Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years

undertook a dissertation project on the history
and social organization of gay male leather
and SM in San Francisco, the primary
material was sparse and relatively
inaccessible to researchers. Most of what did
exist was in private hands: garages, attics,
trunks, and dresser drawers. And that was
just what people had kept or admitted to
having. A lot of irreplaceable documentation
had already been thrown away, or was
considered an embarrassment.
This situation was not an unfamiliar one for
those of us who had already been working on
gay and lesbian histories. When I came out,
circa 1970, I immediately wanted to learn
about lesbianism and spent a few years
absorbing whatever sources I could locate.
Like leather, lesbianism and male
homosexuality had long been classified as
psychiatric problems, so most of the scholarly
literature consisted of medical texts on the
diagnosis and treatment of these “diseases.”
There were also pornography, pulp fiction,
and some serious literature (including a
handful of books such as The Price of Salt,
Patricia Highsmith’s pseudonymously
published novel, recently made into the
feature film Carol, 2015). The gay liberation
and radical feminist press was in its earliest
phases, producing at that point mainly
leaflets, manifestos, and newspapers. In
addition, there was the considerable body of
research and analytic work that had been
generated by the homophile movement and
its press: the Mattachine Review, One, The
Ladder, and The One Institute Quarterly:
Homophile Studies. The homophile era
researchers had also begun to assemble
both bibliographies and actual libraries of gay
and lesbian books and periodicals. However,
even the homophile publications, despite
their importance, were rarely collected by
major research institutions, and the
homophile era library collections were mostly
in storage. Until the 1970s, these gay and
lesbian sources were scarce, difficult to find,
and largely inaccessible.
Like many of the then mostly young gay
liberation era scholars, I quickly ran up
against the lack of sources and the dearth of
institutional repositories for the
LGBT knowledges that had been
accumulated by our predecessors. With the
emergence of gay liberation, the older library
projects enjoyed something of a renaissance,
and something new emerged as well:
community based collections of archival
documents, art and artifacts. One of the first
of these in the United States was the Lesbian
Herstory Archives (LHA), inaugurated in
1974, and housed for many years in the New
York City apartment of Joan Nestle and Deb
Edel. I first heard about the LHA when I ran
into Joan and Deb at a conference of the Gay
Academic Union, also in New York City,
probably in 1976. Two years later, when I
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