LGBTQ+ collecting institutions: the culture of strategic management, motivation and professionalization

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings from an Australian Research Council Linkage Project investigating LGBTQ+ memory, migration and collecting institution practices. It analyses the ways in which minority LGBTQ+ collecting institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) have professionalized in recent decades and adopted the use of strategic management documents such as strategic plans, mission statements and annual reports. Analysing documents from the 48 most prominent LGBTQ+ collecting institutions around the world, this article explores the ways in which such documents present narratives about the motivation and justification for minority collecting institutions, and how they represent themselves as professional rather than grassroots or activist organizations. Three core motivations emerged from the study: the preservation and celebration of the past, sustaining an ‘ethnic minority’ model of LGBTQ+ community through engagement in the present and aspiration for social change and justice for the future. The paper unpacks the underlying discourses to provide a perspective on the role of these cultural institutions in minority communities.


Introduction
Several dozen formal LGBTQ+ archives and other collecting institutions (museums, galleries and libraries) around the world house, preserve and share documents, artefacts and memorabilia related to gender-and sexually diverse culture.Much about LGBTQ+ collecting institutions as cultural practices, arbiters of historical knowledge and educators of minority youth has been written and studied elsewhere (e.g.D'Emilio 2020; Marshall and Tortorici 2022;Sullivan and Middleton 2020;Vincent 2016).As storytelling formations, however, there has been little attention to the practices and means by which LGBTQ+ collecting institutions tell their own story 'outside the frame' of the collecting practices themselves.At core, as John Frow (1997) has noted, archives work within a particular logic based on the inscription of knowledge that informs deposits, information storage and systematic articulation of space, governing what can and cannot be incorporated.The study of archives and other collecting institutions, however, tends to focus on the logic of the contents and/or the curation practices, and this includes the study of minority and marginalized communities' collecting practices.
This research is interested in the stories archives tell about themselves as institutions using the language, genre and documentation of management, such as strategic plans, vision statements, annual reports and funding applications.As part of the LGBTQ Migrations: Life Story Narratives in the South Australian GLAM Sector Linkage Project funded by the Australian Research Council, the team surveyed an international selection of 48 LGBTQ+ and related collecting institutions, including archives, museums and galleries, looking primarily at their strategic plans, mission statements, annual reports, aims and objectives, and related public discourse and journalism about their establishment or funding arrangements.Institutions that made public their strategies, annual reports, or strategic or funding information comprised 80% of worldwide institutions that represented themselves as galleries, libraries, museums or archives serving LGBTQ+ communities.Although the study was attentive to the very diverse cultural and linguistic settings in which different LGBTQ+ collecting institutions emerge, what was notable was the similarity of strategic management documentation -arguably, the result not only of the contemporary universalization of professional management strategies but of the diasporic nature of LGBTQ+ communities in which similitude in diverse cultural settings serves as a discourse of identity (Sinfield 1996).
The goal of this research was to uncover some of the ways in which LGBTQ+ collecting institutions tell a particular kind of story about their motivation to conduct their activities through strategic management documents.This is an important angle on the cultural role of minority community collecting institutions, partly because the professionalization of LGBTQ+ institutions has resulted in the adoption of documentary and management practices that fall outside the frame of the core activity of collecting, preserving and promoting the collection but, nevertheless, bear down upon the narratives that represent the institution.That is, the research is disinterested in the organizations' collection policies or the content of collections themselves, but on the 'meta' documentation of externalfacing strategy for the organizations as organizations.I begin with some remarks on the discourse of strategic management as a cultural formation, before discussing three thematic 'motivations' that emerge in the reading of the strategy and management statements that can be ordered in the temporality of past, present and future: (1) the motivation to celebrate a past, even if it is a troubled past of vulnerability, (2) the framing of LGBTQ+ collecting institutions through sustaining the present 'ethnic minority' narrative, and (3) promoting the use of collections as part of an aspiration for social change in the future.I would like to end with some final remarks on what the 'professionalization' through the adoption of strategic management language might mean for LGBTQ+ institutions and organizations.

The discourse of strategic planning and management
Strategic planning and strategic management are a diverse set of discourses normally associated with entrepreneurial organizations but have come to be adopted by many notfor-profit organizations as a methodology for goal-setting (Cornut, Giroux, and Langley 2012).Significant in strategic planning language is the production of public-facing documents such as strategic plans, strategy maps, mission and vision statements, and annual reports.Michael Watkins (2007) has identified these documents as communicating and directing the 'what, who, how and why' questions that drive an organization's strategy for growth, development, change or sustainability in competitive environments.In this context, they do more than direct but provide indicative traces of that strategy to a wider public, particularly given the ways in which they are often published online in order to generate organizational transparency and credibility.
