Reprinted with permission from History Happens

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Continuing the Dream: Reflections on 38 years of collecting SF LGBTQ history

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On March 16, the GLBT Historical Society marks 38 years since our founding. To celebrate the occasion, we are thrilled to provide an interview with Greg Pennington, a founding member of the Society. To learn more about our history, visit glbthistory.org/timeline.

Was there a specific event that spurred you and the other founders to organize in 1985?

I moved to San Francisco in March 1977 as part of the wave of gay men that came here in the late 70’s. I heard about the election of Harvey Milk and George Moscone and wanted to live somewhere where I could truly be myself.

Just two months after I arrived, Anita Bryant helped overturn the gay rights ordinance in Miami and the San Francisco LGBTQ community reacted very strongly. The headline in the SF Chronicle was “5,000 angry gays march through San Francisco.” The marches went on for 5 nights and although I did not go to the first one, on the second night I heard the marchers going through my neighborhood on lower Nob Hill and I joined them for the next four nights. 

This event was a catalyst for me, and I began collecting gay periodicals from all over the country. I was collecting as much information as I could about everything that was going on in the gay community. I wanted to preserve our history.

I met with Harvey Milk in his City Hall Office in July 1978, about creating an archive for our community. He was very supportive of young people like me fulfilling their dreams. He told me that he would help me make it happen. He issued a press release for a community meeting that would be held on August 28, 1978. Unfortunately, Jack Lira, Harvey’s lover at the time, hanged himself near the time of the meeting and it never happened.

In 1983 I met Bill Camilo, through a mutual friend and Bill invited me to a party at Scott Smith’s house (Harvey Milk’s lover at the time of his assassination) for a gathering with the people that wanted to form a gay library. At that meeting I met Willie Walker. Walker, Camilo, and I later met and formed the S.F. Gay and Lesbian Periodical Archives. Walker and I merged our substantial collections and kept them at his house. Camilo would later drop out of our project. We included the word lesbian in our title because Walker was beginning to amass numerous lesbian publications, such as The Ladder.

Walker and I met in my living room in the summer of 1984 and discussed his plan to create a historical society. I went with him to a meeting of the SF Lesbian & Gay History Project on September 5, 1984, to propose the idea and get their support and help to create the organization. They unanimously agreed to join us.

Walker, Eric Garber, and I were among about 10 people that met several times in the fall of 1984 to form the organization. We made some initial decisions about things until we realized we would have to start over because we needed to have future members of the organization involved in the decisions. Then we changed our focus to preparing what decisions would need to be made at a public meeting to create a Historical Society. We organized the public meeting that was held on March 16th, 1985, at the S.F. Public Library.

 

What was the atmosphere like at the first meeting?

There was excitement in the air as a very broad spectrum of community members answered the call to create an organization. The meeting was very well attended by over 50 people. Many of us were meeting each other for the first time. Walker’s letter to invite members of more than 160 community organizations and more than 100 individuals was wildly successful.

I think we did a good job of organizing the meeting presentations, topics of discussion and decision points. The issue that took the longest to resolve was the name. After at least a half hour on that subject we chose the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. Fortunately, years later we made improvements to the name as it was just too long. We did fit that name on our early banner, buttons, and t-shirts though.

 

Tell us about the other founders: what were their specific interests?

Willie Walker was a labor archivist in Butte, Montana before he moved to San Francisco in 1981. He was a nurse and served on the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital. Walker, like me was a collector of periodicals and ephemera. He would go through community businesses collecting every free piece of paper he could get his hands on. His apartment, like mine was full of ephemera and printed matter. His apartment served as the first archives for the organization after we were founded.

Walker was always focused on doing things the right way to create a professional organization. He was our first archivist, and he got his master’s degree in library science in 1988 from U.C. Berkeley. Walker passed away from liver cancer in 2004 at age 55. It is very sad to me that he never got to see what the organization has become.

