“I hope that people look at this work and they realize how many people we’ve lost in the fight for queer equity, and that visibility for queer people is complicated: visibility is part of equity, but it’s also something that can still get you killed, so we have to continue to fight every day.” —Sean Fader
Artist Sean Fader’s Insufficient Memory is an interactive Google Earth map which allows you to engage with a digital memorial to LGBTQ+ lives. In 2018, Fader began combing through historical archives—including old issues of queer publications, many of which have never been digitized and are therefore hard to find—to compile a database of every LGBTQ+ person who was murdered in a hate crime in the United States while the Hate Crimes Prevention Act was being debated from 1999 to 2000. (The bill was not passed until 2009.) He drove 25,000 miles through 38 states to photograph the scene of every murder using an old Sony Digital Mavica camera that itself dates to 1999, just before the online sharing of photos on social media began to increase the visibility of queer communities. He then uploaded these photos to Google Earth, along with his short descriptions of each murder. The Google Database that is part of this work is freely available for you to experience on your own devices by visiting here.