Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years
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Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years

The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life. The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life.

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social responsibility. As the archivist at the LA&M, I feel a dual responsibility —a responsibility to you all, members of the alternative sex and culture communities, as well as a responsibility to educate and provide access to a history that has been systematically and systemically ignored and kept out of traditional repositories. supporting each other through history. The LA&M is a profoundly moving place: a living entity; a site of memorial; a place for collective memories to be exhibited, to live. For 25 years the LA&M has provided a space for both people within Leather/kink/BDSM/ fetish communities, and also for those who aren’t in the community to explore the history of alternative sex and sexuality. I urge everyone to visit the LA&M, explore, and learn about why alternative sex history is important not just for the communities represented within the collections, but for the history of American cultural and identity development in the 20th and 21st centuries. I am eager to see the cultivation of professionalism, access, and expansion of the collections over the next 25 years, and the impact that the LA&M will continue to have long into the future. Our existence as a museum, archive, and library disrupts and challenges the notions that 1: explicit materials should not be embodied in traditional repositories, and 2: that these materials are too inappropriate to be “on display.” Through primary source materials and collections, the LA&M provides evidences of how the history of alternative sex and culture can help elucidate the sociosexual history of American culture. The Leather Archives & Museum is a sacred place that excites and enraptures. We are learning more and more that our sexual identities are pivotal to understanding ourselves and our histories, and the LA&M as an institution is poised on the forefront of providing evidence of this through our collections and exhibits. Sometimes I pace around the archives room, strategizing about the selection and processing plans for the next collections; sometimes volunteers and interns and I laugh hysterically and have to take a dance break after putting thousands of letters and drawings into archival quality sleeves. Often, we get teary at the beauty and resilience of leather communities loving, teaching, and Jakob VanLammeren, MLIS August 2016 59

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