Eric Garber was one of our founding members, first Board members and served as our first newsletter editor. Eric was involved, like Walker, in the S.F. Lesbian and Gay History Project. Eric was interested in gay sci-fi and co-authored Uranian Worlds. Eric did research on all the gay bars, names, and locations in San Francisco. His research is in the collection of the archives. Unfortunately, AIDS took Eric before he could publish his bar research. Eric was once a roommate of Cleve Jones and a friend of Harvey Milk.

 

Were there any specific initiatives or areas of focus that the founders felt that the organization should prioritize in its infancy?

Walker and I both wanted to create an archive, but we realized that we would need a broadly focused organization to create interest and bring in the people and support we would need. The Society would create an archive but would also do historical programming, publish a newsletter, create a museum, and other activities to promote LGBTQ history. We had monthly programs in our first few years on a broad variety of topics of interest to the diverse elements of our community. We published the first issue of our newsletter very quickly after our formation.

The organization formed at the height of the AIDS holocaust in San Francisco when more than 20,000 LGBTQ people died. Walker and I were very concerned when families came to San Francisco for their gay sons that had passed away and threw away all of their stuff. We felt an urgent need to get as much of it as possible. We were losing a great number of people and a lot of our history.

We were also very keenly aware of what had happened under the Nazis in Berlin to the Magnus Hirschfield collection. At the time it was one of the finest collections of gay manuscripts and materials in the world. The Nazis destroyed all of it. Because of that we decided our collections must be under community control and not controlled by any government agency. We did not ever want to lose our collections because of a shift of political winds. We also did not want the government to censor, suppress, ban, or destroy our sexually explicit materials. Our sexuality is an important part of our history.

 

As the society approaches its 40th anniversary and we reflect on its impact, what are one or two things you are particularly proud of from this legacy?

I am very proud to have been part of the creation of this successful organization for the protection, preservation, and promotion of LGBTQ history. Any creator wants to be able to step out of the way and allow his idea and creation to flourish. I greatly appreciate the incredible volunteers, Board Members and staff that have continued our dream.

I am proud that we achieved our original goal of creating an archive that is a major research center for movie makers, authors, researchers, and community members. It is so important for younger generations to be able to learn about the history of our communities.

I am most proud of the diversity we have achieved in the organization. We still have further to go as there is always room for improvement. In the beginning we were mostly white cis men and we later had good parity of men and women but our consistent long-term focus on the importance of diversity paid off in the long run. Over time we reflected more of the racial and ethnic diversity and fortunately, we also expanded to include the transgender community. The LGBTQ community is the most diverse community on Earth, and we must reflect that.

 

What are your hopes for the society in the future?

I want to see a vibrant internationally acclaimed LGBTQ history museum in San Francisco that is a model for the world, and a tourist attraction that keeps LGBTQ people visiting San Francisco. It needs to be big enough to have space for us to reflect the vast diversity of the LGBTQ communities. I hope that our world-renowned archive collections can be co-located with the museum. I hope that younger generations will be excited to learn about our history and about all of the diverse elements of our communities.

Greg Pennington was a founder of the GLBT Historical Society. Originally from Wichita, KS, Greg moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles in 1977 at age 20. Greg retired after a 30 year career with the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 2014. Greg served as the first LGBT Program Manager in the nation in the EPA San Francisco regional office starting in 1998. Greg spent 20% of his work time on issues of concern to the LGBT employees. LGBTQ history has always been one of Greg’s most important hobbies.

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Assembling a 10,000-Piece Jigsaw: Archiving the Life of Angela Davis at GLGBT Historical Center in SF

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Few people have left as remarkable an impact on modern American culture as the Black lesbian activist, scholar, political prisoner and public intellectual Angela Davis. A new exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California, Angela Davis: Seize the Time, opening a half-century after her 1972 trial and acquittal, provides a unique narrative of Davis’s journey through the junctures of race, gender, and economic and political policy. Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition was first mounted at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum from September 2021 to June 2022 and will be on view in Oakland through June 2023.

