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argaret Tamulonis — Meg to the

community, Margaret at her

Fleming Museum job — has had
an extraordinary run of luck in her profes-
sional life. When she graduated from
William & Mary college with a BA. in
history and anthropology, she went home
to New York City, where she landed an
internship and then a paying job interpret-
ing at a family home from the early 19th
century. In what would become a charac-
teristic emphasis, Meg focused on tracing
the Irish servants from arrival to
employment.

“I was very lucky to have family
in New York where I could live during my
internship until I got hired,” Tamulonis
admits. It was working at that historic
home that got her into the museum world.
She managed to have fulltime paid work
within a few months of her graduation.

So the first thing to know about
the R.U.l .2? Queer Community Center
Archive is that Meg Tamulonis, a trained
historical anthropologist and archivist, is
at the helm. And R.U.1 .2? has her because
she and her partner of then five months
decided to pick up and move to Vermont
in the summer of 1999.

Tamulonis had been working at
the New York Historical Society “for five
years, doing 15-hour days. It was an
amazing place to be. We were de-acces-
sioning a closed museum,” which, she
added, “has its challenges.” De-accession-
ing is disposing of part or all of a collec-
tion, making difficult decisions about what
to keep and why.

When she first arrived in
Vermont, she said, “I was burned out. I
didn’t think that I would get back into the
museum world.” So she found work at the
Onion River Co-op (“a good job to meet
people in the community”), and then at
Borders Bookstore. “One day I had a real-
ly rough day at Borders, and I sat down
and wrote to the Fleming.”

The Fleming Museum, part of the
University of Vermont, hired her, and the
rest, as they say (especially in this case), is
history. Tamulonis is the museum’s regis-
trar, directly responsible for documenting
and tracking the museum’s collections and
providing information on the objects they
contain. She's working on creating a
searchable database of every painting and
artifact in the museum's possession with
digital imaging. And she's working with
university professors on how to integrate
the museum's objects into their classes.

“Objects tell stories. I get to help

Meg Tamulonis,
Archivist

to the
Community

“I really like to find the stories.
I got into history in the first place because I
I’m nosy, curious about people’svlives.”

people figure out the stories, or at least to
make educated guesses.”

And so it is with the R.U.l .2?
Archive. “I was really excited to see there
was an archive. An archive,” she contin-
ued, “consists of paper and artifacts —
mostly paper and ephemera. The queer
community generates lots of ephemera,
especially around Pride. I really like to
find the stories. I got into history in the
first place because I’m nosy, curious about
people’s lives.” _

Tamulonis was the mover behind
the 2002 Archives exhibit at the Fletcher
Free Library in Burlington. And the 33-
year-old archivist is really excited about
the community center’s new home. “The
new building means more space, and the
room to do exhibits. We have rescued ban-
ners, because they’re hard to store, and
they make a great exhibition.”

The oddest object in the Archive,
she said, is a plastic airplane used in a
Pride fundraising event at 135 Pearl. The
Archive contains dance posters from the
1970s and tapes of oral histories of early
Pride marches and rallies. One thing
Tamulonis hopes to get from those oral
histories is a list of “queer historic sites =
in Burlington at first — to publish maps.
Wouldn’t it be great to have [queer histo-
ry] walking tours of Burlington and

Vermont?” ~
The Archives are currently
housed in Tamulonis’s home. “I dream of
gallery space, with full study and storage
areas. Now people tell me what they’re

interested in, and I pull out archival boxes.

Everything is stored in acid-free folders.
I’d like to get everything in digital format,
which would make them accessible.
Looking at a digital image is a first step,
but yes,” she declared, “the object is the
thing.”

Tamulonis is researching drag
through the pages of Out in the
Mountains. “There’s not much in the early
years, Cherry and Yolanda, and the
nineties was the high point. There‘s more
on drag kings now. Our next exhibition
will be on drag. It's a neat way to tell
another story of queer history."

There’s a good reason, she insist-
ed, to donate your complete set of copies
of Common Woman or other historical
materials to the R.U.l .2‘? Archives. rather
than to, say. the Vermont Historical
Society. “The archives and the exhibits we
hold validate our existence. We're a
resource as well as it repository. And when
our materials are donated to larger institu-
tions with :1 different perspective or agen-
da. we have to question: will lesbian histo-
ry disappetw into women's history?" V