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(Erin Allen)
What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is The Rundown. Before we start, I want to let you know that this conversation includes discussion of anti LGBTQ plus violence and hate crimes.

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November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors folks who have been murdered because of their trans identities. And for a long time, LGBTQ plus people were not protected under hate crime legislation. Let me take you back a few decades.

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In 1998, a young gay man named Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, WY. This was back when Bill Clinton was President, and a couple months after Shepard's murder, Clinton called on Congress to pass a hate crime prevention bill that included LGBTQ people.

1:18
The very sad and unfortunate thing is that his presidency and Bush's presidency, they continue to debate it. And Obama signs it in 2009, one decade later. This is Sean Fader. He's a photographer who has spent the past few years using his craft to document the murders in these communities during that 10 year period, most of which are under reported, he actually drove around the country photographing the sites of these killings, and he's collected those photos into a project called Insufficient Memory.

1:53
You can see it online as a Google Earth map. But right now there's an installation of the project at Wrightwood 659, which is a museum in the Lincoln Park Lakeview area in Chicago. Walking around the installation and talking to Sean, it was all heartbreaking.

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I mean, it's amazing all that has to happen in order for folks on the margins to be seen, acknowledged, and just literally have the right to live. What I appreciate though about Insufficient Memory is that Sean is making sure these stories are told. And by engaging community and creativity in his work, he's demonstrating that there is hope for LGBTQ plus folks to be seen and valued.

2:33
We started by talking about why the stories of queer folks being murdered went largely untold in the first place, specifically focusing on the late 1990s into the early 2000s as the bill was being debated in Congress.

(Sean Fader)
Who has the power and the money and the know how to digitize histories that go back?

2:54
Right, that look back? And the people that do have those resources tend to not have reported about queer people in small towns across America, particularly trans women of color, who are losing their lives at, as we know, extremely high rates compared to the rest of our population.

3:18
These are not people that seem to be of interest or the purview of, you know, large news outlets, the smaller, local, more queer organizations that are writing and, you know, trying to record that information.

3:37
None of that gets digitized, right? Often times those you know, those communities are working on a shoestring. Sometimes there isn't even anything written about these people. It's stories that are being told. You know, that there's a keeper of those histories in smaller towns across America.

3:57
For a lot of us, you know, who want to make sure that we can look back and you know, for everything from like, think about how do we, how do we use this information to change people's hearts and minds to change laws. To make sure that people are protected, to make sure these things don't happen again.

4:17
It becomes really important to get these things into digital spaces. I hate to say it, as we craft the AIs of the future, we need queer love and queer loss and queer joy and queer pain to be put into those AIs. Don't just feed the baby all the crap.

4:35
(Erin)
Yes.

(Sean)
Right.

(Erin)
Yes, well said. The installation is called and and the project itself is are are called Insufficient Memory, as we're thinking back right, to the the kind of this 10, that's at least this 10 year history of this everything that's led up to it.

5:01
What does Insufficient Memory mean? How would you describe that title and and how it relates to this project?

(Sean)
Yeah. Well, so one of the things that really sparked the sort of beginning part of this project was also discovering the very first commercially successful digital camera, the Sony Digital Mavica shot
to 3 1/2 inch floppy.

5:26
And around that time, you know, you put a disk into a computer or into this camera and when you run out of space on your floppy disk, it tells you there's insufficient memory to record something. So.

5:42
That felt so poetic to me. This phrase, right that, that people would have experienced in that moment was also the fact that our memory is insufficient. We are not recording and remembering enough to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

6:02
(Erin)
Yeah. There is a special way that this Insufficient Memory title is represented also in the installation at Wrightwood. Can you talk about that?

(Sean)
So if anyone out there on the Internet wants to see the interactive piece, insufficientmemory.org will take you there, which is embedded in a Google Earth.

6:27
So it's a Google Earth interactive presentation is technically what it is. So. I want to, it was really important for me that this be available for everyone in the world who could access it via the Internet. So for the work, I drove 25,000 miles to 38 states to photograph all the locations where queer people were murdered in 99 and 2000.

6:51
Well, the 106 Congress for the very first time debated whether LGBTQ, LGBT people, he did not use a Q, should be part of the National Hate Crimes film. And so the interactive piece allows you to virtually fly around the country and see all of the information I was able to dig up on them.

7:12
I tell you a little bit about my experience in that location and you see the photograph I made. And so that interactive piece is at the center of the installation and then hanging around it are six photographs and I blew the photographs up really big so that

7:32
in that act, it almost destroys the photograph and makes them borderline. I mean like a crunchy, overblown JPEG that's slightly abstracted, slightly landscapey. And that was another way of me talking about that.

7:50
Our insufficient way of actually looking back in time and seeing these spaces, right? That that the impossibility of actually seeing clearly. Of these moments has passed us by.

(Erin)
You talked a little bit about this, how your work took you all over the country into these different spaces, including Illinois, and I wanted to ask if there is a story that sticks out to you from your memory about what happened here.

8:30
(Sean)
Yeah, that's a real hard one. So there was a two trans women who were at a club in Chicago and they left and went home and one of them was targeted because someone that she was dating knew that she was saving up for surgery and showed up at her home with several other men and

9:00
just point blank range shot her in the head and the other trans woman, shot her in the back of the head and in the face and like in the I think in the shoulder if I remember correctly. So that was Beretta Williams who died.