The exhibition draws heavily on the archival collection of archivist, collector, and longtime GLBT Historical Society volunteer and supporter Lisbet Tellefsen, who is probably the world’s foremost archivist working with materials connected to Angela Davis. Tellefsen previously co-curated a special exhibition at the GLBT Historical Society Museum in 2018, Angela Davis: OUTspoken, now available as an online exhibition. To celebrate the exhibition, we sat down for a conversation with Tellefsen about her Angela Davis archives.

You have been collecting posters and archival materials about Angela Davis for decades. What is it like to be a part of this exhibition, to see much of your collection on display?

LT: While I proposed this exhibition and supplied most of the material, I was not the curator for either incarnation, and ultimately it’s the curator’s prerogative to choose the approach. But as an archivist, what excites me most about this exhibit is that rarely, if ever, would you see this much Angela Davis material assembled and displayed in this way. Archives—old documents—typically live in boxes in the basement of a university library. Normally if you’re interested in Davis, you’d find out where her papers are, read the finding aid and look through the posters in dozens of folders. You don’t usually see them all in one place, hung on the wall. So literally to have dozens of posters from around the world displayed with trial sketches, photographs, and documents, makes it a once in a lifetime opportunity to get immersed in this history. As an archivist, that’s interesting to me.

When the show was at Zimmerli, I used to wander through the galleries and if I saw a younger person, I’d occasionally sidle up to them and ask what they thought. One time, when I asked that of a twentysomething young African American woman, she said, “I’m really struck that this was before the internet; how did a young Black woman from America generate this much material around the world!” And I’d never really thought about that! Davis is not the President, she’s not a Kardashian, but a young Black girl from Birmingham, Alabama. To capture the public imagination globally in the late 1960s and 1970s—and generate this much ink—was pretty extraordinary.

So this exhibition is a culmination of your archiving work on Angela Davis?

LT: Yes. As a backstory, I had worked with my godfather’s papers, and for decades I pondered the question of how to use archival materials to reconstruct a long, rich life. And as I gathered Angela Davis materials, I stumbled across a methodology. If I digitized and assembled materials chronologically, I start to put the pieces of Angela’s life together like a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. And fate handed me some remarkable gifts. Print media started to liquidate their photo morgues and archives, and their staff photographers had documented every single day of Davis’ trial. I snapped up over 1,000 newswire photographs related to her trial, the Black Panther party, the Black Power movement, and trust me, when you put 1,000 photographs of Davis together in chronological order, very few of us have our lives documented that extensively and in that kind of detail. It was a remarkable exercise in the potentials of archival material.

You’ve been a collector—an archivist—all your life. What have you learned, looking back from the vantage point of 2023?

LT: I’m currently teaching as a Fellow at the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and I thought about this while preparing a talk there. A distinction I felt was important to make was that in the realm of archives, there are many different roles. Collectors and community archivists have a very important role in the preservation of history. Community archivists, as distinct from institutional archivists, may not be formally trained, but they have a passion for a particular history, they’re more on point for their passions. The zone I inhabit is really as a liaison between the street—the folks creating this history—and people or institutions. In addition to Angela Davis, I’ve worked with my partner on a Black Panthers archive, and because of my history as a Black queer publisher and organizer back in the day, I also maintain a Black queer archive.

NOTE: Angela Davis: Seize the Time will be at the Oakland Museum of California through June 2023. Angela Davis: OUTspoken is available on our website here.

