joined. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Richard Move were also artists from the community that we deeply admired. It developed organically out of the desire to preserve this work. 

Moe Angelos:  I’m a downtown theater/performance maker and have been a character in that landscape for a long time. I’m one of the Five Lesbian Brothers. Linda produced all of our plays at New York Theatre Workshop. We are all connected. I think at some point I was kvetching, “What are we going to do with all our stuff?” because there isn’t just one, but five of us. We’re a company. I knew it was going to be some work to figure out what to do with the archive because there are a lot of voices who might want different things. The Brothers have figured that out, but I was informally consulting with Linda, asking “How do we go forward?” Because we’re getting old. One of us will die eventually. Our first concern was not to leave a huge mess for the other Brothers. Just to make it cleaner.

That tumbled into a whole set of questions: How do we collect, catalog, digitize, store? Who’s going to take our stuff? Because it’s important. It’s a piece of history—self-made playwrights, devisers, whatever we are. Sometimes I look back at performance work that was done and think, “Oh my God, that was an amazing idea!” But it’s gone—forgotten. Couldn’t some of those things be captured for others so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel?

That’s how I got scooped up into this fantastic world of the project. Alyce was gung-ho on the project and kindly asked the Five Lesbian Brothers to be a part of it. One offshoot of the archive project is generating collaborations within the group as well. Ain just directed my revised show This Used to Be Gay last weekend which was a great success. I learned so much from the process. Ain, you did a beautiful job directing. I got nothing but wonderful feedback, especially the new visual elements. It really enhanced the piece. 

Ain Gordon: There’s nothing to decorate and stage if there isn’t a script. Thank you for making that, Moe. I enjoyed it. I’m a fan.

With regards to the project, there are a couple things I want to mention. My father and I co-directed the Pick Up Performance Company. He died in 2022. There were the tangible realities of going from a two-artist budget to a one-artist budget project company, and questions about how to practically handle that. It felt jerry-rigged to bring someone else in as co-director, but familial extension is in the DNA of the company. Alyce and I moved to the idea of “friends and family”—artists who have worked with me or who worked with David who don’t have infrastructure for their projects, bringing them under the Pick Up Company umbrella to offer a home for their work. It felt like a way to serve the community and grow the company in a way that feels right. 

Orbiting conversations about archiving happened without me at first. Things do happen behind my back! (laughs). But it eventually came back to me. As a playwright and theatre-maker, I do a lot of work sourcing archives and overlooked stories. I have strong feelings about how history is traditionally constructed and how people are sucked into believing it’s a fact when, in reality, it’s just an interpretive engine. 

Archives also tend to be for the converted. People go looking for what they already know is there. That’s a problem. We talked a lot about that and how to pierce that wall. We also talked about how we might not be able to secure real support for our individual archives, but that a critical mass could attract interest and also offer a contextual portrait of a geographic, generational moment. Over the years, as theatre-makers we didn’t all collaborate directly all the time, but we were side by side seeing each other’s work. We were making work in parallel. That interaction is useful for researchers and for young queer theatre-makers to know about. 

Alyce Dissette: I feel as if I’m the more pragmatic member of the team (laughs). I recall having a coffee over Christmas break two years ago with Moe and Linda. They were talking to me about where to go with Lola’s archive, where to go with the Five Lesbian Brothers’s archive. I’m not a complicated thinker. I just said, “You’re never going to raise money for individual archives. So one way to approach this may be to put us in a group—a group that made some sort of sense for us to work together.” 

That conversation led to other conversations. We brought in Ain—because not too much secret goes on without him knowing! (laughs.) And then we all talked for a while. Ain, Linda, and I curated the other artists that would participate—thinking about what made sense aesthetically and practically in terms of forming a group initiative. Then we tested the waters to see if we could actually raise money for such a thing.

It was one of those wonderful moments where nobody was negative about this idea or about these artists. It’s a very special group we’ve created. They represent a time when two things were happening in the field: first, they were emerging as queer artists and gaining legitimacy in the downtown art scene in New York; second, they were simultaneously being hit with the AIDS epidemic. Those two factors were major in the careers of these people.

We also have a generational divide. Lola is our oldest artist. Richard Move is our youngest artist. That’s also representational of the impact they had on the field and on LGBTQ+ rights. A lot of the artists that came through while they were working died. A lot of people died. And people seem to forget that.

