Rukus! Black LGBT Archive
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rukus! Black LGBT Archive is a collection of materials related to Black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities in Great Britain. The archive consists of diaries, letters, meeting minutes and related organising papers, magazines, pamphlets, flyers, posters, journals, books, photographs and assorted prints, audio-visual material, memorabilia and ephemera mainly, but not exclusively covering people, places and activity based in London. The materials have been gathered from and donated by individuals, activists, DJs, club promoters, writers, artists, community organisations and publishers from within and outside Black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.[1]
The archive is housed at The London Archives in Clerkenwell, London.[1] It is the first of its kind in Europe.[2] In 2008, rukus! won the 'Archives Landmark Award'.[1]
The archive strives to establish, maintain and make publicly accessible a "living Black LGBT history archive", produce and contribute to "exhibitions, publications, talks, workshops and educational resource materials" that can "raise awareness of our lives and visibility of our history and culture" and provide access to oral histories and interviews that "preserve a record of our lives and testimonies".[3]
'rukus! Federation Limited', a charity, was founded in 2000 by artist, curator, archivist and activist Ajamu X and filmmaker, artist and writer Topher Campbell. The two named the archive by combining 'rukus', after an African-American porn star of the same name, with 'Federation', a tribute to Campbell's love of the sci-fi television series 'Star Trek'.
Led by Richard Wiltshire, Senior Archivist, London Metropolitan Archives (now The London Archives) and with assistance of Ajamu X and Topher Campbell, the archive was catalogued between 2011-2014 by the rukus! volunteer project. The catalogue was completed in February 2015.[1]
When speaking about his desire to start the archive, Ajamu X describes his motivation being born out of a
"frustration around how Black queer narratives start from a deficit paradigm: something is wrong that needs to be fixed. And there is rarely a conversation that starts from a place of our cultural production, celebration, abundance. And your material, social history rarely includes the Black experience, and your wider LGBT history rarely includes a Black experience. We rarely appear in terms of narrative, and where we do we're always framed within the problematics of being Black and gay, whereby your white person is out and confident. There is a generation of younger, fabulous Black queers who might not be aware of what's happened in Black life in the last twenty-plus years."[4]