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Understanding and Preserving Pain and Joy

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From August 1965 until the end of 1966, a youth group called Vanguard met in the Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. It is the first known queer youth organization in the United States, and most of its members were queer street youth. The GLBT Historical Society had digitized V, the magazine published by Vanguard, so when I found it I was entranced. I needed to understand the youth who published it. I visited the archives in person in January 2022, not long after hitting a wall in my research.
My senior history thesis was titled, “A Significant but Finite Space: The Limitations and Successes of the Vanguard Organization in Fostering Community for San Francisco’s Trans and Gender Nonconforming Youth, 1965–1966.” Previous scholarship about Vanguard has focused mostly on its public facing self and activism, but I focused more on its internal self: weekly meetings, community dances, and the social and material benefits of Vanguard. I especially highlighted the experiences of trans and/or gender-nonconforming members. I argued that Vanguard had significant limitations, but gave such residents relative freedom from discrimination that pervaded their lives, allowing them to safely express their identities in supportive community spaces.

The information I uncovered in the archives clarified the many contradictions in my sources. Stories that I uncovered from meeting minutes, newspaper articles, and letters became critical to my argument. Additionally, getting to hold the original magazine issues and flip through them was a powerful experience. The most interesting and useful item I found in the archives was a 2016 retrospective essay by Vanguard founder Adrian Ravarour, which gave me unique insight into Vanguard’s internal social dynamics. I learned that in 1965, the members held “family” Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, an instance of Vanguard serving as a replacement family group for queer youth who had run from or been abandoned by their blood family. I also learned that Vanguard’s second president was disliked by the Tenderloin’s trans and gender-nonconforming residents, suggesting that despite Vanguard publicly lambasting homophile organizations for emphasizing gender conformity, it was not a perfect respite from transphobia.

I came out publicly as trans near the end of my junior year. In part, this project was a way to reflect on who I am, what I value, and what history I’m entering into. I have also worked with kids and teenagers in classrooms and summer camps since I was a high schooler. This is our history, and we cannot effectively move forward without understanding the past. So much of Vanguard’s story is still relevant. Further, many of the people and stories I wrote about have been largely forgotten. It is important to remember and honor queer people who came before us, understanding and preserving their pain and their joy.

A disproportionate number of homeless youth today are queer, and many states have been passing laws targeting trans youth. We must use past queer experiences as inspiration to take action in the present. Queer and especially trans youth today need communities where they can care for each other and exist as their full selves while fighting for the right to exist and thrive. They need organizations like Vanguard.

To learn more about Jeremy’s project, email them at [email protected]. To explore issues of V magazine (later Vanguardmagazine), click here. (The first three issues were published by the Vanguard group, and the rest in 1966 by someone connected to Vanguard after the group collapsed and was reorganized.)
Jeremy Sass recently graduated from Vassar College with a BA in history and a minor in education. They researched the Vanguard queer youth organization at the GLBT Historical Society’s archives as part of their senior thesis. Since graduating, she has moved to Boston and works as a data integrity assistant at the MIT AgeLab. In their free time, they love to read, watch science fiction, and do origami.

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“An Impulse to Jump Into Things”: A Life of LGBTQ and Latinx Advocacy

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Longtime GLBT Historical Society supporter and board member Lito Sandoval has been involved in LGBTQ advocacy work for over three decades. A Bay Area native, he has worked with organizations as varied as ACT UP, AGUILAS, and the Queer Latinx Social Club, which he founded.


To kickstart the New Year and celebrate Lito’s final few months on our board, we sat down for a chat about his life and career.

How did you get involved with HIV/AIDS activism?

LS: I moved to San Francisco in 1988, when the AIDS crisis was already full blown. To be honest, I wanted to get involved in queer social activities, and AIDS activism was basically queer activism at that time. A coworker had been involved in ACT UP and I came along to a meeting. There were a lot of politically active people of different ages, a lot of folks who came from antiwar activism and worked on abortion-rights activism. Then I went to a local issues committee meeting focused on San Francisco issues. At the second general meeting the recording secretary had to step down and my impulse to jump into things took over, so I was recording secretary for a few years.

One of the first actions that took place when I was a media spokesperson was when we did an event in Concord in the East Bay, where I grew up, protesting Louis Sheldon and the Traditional Values Coalition. The soundbite that made it on television was me declaring “It’s, like, a human rights issue!” and I sounded like a valley girl! (Chuckles)

What was it like to be a young Latino man working in a prominent HIV/AIDS activist group?