So, I said that I would be co-director of the project. But I didn’t want to do it alone, and Ain suggested Linda as my partner in crime. We’ve also formed an amazing group of advisors representing the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, the National Theatre Archive Project, and other movers and shakers in the field. They’ve been more than generous with their time and support.

Gillespie: It’s wonderful how all of you are connected and have a common vision that honors individual artists’ perspectives. I should mention that this project also relates to the work I’m doing in my scholarship. I’m currently working on an anthology about Split Britches’s work that documents the last two decades of work by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver including scripts, interviews, essays, along with a companion digital archive with photos and video to accompany the book. More broadly, I’m interested in queer legacy, performance archives, and how intergenerational connections can be made and sustained between younger and older queer artists. 

What is the mission of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, and what are its central goals? 

Dissette: The two central portions of the mission are 1) To create legitimate archives that go into a permanent collection so that the work will be saved, and 2) To figure out a way to make the material publicly accessible as opposed to disappearing into a collection only scholars can access. Obviously, the process of archiving a career, a body of work, is a huge undertaking. It takes a lot of time and work. But then where does it go? We don’t want it to disappear in boxes. 

One of the things we did with David Gordon’s archive is make it publicly accessible online, and it is available now (https://davidgordon.nyc/). Because the Mellon Foundation gave us the funding for that project, we were able to create an in-depth artistic legacy that people can access online. That’s a new thing in the digital age. It’s exploding in some places and nonexistent in others. But for us, both parts are essential: a legitimate collection that lives somewhere, and public access. Ideally, there will be public access for the entire group so that anyone can search and access all eleven artists in the project. 

We don’t know where that will land yet. We can work on that while doing the pragmatic work of assembling the archives—which is a long and complicated process. 

Chapman: Could I just add a subsection of our mission? Alyce and I don’t feel we can do more than help put these archives together, but we’d like to distribute some of our findings and the work we’re doing to support the larger community. We’re developing inventory systems, making connections throughout the community of people interested in theatre and performance archives. We’re organizing an event in June (2025) on digital archives, bringing together the American LGBTQ+ Museum, The Feminist Institute, and our project. We’re seeking opportunities to meet people in the community. We’re reaching out to the major archives including Fales Library at NYU, the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and others. We’re hoping to contribute beyond just building the archives to help disseminate what we’re learning for others to benefit. 

Gillespie: And you did an exhibition at BAM last year right? 

Dissette: The BAM exhibition was huge for us. It really helped kick things off. BAM’s artistic leaders were instrumental partners. At the time, BAM was producing Taylor Mac’s Bark of Millions and they wanted to show there was an existing LGBTQ+ artistic legacy—that this work didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There was whole history and community of artists practicing for decades. Amy Casello is a great thinker and supporter of it all.

Gillespie: Is BAM also one of your community partners?

Dissette: Yes. We did a few events in conjunction with the exhibition last year. We are in conversation with BAM about future collaborations. Institutions get busy, especially now, but we want to maintain a community around this project throughout its development. We’ll do a few events every year as we work, and BAM is certainly a part of that community.

Gillespie: I want to ask about the actual archives themselves. You mentioned the digital archiving process. What are some of the challenges or difficulties with building performance-based archives? It’s obviously quite different than other genres of art when you’re archiving ephemeral work. 

Gordon: One of the challenges is right here among us: there are very different types of performance histories across the artists in our group. Carmelita, John, and to some extent the Five Lesbian Brothers did a lot of work in clubs, which are very rarely documented. Or if they are, they’re on very endangered media formats.

This is part of what I mean when I say that history is a kind of fictive engine. There are economic factors that make some work easier to document and some harder. Then there’s the question of how the archive tells the story of why things are missing or absent from the record, or do we just passively let the absence remain? What is the narration that frames that absence for an uninitiated viewer?

Dissette: These are very particular archives. They’re artist-driven, not institutionally driven, and that’s a very different approach. We’re using the David Gordon Archive as a model because David made all the decisions about how he wanted his work left behind. There’s video, scripts—we had to figure out how to organize it so it could be accessible.

Then there’s the boring digital labor of scanning everything. When we sent his forty boxes to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, we had digital copies of everything meaningful. David contextualized everything by writing what he called “scripts,” but they’re really stories—decade by decade—about how the work was made and what happened. That matched his philosophy that art and life are the same thing.