Although used to direct an organization's activities and to serve as markers for performance measurement, strategic planning and management documents are typically understood as separate from the everyday activities or processes of the organization, no matter how much they might bear down upon those activities.That is, such documents appear 'outside the frame' of the archive or museum or gallery itself.For example, when one visits a museum, it is the exhibitions, activities of curation or acts of reading, viewing and consulting that come to the fore and are perceived as separate from institutional management, operating through an alternative 'epistemological frame' (Butler 2009, 1).This is to consider the genre or language of strategic management in ways which are mutually constitutive of, but also communicatively separate from, the experience of the organization.This is so, even if strategic consultants themselves are more likely to see strategic planning as completely inseparable from the organization's activities or engagement with customers or the public (Mintzberg and Quinn 1996) -a specific expertise and way-of-thinking that differs markedly from the experience of the everyday visitor.
Strategic management documents, their language and their genre are often described as containing 'jargon' (Cummings 2011).Jargon usually implies an intended audience able to recognize a particular way of speaking that is sometimes considered impenetrable by those who do not work every day in that setting (Treadwell and Treadwell 2003, 218).For Adorno (2003), jargon should not be underestimated just because a small group of people utilize it in ways which obscure meaning from others while standing in for meaning and insight; rather, it is vital that attention be paid to jargon in order to better apprehend the range of meanings in what otherwise appears through jargon to be apparently transparent, but never quite is (Bielsa 2012, 24).This is not to suggest there is a cynical motive in the use of strategic management language and planning documents but to point to the radical distinctiveness of its language from the objects they claim to strategize about and therefore to present a public-facing story of an institution that is formulated differentially from the everyday activities of the institution.
However, the distinctiveness of strategic management documents and the experience of visiting, using or working in an LGBTQ+ collecting institution is, of course, not mutually exclusive when understood from a deconstructionist perspective.Rather, the trace of what is absent from the experience (the strategic management texts) points to the contingency of the experience, such that strategic planning is not absent simply because it has been framed off, but only ever deferred from how the operation of an institution is experienced.They thereby come to have relevance if we look at the structure of LGBTQ+ collecting institutions as institutions (Derrida 1967).What this implies for an analysis of LGBTQ+ collecting experiences is that they are partly constituted today by the trace of a language and genre of strategy that draws on practices of goal-setting, organizational tactics, the framing of activities as mission, and so on, in ways that reveal articulations of the role of archives that differ from those found in other scholarship that explores the collections or collecting practices themselves (e.g.Marshall and Tortorici 2022).The stories archives tell about themselves in the language of strategy, management and organizational reporting are one mechanism -among several -we can use to discern and unpack some of the multiple frameworks of motivation for what is often a voluntary and painstaking task for those involved.

Motivation #1: preserving and celebrating the past
The first and most obvious motivation of LGBTQ+ collecting institutions articulated in their strategic documents concerned the act of preserving artefacts of the past relevant to LGBTQ+ communities or histories, and this was found across all documents analysed for this study.At the most simple level, all archives and other collecting institutions seek to retain and preserve documentation and other artefacts that credibly tell memorial stories about the past (Plummer 1995).Yet the preservation of those in the context of minority archives relates as much to the formation of minority subjectivity as it does to mirroring the will to archive (Derrida 1996) among nation-states as the 'model' for collecting practices.The mission statement of the GALA Queer Archive in South Africa articulates the institution's 'primary focus' as being to 'preserve and nurture' LGBTQ+ narratives (GALA 2023).Likewise, the Queer Archive for Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) in Bangalore, India, articulates its key objective as being to 'chronicle and preserve the stories of communities marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality in India' (QAMRA 2023).Finally, the Victorian Women's Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives in Melbourne, Australia, which collects material related to lesbian-feminist contributions to the Women's Liberation Movement since 1969, states as one of its core strategic aims that it will 'preserve this material for posterity' (VWLLF 2015).In all cases of these and many other examples of strategic management documents that note the will to archive through the activities of perpetual preservation, the framing of the preservation is one that recognizes the documents and artefacts that pertain to LGBTQ+ community as belonging to the community and therefore worthy of preservation.