9:19
Her girlfriend Pebbles did survive. Actually, one of the things that was so horrible about this is that police. They did not talk about it, right? And you know, they claimed that they were trying to protect Pebbles, but actually the police did a really bad job, let's just put it that way, claiming that they were protecting Pebbles, but really they just didn't care.

9:46
And the Windy City Times shout out to them, did cover that when no one else would. And that's the only reason I was able to find out as much information as I was able to. Because the Windy City Times did some really solid recording there.

10:02
(Erin)
Yes, very tragic for so many of these folks. You are the first and only person to do any intentional documentation of their stories, right? Again, you know, you shouted out Windy City Times. They did that. But as you said, also like a lot of these stories there there is no information, especially online, how often

10:26
do you find that there is no official record of the details of a person's murder? Could you, can you say?

(Sean)
So I worked on 50, so 50 that I was able to find any information on.

10:45
There's about seven I've never found any information on. There's three people, I've never found their names. There's maybe 10 that are in the project that I found two sentences on.

11:05
(Erin)
Yeah. When you do find police reports or news stories, how are these stories characterized? How are the people the victims?

(Sean)
They're horrible. It's horrible. You know the vast majority of the of the reporting, particularly from the police is.

11:25
Homophobic and transphobic often times very clearly racist. And so one of the things that I did in this work was delete all of that take out. Sometimes I talk about the fact that the police are characterizing people in this way when there's absolutely no evidence of it.

11:48
And sometimes I just don't even say it because I don't want to continue that story. And we know how the Internet works, right? The more things that say it, the more true it is. Even if I'm saying the police claimed this and have no reason to believe that the sentence that the police said this is now on the Internet and it reinforces that Google search that you just did, right?

12:18
And so it became really important for me to make sure that I did not. You know, as a proxy continue that violence against these people and it was really important for me to try to write these stories with love and respect.

12:43
As we move forward, we are better at recording these stories, I think one of the things that I noticed. A huge amount of is, and forgive me, I cannot remember if it's 99 or 2000 Trans Day of Remembrance starts.

13:01
And that project is such an important project that is literally about remembering right? And so people in cities across the country for that project really do start trying to write this down and put it into the public space.

13:20
So I would say in these moments there's a lot more records being kept because of Trans Day of Remembrance. I also think you know right now it's interesting. I was making this work and towards the end of the work and the first time I was showing it in New York, there's BLM marches going by the door screaming, say their name, say their names, say their names.

13:46
And I realized, I think that was such a strong impetus for me in making the work because we can't forget these people. Like we need to be able to say their names, know who they are, right? And so I think we're a lot better right now at recording these stories.

14:08
(Erin)
Yeah. You are an artist with an established practice around photography, documenting. You're also a queer person, which means you could be targeted also just because of your own identity.

14:24
It's an interesting kind of unique juxtaposition. How? How do you care for yourself given all of that?

(Sean)
I will say I don't have the best history of thinking ahead about how hard something's going to be. And in all honesty, I think that's probably good because I I think a lot of my work wouldn't get made if if I had really seen how hard this was going to be for me.

14:52
I think I went in a little blind. So one of the things I did, because, you know, karaoke gives me joy, was that the summer that I drove across the country to 38 states was my 40th birthday. So I sang karaoke in 40 states for my 40th birthday, to try to make sure that I held on to some joy and had something to like look forward to on a regular basis.

15:23
(Erin)
Well, I'm so glad you were able to balance that out or at least counter some of that fear. I will say that going to see this installation, I walked away feeling very sad and also angry.

15:43
Those are important emotions to feel because these stories are tragic. So unfair, right? To say the least. But there's always lessons to be learned, and I wanted to just get a sense from you like, what do you think is a good that can come from your work on this?

16:05
(Sean)
So the thing that is mind bendingly amazing for me right now is that I've teamed up with a good friend, Maureen Towie, and we worked with Mass Design, who created the Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, commonly referred to as the Lynching Memorial.

16:28
And we've been working with them to design site markers for every location across the country and so we've designed them. We're in process of prototyping them. Each one of them will have a community supported augmented reality component to it.

16:46
So it will contain all of the actual journalistic work, which is talking to people on the ground in the community who knew these people, recording their stories and embedding them in an AR that visitors to each location will be able to access.

17:05
And so that felt like, amazing, right? Like to actually do something in this moment where we're really having to try to think about memorials and monuments and what they mean in this country, to actually be able to say, you know, what the vast majority of the memorials across this country are men in conquest.

17:27
Right? What if we changed that, what if we, what if we started to memorialize queer loss across the country? These stories could possibly change hearts and minds.

(Erin)
Sean Fader is an assistant professor and the associate chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

17:52
He's also the artist behind Insufficient Memory, which is now installed at Wrightwood 659. Sean, thank you.

(Sean)
Thank you so much. This is it's been so magical to talk to you.

(Erin)
Insufficient Memory is a part of a larger installation called Difference Machines.

18:12
It's open until December 16th. For more information you can go to wrightwood659.org and I should also note that Wrightwood 659 is a WBEZ underwriter and you can check out the interactive map from seansproject@insufficientmemory.org.

18:30
And that's it for today. Thank you to Justin Bull and Sarah Stark for producing The Rundown and to Ariel Van Klee for editing the show. Brendan Van Ezzak is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Louis Weeks. The Rundown is produced by WBEZ Chicago and is a part of the NPR Network.

18:47
And we love to hear from you. E-mail us with your thoughts, questions and what you want to hear on the show. You can e-mail the Rundown pod at wbez.org. I'm Erin Allen. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you later.