Short abstract:

This paper problematizes the present-day dominant paradigm of crisis response that seeks to de-escalate, triage, and transpose crises without addressing their root causes by excavating an alternative genealogy of vital infrastructures of mutual aid exemplified by gay switchboards.

Long abstract:

Crisis Text Line, the largest crisis text service in the United States, recently reported that nearly half (47.8%) of its texters identify as non-heterosexual. At the level of public discourse and lived reality, crises seem to have been conjoined with queerness, from the persisting trope of queer loneliness and estrangement, the health and political emergency of HIV/AIDS, to the media frenzy of youth mental health crises where LGBTQ+ teens are overrepresented. Hotlines such as the Trevor Project, in turn, have been posed as a technological “solution”. This talk offers a media genealogy of the present condition indicated by the Crisis Text Line report—the over-saturation of crises among queer, trans, and minority lives and the resort to the hotline as a sociotechnical redress—by returning to its analog incarnation, gay switchboards. The talk tells switchboards’ story through three interpretive frames: 1) a history of switchboard movements as distributed networks of information; 2) a biography of switchboard devices as mediated interfaces of encounter; and 3) a genealogy of switchboard work as vital infrastructures of survival. This talk points to a politics of crisis as a temporal form of vulnerability and a technopolitics of its uneven (re)distribution along lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and location. Through the archive of gay switchboard, this talk attunes listeners to an acoustemology of the closet, an empirical inquiry into how the closet became known, problematized, and acted upon through voicing and listening and a conceptual heuristic of knowing-with and knowing-through the audible.