Each artist will need to find their voice in this process—how they want to frame their body of work and what they want people to know. Then there’s the more conventional archive methodology: organizing scripts, video, letters, documents. There’s just a lot of stuff, and we need to figure out what will be saved and what digitized.

David’s online archive is organized by decade. All the work from that decade is listed. You click on the work, and everything—programs, photos, etc.—are accessible from that page. This isn’t something you can do on WordPress. It was professionally programmed. We hope to have resources to do something similar. But first we have to do the grunt work—organizing archive materials and making them accessible. And it’s a lot of labor. Most of us don’t even know what we have yet. We’re just starting.

Angelos: And then there’s the inherent problem with live performance. We’re doing the work to be in the room with the people in the room. It’s not necessarily intended to be recorded. We’re not making a movie. We’re not making a video. It’s ephemeral. You can’t really capture what was happening behind the camera at a club. And we did a lot of one-offs—someone’s benefit, an avant-garde-arama, and other things like that. We’d write a specific thing for a one-off event and maybe all that’s left behind is a lyric sheet. So that’s interesting too. We did a lot of that type of work. We all did.

Dissette: We were just talking about that yesterday with Carmelita—about starting to organize things. She has all these sheets of paper, and now they need to be organized in some way.

Chapman: In the case of Lola’s work with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, they weren’t able to record it most of it. They didn’t have access to equipment in those days. We’re talking about the late 1960s into the early 1980s when Lola left the company. That was the time people were just starting to record performances. So there’s very little live documentation—at least from that period. With the Five Lesbian Brothers, and with David and Ain’s work, some performances are documented. But it’s uneven.

The other thing I want to add, and this isn’t about digitization per se, but I think an important part of our mission is that our artists are all living. They’re all still alive and are making the decisions about what they want to be archived. With Lola, for instance, we’re doing oral histories and transcribing those as a form of storytelling—the kind Ain described so beautifully. 

Gillespie: It’s important that you mentioned that these are artist-led projects. Oftentimes, archives aren’t consolidated by the artists themselves. That’s what’s so exciting about this project. The artists have a lot of say in how their work will be digitized or archived, but also in how that legacy will look in public-facing contexts.

Gordon: Yes, and the word “consolidation” is exactly the one I want to avoid. There’s a project I did for the Mark Taper Forum. I have fourteen of the twenty-five drafts of that script. I want all fourteen to be in the archive. I want everyone to know what hell that was.

Gillespie: I understand that impulse because then you get to see the artist’s process. That’s a big part of the work.

Gordon: It fights what I think writing history tends to do—making it seem like there was a series of steps that led inevitably to the thing that’s now historicized. And that’s rarely the case in creating performance. I’m interested in making the archive demonstrate the chaos of the creative process. History narrows an array of events into a traceable sequence that appears to have led to the thing it wishes to historicize. But that’s the opposite of what actually occurs, at least for me. That’s not how any work comes to be. In a lot of these downtown shows, someone would ask you to participate in a show. I’d say, “Okay, great!” I had a title but hadn’t written a word before I was invited to participate. 

Chapman: Here’s an example. Lola and I made a piece about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that we worked on for many years. It relates back to how HIV impacted our work. We started the piece with our friend Georg Osterman, another member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. We were making a piece about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. George passed away in 1995. We had a draft script and we were ready to go into production. But without Georg—because the work was so personal to both George and Lola—we didn’t see how we could go forward. Our friends and community encouraged us to think differently. They didn’t want all that work to be lost. That led us to evolve a new piece about Gertrude and Alice. But that work would never have come about without the AIDS epidemic. That’s the unwieldy kind of story that we’re documenting. It’s part of telling the story of a whole era.

Gillespie: Do you feel there will be difficulties navigating how to tell this story without narrowing it—or “consolidating” it? (I promise I won’t use that word again, Ain!) How will you present it publicly in a way that’s visible to people who might not have been around or don’t necessarily know the context. One thing about this group is that you all knew each other. You were all working in the same time and place. You saw a lot of the work. But a future viewer may not have. And it’s still important for them to try to understand it. 

Moe: What do you think the challenges might be in telling your story through the archive, or the Five Lesbian Brothers’ story?

