Make Roanoke Queer Again: Community History and Urban Change in a Southern City

This essay explores intersections among urban history, queer history, and public history in a gentrifying southern city. I show how queer cultures flourished in Roanoke, Virginia, in the 1960s and 1970s only to be displaced by a combination of police repression, urban planning, and gentrification starting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Seeking to “Make Roanoke Queer Again,” the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project is a community-based history initiative committed to researching and interpreting the region’s LGBTQ history. This essay argues that queer community history projects can be a form of resistance to gentrification and a means to preserve our history from “queer erasure.”