LS: One of the things ACT UP did was control its image, and while historically people have seen it as predominantly white, they did like to make sure that when it came to spokespeople that there weren’t just a lot of white men. I remember a Board of Supervisors-sanctioned rally at Duboce Park where I gave a speech making fun of the fact that it was a “sanctioned” event, the point being that we should protest whenever and however we wanted! That night at Esta Noche, a Latinx LGBTQ bar on 16th Street, a Latino guy who’d been at the rally came up and told me, “Thanks for speaking, it was nice to see someone other than white faces.” 

We definitely tried to keep things open and social justice oriented and inclusive. You were busy all the time, figuring out not just what or who to protest but also the messaging, trying to get the message across. But I don’t think we reached communities of color very well, to be honest. ACT UP was conscious about its public image, but there were problems with tokenization. The People of Color Caucus, when I went, didn’t really have people of color. It was me and the boyfriend of the white guy who hosted. It actually ended up being a front for the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). One of my regrets is not taking it back.

How did your work shift more toward working with people of color/Latinx people? 

LS: The thing about my life is that I do stuff and move on; I mean, I was in a spoken-word workshop and ended up in a comedy trio! Things just evolved. After ACT UP, I was recruited to work as the political chair of AGUILAS, which was more of a social group, and that’s when my work became more Latinx focused. When I was co-chair on the board the El Ambiente HIV prevention program began. Then there was Proyecto Contra SIDA Por Vida, which was more arts oriented, with arts and writing workshops. I went to some of their workshops and because of that ended up writing skits with other Proyecto workshop alums Jaime Cortez and Al Lujan. We ended up getting a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. And so my erstwhile comedy trio, “Latin Hustle,” ended up with two sold-out runs at Theater Rhinoceros. We also took the show to L.A.

One thing I will say is that at the ACT UP memorial in 2015 commemorating 25 years since the 1990 AIDS Conference in San Francisco, I realized that at the time, we never allowed ourselves time to really grieve back then. We mourned the friends and allies that we lost, but it was such an intense time; you moved from this action to this action and the grieving process as a whole always got put on hold. So at the memorial, with the passage of time, a lot of intense feelings emerged.

NOTE: To learn more about ACT UP, check out the interviews in the ACT UP Oral History Project. Information about the AIDS treatment advocacy movement is available in this online exhibition.

Lito Sandoval is chair of the GLBT Historical Society Board of Directors. He works as a program manager with Notified and has served on many nonprofit boards in the Latino and LGBTQ communities. He is a former board member of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. He also founded the Queer Latinx Social Club.

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Would You Be Caught Dead in That Outfit? The Powerful Fashion of Translatinas: New exhibit at SF’s GLBT Historical Society

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There are those of us with more conservative fashion tastes, others who are willing to be more fashion-forward. But the question “Would you be caught dead in that outfit?” isn’t just one that you’d whisper to a friend on a shopping expedition—or behind a bridesmaid’s back at a wedding. For members of San Francisco’s Translatina community, the question is less an interrogative than a defiant statement.

Artists Julián Delgado Lopera, who curated the 2016 exhibition Noche de Ambiente with the GLBT Historical Society, and Rebeka Rodriguez are unveiling their new exhibition Would You Be Caught Dead In That Outfit?/¡Que Perra Mi Amiga! on September 22 at the Pacific Felt Factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. In photographs and through journals, the exhibition celebrates the legendary intergenerational histories of the city’s Translatinas, with a focus on the power of dressing up and kiki, or gathering together. Some of the exhibition materials and work generated by the show will be donated to the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.

We interviewed co-curator and photographer Rebeka Rodgriguez to learn more about the exhibition.

Tell us about the cultural importance to Translatinas of extravagant fashion and dressing up.