To see the materials as belonging to the community's archive is to recognize that the papers have an attachment to community: they are objects of a collective emotional investment.As Sally Munt (2007) points out, all emotional attachments are produced in the context of an unconscious or barely conscious somatic attachment to objects whereby that attachment is produced in the liminal space between the self and the social (12).The will to archive, deposit and preserve that which pertains to community is in this sense driven by an emotional investment that such materials have a connection to the community in a network of subjects, objects and 'things' that itself must be preserved not because the 'things' are interesting but because the connection itself becomes invested with a sense of community and commonality.In this respect, papers, documents, materials and other artefacts are perceived to have a 'stickiness' to community that implies a relationship, whether or not there is one and whether or not that relationship is relevant to narratives and stories of the past (Ahmed 2014, 211n5).
Within this strategic articulation, however, is the key concept of celebration of the past.This can be recognized as an emotive attachment to stories that articulate a community's past in what Heather Love (2009) describes as narratives of 'heroes' and 'heroic' acts.One exemplary instance is found in the mission statement of the Australian Queen Archives (AQuA) in Melbourne.AQuA is marked by its history as a grassroots, voluntary organization for several decades, the activities of which has resulted in a collection of over 400,000 LGBTQ+ historical documents and material objects.Its public mission statement frames this aspect of the practice and purpose, noting that the organization 'collects, preserves and celebrates material from the lives and experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex, queer, Brotherboy and Sistergirl (LGBTIQ+) Australians' (AquA 2023).Significant here is the third component beyond collecting and preserving: celebrating.This strategic aim signifies something beyond the more traditional collation and preservation found in state archives which, unlike other state institutions, rarely operate as sites of national pride.Celebrating here is framed as a strategic activity that gives the 'will to archive' a purpose or orientation.This can be read as extending an extant celebration of -or pride in -LGBTQ+ lives (Vaid 1995) into the personages, circumstances or social frameworks of the past, thereby stabilizing not individual lives but a communitarian identity across a temporality as warranting recognition, even if what the archive collects include stories of non-recognition and vulnerabilization of the past.
Across preservation and attachment we can recognize a triangulation of attachments as providing the underlying discourse of motivation for LGBTQ+ collecting institutions, what Munt (2007) refers to as circles of attachment and re-connection ( 216).The attachment to the preservation and celebration of the past stands in for an attachment to community such that 'things' that belong to or represent that community -whether the traces of the past or the present and future lives -are positioned as objects of necessary, emphatic and driven protection.A passionate attachment can be understood as the result not merely of an appreciation of that community, but as a psychic investment in one's own subjectivity and subjection to the regimentary frameworks that such a community stimulates in those whose sociality is conditioned by it (Allen 2006).Once we bear in mind that a minority subjectivity depends on an attachment to the communitarian discourses that constitute its intelligibility and thus become essential for sustaining that subjectivity's performance over time, we can see a possible orientation (one of many) towards that community as one marked by an attachment to its historical past, to the things that have no usefulness except that they belong to the community.

Motivation #2: sustaining the present community
A second story told about minority collecting institutions in strategic management statements is one in which the institutions are implicated in the preservation of the community in its present dominant formation of gender and sexually diverse identity as that which characterizes LGBTQ+ community belonging.While the will to archive question of motivation has an attachment to the past, the preservation of the community is one that attaches to the present.That is, by existing as an archive, it enables the community itself to be sustained as one institution -among severalthat facilitate identification.Indeed, across the strategic management documents consulted in this study, the term community appears more than 70 times, often in reference to 'representing' the community (e.g.Qtopia 2023) and to fulfil its aims by 'engaging' or 'sustaining' the community (e.g.Leather Archives & Museum 2023; Queer Reads Library 2023).Alongside the preservation-celebration couplet, references to representing, supporting or sustaining 'the' community or 'LGBTQ+' and variants were among the most common strategic objectives cited among the full array of documents consulted.
A strategic objective of representing and sustaining LGBTQ+ community points to the fact that these institutions recognize the community they serve and support through a logic of static identity, even if that is not represented by the internal diversity, contingency and identity fluidity that may be represented in the collections themselves.The combination of the normative, late twentieth-century terminology of gender and sexual diversity (Cover 2019), the strategy of engaging and sustaining, and the framing of community as that which pre-exists the institution draws on and re-circulates the formation of LGBTQ+ community through ethnic minority models and civil rights discourse.Such a framing of LGBTQ+ community has been contested regularly in scholarship and political commentary in favour of poststructuralist, postmodern, fluid and contingent approaches (e.g.Altman 1971;Jagose 1996) Despite the power of these contestatory frameworks, what has remained intact is a biological-ethnic framing of identity and community belonging (Epstein 1990).