Angelos: All of what we’re talking about is rooted in personal relationships, right? That’s the part I don’t know how to make legible—other than “we were in the same room at the same time.” But it’s such an important part of this work. It’s the “family business,” as the Pick Up Performance Company says. It’s about who you know. I don’t know that it’s so different from insider trading—it’s who you know, and who shares some sensibility in a context.

We were all in New York City. And what did that mean in that era? The city was very different. You could still hang out your shingle and start making shows without an MFA from Yale or wherever. No dis on that, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do it the same way now. There was this autodidactic process, and we were teaching ourselves as we went. That feels very different now. It’s hard to make it legible without sounding like, “It used to be better—get off my lawn.” But it really made a difference. We didn’t have to work four days out of five for the landlord. I don’t know what young artists do now. I don’t know how they do it.

Gillespie: And your work in This Used to Be Gay really captures that history in a unique way. You’re calling back to a queer history that helps contextualize the work being made and tell that story. It’s also very funny. 

Chapman: I worked at Theater for the New City in the early eighties. It was my first administrative job. That’s where I met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, who had worked with Spiderwoman Theater. That was even before Split Britches emerged from the work they did together. I saw the first two WOW festivals—before there was a dedicated WOW space.

In her show, Moe takes us back to the original WOW Café theatre on 11th Street. Then we move 4th Street. I’m very connected to that history. I’m motivated and inspired by the begats—seeing Gordon’s work at Dance Theater Workshop, knowing he came out of Judson Church, where George Bartenieff and Crystal Field had worked. Those connections, how these artists influenced each other beyond our group—it’s eternally fascinating! 

I get excited about how these elements of community affect aesthetics, how we make work, what we’re interested in. I think our particular brain trust in the project—our artists—is really dynamic. There’s so much potential in how we relate and communicate across aesthetics and generations. There’s so much more to explore beyond sorting papers and digitizing materials. We’re telling the story of work in the East Village, a sort of performance phenomenon. You can’t recreate those moments or that time and place. It’s unique.

Gordon: I think telling the story is the same as designing the experience of the archive itself, especially for someone arriving at it online. It's like the first ten minutes of a live performance. I ask the same questions: What will they see first? What will set the tone? How do we make it feel the way we want it to feel? How do we disassemble the linear steppingstones that history likes to create and convey some of the randomness, the chaos, and the chance? Those things can happen—it depends on how it’s designed, what kind of contextualizing the artists do.

Personally, I loathe finding aids. I won’t even read them anymore—I go straight to the indexing. Because the finding aid does exactly what I don’t want done. So how do we rethink finding aids for these archives? Could we write something different? Maybe six different people write six different versions, and users can choose which one to follow. I don’t know, but I want us to think about that.

Chapman: And we’re talking about people who were groundbreaking. These are artists telling stories that had never been told before. They were pushing against years of repression and silencing. And once you break that open . . . who knows? I don’t think we’re finished exploring that yet.

Dissette: It’s a little overwhelming, to be honest. But one good thing about archiving is that it takes time. It’s not like a production. We will learn things as we go, and I’m counting on that. We certainly made it up as we went along with David’s archive. I have colleagues who work in tech. I worked at the Voyager Company that produced those CD-ROMs. I ran the first digital art contest back in the 90s. I’m interested in the process. And what we gain are opportunities that emerge within that process. That’s the most interesting part of this work to me.

Gillespie: The digital archives of David Gordon (https://davidgordon.nyc/) and Lola Pashalinski (https://performingartslegacy.org/pashalinski/), as they stand now, are kind of independent of this project, right? Do you imagine that the archives you’re assembling in this project will resemble the work on those archives? 

Dissette: David’s archive is independent and is strictly a model for what we’re doing. It’s not part of this project except to show what’s possible. Lola’s current online presence is through the Entertainment Community Fund’s Legacy Project. That’s another kind of framework where many artists are represented. They designed the portal. It’s a possible model for us, but I’d like something more complex, technologically speaking.

They did a really good job creating infrastructure where people could enter information. But my fantasy is that we partner with a major institution to create a portal—a really complicated portal—where this would be one entity, and other entities could also live in the future. 

Gordon: In fantasy land, all of us would be on one portal. If you searched “1980,” you’d get everything all eleven artists made in 1980—not just one. 

Dissette: That’s the cool thing about David’s archive—it has a search engine. You can’t do that in many places.