RR: Clothes become our armor out in the world. All those incredible gowns and sparkly suits. Dressing up as survival is one of the through-lines here: the power of certain outfits gives you the courage to go face the world. The dance floor is our church, where we go and worship each other and our community. One of the pieces on display is a dress that was given to Julián’s drag mother by a queen in the 1990s. So outfits have been handed down from queen to queen over time, and remixed and referenced.

What was the germination of this exhibition?

RR: Both Julián and I have a deep personal investment and long history creating work with Translatinas, specifically with El/La Para Translatinas, an organization that represents trans, intersex, and gender-diverse Latinx people; I’ve been photographing the women at El/La for more than a decade. Julián’s book ¡Cuéntamelo! Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants was republished by Aunt Lute Books in 2018 and that is when Julián and I worked on “Would You Be Caught Dead in that Outfit?”, a multimedia event at the Stud celebrating the aesthetics of 1980s and 1990s underground clubbing. There was a panel discussion which included one of the people featured in the book and we had a runway where everyone who wore their outfits got a chance to strut their stuff. I took photos, it was fun!

And then at the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, we facilitated writing workshops with five El/La Translatinas members who shared stories, drew images and wrote about their memories of creating outfits and hitting the club. I was able to photograph some of them in the intimacy of their homes. The journals with their stories as well as prints of the photographs will be part of the exhibition. So it’s been an evolution, it’s a project that’s a living history, and this is the latest incarnation. And it’ll continue when the work becomes part of the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.

How is this exhibition also a very San Francisco show?

RR: Part installation, part archival project, this show centers the lives of transgender Latin American immigrants and their contribution to the glorious fabric of San Francisco’s queer history. The contributions of Translatinas to San Francisco’s queer history is vast, deep, textured and layered, both physically and metaphorically Translatinas have always been here, on stage, in the streets and on the dancefloor. WYBCDITO highlights Translatina creative brilliance and resilience. By centering this history we make space for all of us.

NOTE: Would You Be Caught Dead in That Outfit? opens September 22, 2022 at the Pacific Felt Factory at 2830 20th Street, San Francisco, and runs through mid-October.

Would You Be Caught Dead
In That Outfit?
Opening Reception
 
Thursday, September 22
5:00 p.m.
In-person program
The Pacific Felt Factory2830 20th Street, San FranciscoFree
Join us for the opening reception of Julián Delgado Lopera and Rebeka Rodriguez’s new exhibition Would You Be Caught Dead In That Outfit?/¡Que Perra Mi Amiga! at the Pacific Felt Factory. Through dress-up and kiki, the exhibition celebrates the legendary intergenerational histories of trans Latinas on San Francisco’s 16th Street. Part installation, part archival project (with new material being donated to the GLBT Historical Society’s archives), this stunning visual collection centers the lives of transgender Latin American immigrants and their contribution to the fabulous fabric of San Francisco’s queer history. Would You Be Caught Dead is being mounted in collaboration with El/La Trans Latinas, the Transgender Cultural District, the GLBT Historical Society and AIRSF. More information is available here. No tickets are needed; entry is first-come, first-served.

Rebeka Rodriguez (she/her) is an artist, curator, and cultural producer whose work explores the body as a site for personal and collective histories, desire, community and queer aesthetics. She is currently working with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where she designs and implements creative programming, and is the Director for AIR-SF, a nonprofit project committed to supporting artists and producing relevant public art projects and expanding civic participation.

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Into the Vault: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour of the GLBT Historical Society Archives

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Friday, May 13
5:30–7:00 p.m. PT
Online program
$5 | Free for members
You’ve seen highlights from our archival collections on social media and in programs. Now join us on a behind-the-scenes look at the work of the GLBT Historical Society archivists. You’ll learn how archival staff preserve and share LGBTQ historical material, including processing collections, managing donations, digitizing records and more. You’ll get a peek into the vault, where the archivists will share some of their favorite pieces. Finally, we’ll be introducing a new workshop program we are launching this year that provides free archival skills training to the public. Speakers will include Kelsi Evans, our director of archives and special collections; Isaac Fellman, reference archivist; and Megan Needels, project archivist. They will also be joined by members of our Archives Working Group, a volunteer advisory group consisting of local archivists, historians and others in related fields. Tickets are available online here.