Understanding how contemporary strategic management discourses as utilized by minority cultural institutions sustain and re-circulate the narrow liberal-humanist logics that uphold particular formations of community and identity is important, because it allows us to move away from the perception that it is only political organizing that provides that logic.In this context, collecting institutions provide the practice through strategic statements to sustain and articulate an identity fixity and discrete form of community that not only constrains the possibilities for contingent subjectivities and cultural practices to emerge but is in service to wider heteronormative and cisgender sociality, primarily by eschewing the opportunity to critique establishment norms (Altman 2013).In this sense, collecting institutions' simple articulations made in strategic management documents -that are often themselves serve the needs for state funding -fall into the service of the contemporary nation-state.While state and national collecting institutions are often legislated in ways which sustain their 'belonging' to the state as well as their long-term funding, minority institutions which began as grassroots collecting organizations which achieve belonging to state, community and local culture through an adoption of strategic management as protocol.This is an unwitting strategy Jasbir Puar (2007) has described as homonationalism: producing and maintaining a 'good queer' subject and community assimilable to contemporary western nations as one among several multicultural communities (Ruti 2017).
This framework can be seen in several examples of public mission statements of LGBTQ + archives around the world.One European archive, the Schwules Museum in Berlin, which is publicly funded by the City of Berlin, is oriented towards the preservation of a particular history of LGBTQ+ subjectivity, focused on preserving and representing the culture and history of queer people and sexual and gender diversity (Bosold and Hofmann 2018).Similarly, in New South Wales, Australia, the museum Qtopia is funded by a number of major corporate partners and seeks longer-term government funding.Its mission statement notes its intent to 'represent the history and culture of the LGBTQIA+ community with integrity, authenticity and accuracy' (Bowring 2023).Given the historical connection between collecting institutions -particularly archives and museums -and the nineteenth-century construction of the nation-state (Anderson 1983;Featherstone 2006), the homonationalist tendency of sustaining an extant, categorized and discrete community through collecting its past in service to its present is reinforced.

Motivation #3: aspiration for the future
Finally, the strategic documents revealed a third motivation for LGBTQ+ collecting institutions that can be described as focused on aspiration for the future, including future social change and justice.Arjun Appadurai's (2003) work on aspiration has been seminal in outlining the multiple intersections between archive as a practice and the aspirations of minorities and the disenfranchised.For Appadurai (2003), alternative and minority archives are grounded in humanist frameworks to give institutional intelligibility to the historical accidents that produce contemporary circumstances with a view to animating social change.The futural aspiration for social change built on memories of injustice or exclusion, of heroic acts of past figures and of shared knowledge of exclusion from the formal archives is, then, always futural because it produces a collective memorialization through which identifications are actively produced (Fuss 1995) and through which belonging is manufactured (Ahmed 1999).
Of the 48 international archives, libraries, galleries and museums we surveyed for this work, no fewer than 14 were explicit in including public education that promoted social change among their mission and vision statements, and their purpose for existing.For example, the GALA Queer Archive in Johannesburg, South Africa, recognizes its mission as one of prompting future social equality through inclusive education based on its collecting activities (Ncube 2022).Likewise, the Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand (Aotearoa) states its strategic mission as driven by an aspiration to contribute to the future of a supportive social environment and the promotion of future health for LGBTQ+ subjects (LAGANZ 2007).In another example of the aspirational divers of archives, the IHLIA LGBT Heritage archive in the Netherlands presents its strategic goal as promoting the social acceptance of LGBTQ+ subjects in that country.Indeed, their tag-line is 'Collecting the past and present informs and inspires the future' indicates not only a futural trajectory for its activities but openly presents a linear temporal framework that captures the above two motives as well (IHLIA 2023).Finally, the Unstraight Museum -an organization that holds temporary physical events and exhibitions across Europe and is aiming for a permanent physical home in Sweden -notes among its public strategic documents that it perceives culture 'as a means of change, globally' whereby collecting and sharing stories from a 'nonnormative perspective' operates as an aspirational enabler of such change (The Unstraight Museum 2023).This is one instance in which a minority LGBTQ+ collecting institution's strategic statements differs from the Straight traditional goals of a nation-state's collecting agencies and archives: the former incorporates an aspiration for social change, whereas a nation-state's archives actively preserve and maintain a status quo (Anderson 1983;Frow 1997).Importantly, this presents a renewed conceptualized for collecting institutions that differs from the everyday perception of archives: contrary to the outdated image of archives as dusty spaces available for consultation by historians, most no longer limit their focus and vision to collection and preservation but actively participate in pedagogical work through activities that engage and teach others (Marshall 2011).One of the strategic drivers for that pedagogical mission is typically seeking state funds to operate, whereby funding agencies and government departments are more likely to provide operational grants if there is a pedagogical, community or social outcome beyond only collecting, and if there is a genuine plan to promote diversity and inclusivity through public outreach as a key activity (Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd 2009).This is not to suggest that such aspirational pedagogies, as they appear in the strategic management documents, are necessarily cynical; rather, foregrounding the collecting institutions' mission as aspirational and pedagogical simultaneously incorporates a minority institution into the wider socio-political funding culture while generating engagement for social change.
