Poster for Tucson's 2nd Annual National Coming Out Day Motorcade, Wingspan, “National Coming Out Day,” Arizona Queer Archives (undated)
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Arizona Queer Archives (AQA) centers community participation in building and collecting LGBTQI histories throughout the state of Arizona and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. AQA is a collection of manuscripts and organizational records, ephemera, oral histories and other records that tell what it means to be LGBTQI in the region.
Founded in 2011 by Professor Jamie A. Lee, AQA became Arizona's first LGBTQI archives. AQA is open access with archive research at University Libraries Special Collections, and hands-on archival laboratory spaces at the U of A Institute for LGBT Studies and the Blacklidge Community Collective, a nonprofit "space for experiments in playful autonomy, resilience, and sharing."
As a community-focused archive, AQA recognizes "queer" as more than an identity marker or umbrella term, and draws the word into how it collects, preserves, and makes collections accessible. In partnership with AQA, University Libraries Special Collections added LGBTQI as an area of emphasis in 2022 with nearly 30 collections including those transferred from AQA.