This chapter offers a ‘wibbly-wobbly’ account of a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual (LGBT) community history and archiving project, How We Got Here (see also Moore, 2015). The project was initiated by The Proud Trust (TPT), ‘home of LGBT+ youth’, a regional network of LGBT youth groups across Manchester and North West England, who partnered with a number of organisations, including Schools OUT UK. The project traced three interrelated threads of LGBT activism that were particularly focused on Manchester and the north-west of England, but both the project and the original activism also paid attention to how the city and region are inevitably enmeshed in national and global politics. The three strands of activism centred on:

• 1. the establishment of the first purpose-built gay centre in Europe, in Manchester in 1988; this is now managed by TPT;

• 2. work in schools, supporting teachers and pupils, including the setting up and campaigning of Schools OUT UK (formerly called the Gay Teachers’ Group);

• 3. histories of LGBT youth work in Manchester.

Thus, the project also centred on histories of LGBT activism that rarely receive attention – including the campaigning of teachers and youth workers in schools and youth clubs and beyond. Such sites of intergenerational exchange are useful for thinking about change, how change is understood and how what counts as change itself changes over time in the context of LGBT activism. The youth work practised by TPT has a strong emphasis on participation and informal learning. This ethos was reflected in the project, which was conceptualised as participatory community history involving young people from a number of LGBT youth groups across Manchester.

This participatory project, focusing on the creation of queer histories, forms the basis for the current chapter which draws on Susan Leigh Star's (2010) concept of ‘boundary objects’ to explore the often invisible work of collaboration. In particular, I explore the making of queer transgenerational histories and archives, and highlight differences and tensions across the project, around matters of whose histories are included and whose are excluded.