In terms of the latter, it is useful to ask how the utterances in a strategic management plan attach to aspiration.We can do so by pointing to what Terry Eagleton (2015) identifies as the cultural formations of attachment to present activities that is perceived in liberal-humanist institutions as 'hope for a changed future' ( 126).This speaks back to the wider motivations to archive, collect and engage in the first instance.As Sara Ahmed (2010) has noted, there is a relationship between a struggle for a bearable life and aspiration hopes for the future, including futures for other subjects.She understands that any motivation for action -which in this case might include collecting activities or the strategy to utilize those collections for change -may indeed be difficult without any aspiration (120).Arguably, LGBTQ+ collecting institutions demonstrate an attachment to aspiration towards social change not because that is an achievable goal for such an organization, nor because those who volunteer or work in those organizations might emerge from a culture of activism, but because strategy is framed in liberal-humanist progressivism.This, then, suggests that such institutions are positioned by the force of strategy's approach to temporality within a liberal-humanist linearity of progress, whereby the injustices of the past are noted in the present, and the aspiration for change is to produce a futural sociality that overcomes but does not forget those injustices.Such a linearity of progress marks the broader cultural narrative of gender and sexual diversity as one in which a futural inclusivity and acceptance is not merely desired (Cover et al. 2017) but operationalized as a way of reading the present and future setting of LGBTQ+ culture.

Professionalisation, strategy and collection
Unpacking three of the core motivations for LGBGTQ+ collecting institutions through strategic documents helps us to apprehend one formation or narrative through which they justify their existence while shaping the communities they serve.At the same time, however, it opens the need to address some of the ways in which the adoption of strategic management language by organizations that emerged from voluntary, grassroots and activist frameworks (Duggan 1995) means for the wider inclusivity and framing of LGBTQ+ cultural practices.Many LGBTQ+ health, political, social and cultural organizations were effaced of their grassroots, radical and alternative organizing frameworks in favour of an organizational professionalism from the mid-1990s (Morton 1996;Vaid 1995) and into the early twenty-first century (Doyle 2008).Professionalization in any field typically occurs in the institutionalization of organizations such that their structure mirrors that of extant, cognate institutions (Luders 2008).It is a process, according to Foucault (2004), driven by disciplinary and biopolitical power mechanisms, whereby the professionalization of institutions, activities and ways of thinking or acting operates on behalf of producing truth-effects.Conversely, within liberal-humanist institutionalization, that which falls outside 'the professional' is implied to be suspect or unable to report or act truthfully.
A process of professionalization of collecting institutions more generally began during the second half of the twentieth century whereby state, public and corporate funds were put towards archives that were not official state archives, often representing minorities, and allowing them to be recognized as institutions (Rossington and Whitehead 2007).
LGBTQ+ collecting institutions underwent a similar shift towards professionalization, not only shifting from being housed in domestic spaces to fit-for-purpose buildings but also hiring professional and trained archivists, curators and specialists.The Schwules Museum in Berlin, for example, began as a grassroots organization run by volunteers and donations, gaining state funding and becoming recognized as an organization marked by professional practices -indeed, self-recognizing as such in strategic and reporting documents.In this respect, a circular narrative of professionalization told both in and by the language of strategic management produces a story of progress for the institution, the community and the society -even if a counter-story framed by a nostalgia for the nonmanagerial communitarianism is possible (D'Emilio 1992;Milner 1999).It also tells a (contested) story about the inability of grassroots organizing to sustain an organization if it fails to professionalize (Vaid 1995).In this respect, when LGBTQ+ collecting institutions as representative organizations within a minority community are seen to professionalize through the adoption of strategic management practices, it marks a particular kind of (limited) acceptance of minority gender and sexual subjectivity, a tolerance produced through homonationalism and evidence of what is perceived as institutional normativisation.