As the technology improves, there are more possibilities. But there are also difficult decisions. Video will be all over the place. There’s no way to consolidate it. Ishmael Houston-Jones has something like thirty videos at the NYPL through Dance Theater Workshop. In David’s case, we partnered with the NYPL Performing Arts Library since his work was going into their permanent collection. So now there’s a direct link to the NYPL Digital Collections where David’s videos live. The public can access it online. But we don’t know yet what will be streamable outside the NYPL system. Right now, to view most of it, you need to physically go to the library.

Sometimes, there’s a lack of sophisticated understanding about what websites can be. David’s site was designed by someone who is a media artist, someone from MIT—an artist in her own right. She and David talked through the vision. Then she came back with a structure for the archive. That’s different than someone just making categories in WordPress. It’s a different level.

Chapman: Also, the Legacy Project site for Lola is not a complete archive. It does have a fairly developed chronology of all the work. But it doesn’t have all the photos. It doesn’t have a lot of audio. It’s material that we could easily transfer to another kind of site if we want to do that as we develop. But it’s not complete. We’re further ahead because we actually do have a dedicated archivist, but these are incredibly time-consuming processes.

Gillespie: It sounds like the archives, in an ideal world, are kind of a new collaborative art project where the artists themselves will collaborate with a media artist to think about how this will look and be mapped out in a non-traditional, nonlinear way. That is really interesting because it’s kind of a queering of the archive itself. It’s not chronological. You want these to tell the story in a way that’s messy and real and shows the connections between artists. 

Dissette: It’s important to say also that they wouldn’t have access to anything without producers, which in this project are Linda and myself. The producers are the people who are facilitating a process. Just putting an archivist with an artist will not be enough. There must be someone guiding the process at some level. I mean, it’s like a show.

Chapman: I think making new work out of the archival materials is something a lot of us are interested in right now.

Dissette: David Gordon named it “Archivography.” The performances were called “Live Archivography,” and then there’s the website. I think also he resented being relegated to historicizing as the only fundable action. He had more to give. And I think that’s actually the benefit of us all doing it before he died. 

Gillespie: I’m curious about funding. What is your approach right now, or what are your plans for procuring funding to help with this project?

Angelos: Oh, we’re going to ask the NEA and NEH immediately! (laughs). Their new mandate—what the NEA is supposed to do now—is fund disaster recovery. And, you know, this is a disaster! 

Gordon: We’re all in recovery.

Angelos:  Just little gallows humor there . . .

Chapman: Alyce is going through all the various funding agencies that we can think of. And Ain and Alyce particularly have really developed great language which we are using. We’re leaving no stone unturned. Of course, anybody we ever knew who ever gave any money as an individual is getting approached. We’ve had a very generous anonymous donation. Because of some former funding that the Pick Up had, we’re able to start making this a project that is part of the broader work of the company.  

Dissette: Having been raising money for a long time, one of the wonderful things about raising money for this project is that everybody we’ve talked to likes the project. Nobody had told us it’s a terrible idea. Nobody. And nobody’s been even middle-of-the-road about it. That’s been the response universally so far. We got initial startup money from the Howard Gilman Foundation which has helped. But we will need more. We’re approaching some major foundations about that. And the fact that we're committed to making the process be part of the community—working with the community—is key. And so NYSCA and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs have been supportive of this, in addition to our other projects though the Pick Up Performance Company. Funding takes a while, especially big funding. They commit money years in advance. But we’re working on it. The artists are also helping. 

Gillespie: Do you see additional projects like Moe’s This Used to Be Gay with the Pick Up Performance Company connected to the project? 

Gordon: If the artists are interested in it then absolutely. It’s artist-driven from our standpoint. Some of these artists have enough infrastructure that they wouldn’t necessarily want to do that. Some don’t. It would be very case by case. We’re absolutely open to it, and also in no way mandating it.

Gillespie We’ve talked about digital archives, but what about the physical archives? Have you thought about what to do with all the paper? 

Chapman: Absolutely. And we do also have other artifacts besides just the paper. Those are all big questions that come up as we’re putting these collections together. But I think the physical collections are really important too. 

Dissette: We have said that the physical archives could go to different repositories as long as the virtual one unites them all. But there are some people who are also interested in perhaps the physical archives going into one repository. So that’s a moving part of a conversation now.