This summer I am interning at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. I didn’t really know too much about archives before I started, except what I learned in the Queer Publics class I audited last semester, from which my vision of a queer archive was a lot like the representation of the Lesbian Herstory Archive in the film The Watermelon Woman.
Since beginning to volunteer at the archive at the beginning of June, I have been regularly blown away by some of the amazing stuff we have there.
The Archive is organized into three main categories:
- Manuscripts
- Periodicals
- Oral Histories
but there is also an interesting collection of Ephemera which is organized by subject, organization, sites and other ways, and to my amusement contains an entire index of historical sex sites. Plus there are smaller collections of Posters and T-shirts and stuff like that.
The manuscript collections are probably the richest for research. One of the first main an important acquisitions of the GLBTHS was the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin collection which is, frankly, huge and has some amazing pre-stonewall resources.
But even though, that is really interesting and impressive, it is not really my style. I was more impressed by the fact that some filmmakers donated this collection of film, including a bunch of footage of a Sylvester music video, which may be one of very few copies. (or any, was the video ever even released?) One of the veteran volunteers is actually starting to put some of the video footage up on Youtube here, which is another really great project to let people access some of the cool stuff chilling in the archive. (no really, chilling. It’s climate controlled and cold!)
One of my first projects as an intern was to survey the Asian American material they had in the archive, since I concentrate in Japanese/Queer/Cultural Studies. While there are a few manuscript collections that relate to this, I dealt largely with Publications. There are certainly not full runs of everything, but I made a list and there are at least one copy of over 70 publications related to queer asian interests or communities. A lot of these include newsletters from local organizations like GAPA and APIQWTC, but there are also some gems of foreign publications such as the Japanese Kick Out from the early 90’s, and a somewhat racy glossy photo magazine from 90’s Taiwan called G&L Magazine.
The other main job I do around the archive is Research Assistance. Researchers from all over come to the archive to use some of the primary material available. I try to help researchers find what they need, and pull it from the archive so that they can peruse it in the reading room. It’s actually one of my favorite jobs because I get to hear some of the cool topics that people are researching. Recently there have been people looking for material on the Gay Games, COLAGE, Latina lesbian communities, 60’s anti-war visual culture in the queer community, and a woman studying the Queer Archive movement itself.
What I have been starting to do the past two weeks is Accession collections. Once a collection is donated, it needs to be accessioned, which is basically giving it a name and #, and providing a basic first assessment of what the collection is: is it video or manuscript? when is the material from? How big is the collection? etc. So basically I get to paw through a bunch of (usually) interesting stuff before anyone else does.
After accessioning, (maybe a long while, depending on the backlog) the collections go through processing, which is still mysterious to me, but it sounds difficult, or at least very time consuming. Especially considering that GLBTHS is a volunteer powered organization with only 3 paid employees.
I am regularly impressed with how much I learn every time I go to work without even trying.
