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

MEMORY AND THE POWER OF PLACE:
MEDITATIONS ON ARCHIVES AND COMMUNITY AT THE LA&M
T
he collections of the Leather Archives
& Museum are not passive, idle.
These materials are living and active.
Sweat stains on the armpits of a bar vest;
Etienne murals, handwritten letters of
adoration and worship; newsletters about S/
M technique; organizational bylaws, event
ephemera, run planning documents; t-shirts,
leathers, denims, uniforms; thousands of
original artworks by greats such as kd
diamond, Rex, Steve Masters, Jacki
Randall. Mistress Mir’s corset; homemade
and distributed pornographic films; oral
history interviews. At the Leather Archives &
Museum, these are just some of the sexual
objects, memories, histories, club and
organizational records, and artifacts that
have become museum, library and archival
materials.
As a community archive, we have been on
the forefront of collecting, describing,
preserving, and providing access to leather
history for the past 25 years.
Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth
Shepherd are U.K.-based archival scholars,
and they provide the following definition of
community archives:
Community Archives are ‘collections of material
gathered primarily by members of a given
community and over whose community members
exercise some level of control. This allows both for
collections that are sustained entirely independent
of mainstream heritage institutions and those that
receive support in some form from such
organizations. Indeed, we argue that the defining
characteristic of community archives is the active
participation of a community in documenting and
making accessible the history of their particular
group and/or locality on their own terms’. (Source:
Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth
Shepherd, ‘Whose Memories, Whose Archives?
Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and
the Mainstream’, Archival Science, 9 (2009), 71-
86).
At the LA&M, archival work is guided by
principles and best practices of the
professional field while simultaneously
integrating the unique language,
descriptors, and cultural meaning of the
materials we collect. It has been incredible
to apply both of these methods and
practices to the LA&M collections. From
preservation assessments to deacidification,
rehousing to foldering, encapsulation,
integrating materials into archival sleeves,
metadata structures, catalog records,
digitization, volunteer and intern
management, completion of collectionsbased
projects, exhibits, and processing—
the archive at the LA&M is an active,
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