Early in his documentary The Whistle, StormMiguel Florez muses about his LGBTQIA+ friends who grew up in other parts of the country in the ’70s and ’80s who always say, “I didn’t know anybody like me.”
Florez retorts, “Albuquerque was packed full of queers back then!” Later in the film, we see a woman holding a scrapbook. It shows the wear and tear of being well-loved over many years. A bumper sticker reading “Get Wrecked” falls out of it and she chuckles. To her, it’s a scrapbook of cherished memories. To our underrepresented community, it’s a treasure trove, an archive, a key to reminding us that we’ve always been here and we’re not going anywhere.