The self-representation of professionalism through strategic documents does not, of course, imply that an LGBTQ+ organization, its volunteers or its members are necessarily less radical, less alternative or less egalitarian than, say, the activist collectives of the past (Lunceford 2012).Rather, it should be borne in mind that the differential nature of strategic management language may not necessarily subsume hegemonically the entirety of alternative grassroots energies or the complete alignment of curators, volunteers and guides in collecting institutions with a particular expectation of behaviour standards.Rather, in the case of collecting institutions, it implies a conformity with particular ways of representing the self and the community and minority identities it serves.
Among the collecting institutions surveyed in this research, more than half distributed an annual report to a wider public audience and/or regulatory bodies in the relevant jurisdiction.Taking one example, the 2021 annual report of The ArQuives (LGBTQ2+ archives, Canada), the annual report adopts the strategic language, genre and framing of professionalism in terms of layout, presentation and graphics, indistinguishable from, say, the annual reports of major transnational corporations.Its content, however, is marked by the Foucauldian 'truth drives' that underscore professionalization: a message from the board co-presidents, a snapshot of events and projects over the past year, details of partnerships and sponsors given through the presentation of corporate logos andimportantly -a review of performance against six strategic objectives (The ArQuives 2022).
It is in this aspect of strategic management among LGBTQ+ collecting institutions that the incorporation of LGBTQ+ culture into a mode of normative everydayness is most discernible.Performance measurement against strategic objectives is at the core of strategic management and is that which marks an organization as 'professional'.The emphasis on reporting progress against objectives falls within the cultural ethos of risk management, whereby checks on performance and progress are utilized as a mechanism to 'secure' an institution -in neoliberal terms -by a self-surveillance that seeks to minimize the risk of failing to achieve goals (Evans and Giroux 2015, 95).Strategic management documents are focused on calculating risk in relation to progressing an organization's mission through performance (Horlick-Jones 2005), a cultural formation that extends from the growth of a securitization mentality since the nineteenth century, whereby an array of tools, mechanisms and practices are deployed to quantify, measure and rationalize performance (Foucault 2007, 60-62).In this sense, the narrative of the professionalization of LGBTQ+ collecting institutions is one not of progress but of assimilation to a neoliberal logic that provides a language -a way of thinking and beingadopting a normativity of organizational management.These both reflect and further embed the socio-cultural shifts in LGBTQ+ culture, not replacing older modes of grassroots and communitarian organizing that persist but adding new ways of being and thinking that represent gender and sexual minorities as 'fitting in' with other practices perceived as normative (Altman 2013).

Conclusion
Although this article only drew on a small sample of the strategic management documents of a comprehensive survey of LGBTQ+ galleries, libraries, archives and museums, the practice of analysing these indicates one of the key contemporary frameworks in which these cultural institutions tell stories of themselves.Although the motivations for existence and relationship with community are the principal narrative that can be discerned in these documents -and these conveniently emerge as narratives of past, present and future -a deeper analysis based on cultural theory points to the complex articulations of professionalization.Most well-known LGBTQ+ collecting organizations have in recent decades eschewed their grassroots, amateur or activist organizational origins and, simultaneously, adopted the language of strategic management for, at least, one form of self-representation to wider society.What this tells us is not only that LGBTQ+ collecting institutions no longer leave their collections to speak for themselves but also that this professionalization indicates not a resistance to normative cultures but an adoption of those norms in a form of organizational assimilation, As a cultural formation, this professionalized use of strategic management documents represents the institutions as 'good queer subjects' (Ruti 2017) which conform not only to social norms of inclusive and 'acceptable' gender and sexual diversity but to institutional and business norms of neoliberal organizational culture and risk management.The strategic management documents, then, provide a story of the collecting institutions which operate pedagogically: to be socially included as a community depends in homonationalist terms on disavowing radical or alternative frames of organization, management and decision-making -no matter how much those may be the stories that are told inside the collections in these institutions.