Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years (1991-2016) [digital]

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
moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to start
my leather project, I fell in with the newly
formed San Francisco Lesbian and Gay
History Project. This was a loose assortment
of people investigating various aspects of
queer history, and almost all of us found that
in order to do our research, we also had to
become collectors. In contrast to most
historians, who can go to established
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