Mark Sawchuk

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The Artistry of Leather and Desire: Archives Acquire Tool Box Mural

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Striking in its composition, this superb painted mural is yellowed with age and nicotine stains but still brims with sexual energy. The figures are seemingly drawn from a wide cross-section of mid-century society. A tattooed man in a sleeveless T-shirt fixes the viewer with a gaze suggestive of desire. A more bourgeois-looking fellow wears a striped turtleneck, while in the background a man in a full suit and tie looks on. To the left of center, a man wearing a leather cross-stitched shirt gazes at the rear end of a nearby patron, while in the very center a broad-shouldered man […]

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Queer Kinship Among the Seen & Unseen: Exploring Japanese American LGBTQ Lives

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A new online exhibition provides a pathbreaking look at LGBTQ lives and culture in the Japanese American community in the United States. Curated by Stan Yogi and Amy Sueyoshi, a frequent GLBT Historical Society collaborator, Seen And Unseen: Queering Japanese American History Before 1945 is a project of J-Sei, a Japanese American community organization in Emeryville. The show draws on a variety of sources, including some of our archival collections, to unearth a hidden past when same-sex relationships and female impersonation were accepted parts of nikkei (Japanese American) immigrant culture. The exhibition also explores how, over time, the nikkei community’s atittudes came to […]

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Sampling Ten-Minute Tastes of the LGBTQ Past: Preparing for Queer History Conference 2019

Reprinted with permission from History Happens, the newsletter of the GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco)” with a link to our website (www.glbthistory.org). bIn June 2019, the GLBT Historical Society is co-hosting an unprecedented gathering in San Francisco: the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender History’s first stand-alone conference, Queer History Conference 2019. Founded in 1979, the committee is an affiliate of the American Historical Association that promotes the study of the LGBTQ past by facilitating communication among scholars in a variety of disciplines. As the conference approaches and participants finalize their papers, History Happens dropped in for a chat with the conference co-chairs, Amy […]