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SF GLBT Historical Society Offers a Virtual Tour of the Lyon-Martin House

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“A bronze sidewalk plaque just doesn’t cut it,” said architectural historian Shayne Watson when we spoke to her last year about the Lyon-Martin House, the San Francisco home inhabited for over five decades by Phyllis Lyon (1924–2020) and Del Martin (1921–2028). In 1955, Lyon and Martin co-founded the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), much of whose activities they oversaw from their house in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood.
 
Watson continued, “Just as Americans claim Independence Hall as a birthplace of American democracy, queer people throughout the world can claim the Lyon-Martin House as a place instrumental in the development and advancement of our fundamental rights—it’s part of our collective experience.”
 
That collective experience is now a three-dimensional one that anyone with an internet connection can enjoy. On March 22, the GLBT Historical Society, digital historic preservation firm CyArk, and the nonprofit historic preservation group Friends of the Lyon-Martin House unveiled a pathbreaking, 3-D virtual tour of the Lyon-Martin House. The virtual tour is available to the public and can be experienced on the society’s website at www.glbthistory.org/lyon-martin-house.
 
A City Landmark
 
The Lyon-Martin House is not simply a residence. Lyon and Martin purchased the house the same year that they and others co-founded the Daughters of Bilitis, and house quickly became the beating heart of the organization. They held meetings in its living room, planned events, edited DOB’s journal The Ladder, and built their lives together within its walls. Recognizing this, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously bestowed the status of San Francisco Landmark on the house on May 4, 2021. Friends of the Lyon-Martin House, a fiscally sponsored project of the GLBT Historical Society, is now working with the property owner, the city and other stakeholders to document the historic structure and plan for its long-term future.
 
CyArk’s virtual tour of the Lyon-Martin House is a groundbreaking evolution in digital historic preservation efforts, enabling far more members of the public to experience and learn about the Lyon-Martin House than would otherwise be possible. The house’s small size, limited occupancy and situation on a steep hill in a residential neighborhood present significant public access and accessibility challenges. The virtual tour eliminates all potential safety, accessibility and occupancy challenges while providing a seamless, three-dimensional experience for virtual visitors enriched by historic photographs, interviews and commentary.
 
CyArk created the 3D model for the tour using thousands of photographs and laser scans to accurately document the home as it exists today. The rendering additionally incorporates digital versions of several of Lyon and Martin’s possessions currently housed in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives to provide a sense of the interior when they lived there. The tour is organized into a total of 17 stations, taking in areas including the front yard, living room, second-floor landing and kitchen. At each station, visitors can use four keys on their keyboard to move in three dimensions and the right mouse button to rotate the camera 360 degrees.

Voices of Phyllis & Del

Each station is accompanied by historic commentary, reflections and interviews provided by LGBTQ historians, friends and family members of Phyllis and Del, including Marcia Gallo, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas; Don Romesburg, professor of gender and women’s studies at Sonoma State University; and Kendra Mon, the daughter of Phyllis and Del. Finally, the tour incorporates the voices and reflections of Phyllis and Del Martin themselves, drawn from the extensive oral histories and interviews conducted prior to the deaths and held in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives.
 
The GLBT Historical Society, CyArk and Friends of the Lyon-Martin House are very pleased to make this tour available to you. As San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the historic landmark designation for the site and represents the Noe Valley neighborhood, remarked on March 22, “It’s one thing for the city to grant landmark status to a building, but it takes community-led efforts like this to make that history accessible and fresh, something that’s especially needed when it comes to queer history.”
Click to tour the Lyon-Martin House

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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 in what looks to be a leather motorcycle cap plays it coy, turning away.

The GLBT Historical Society is delighted to formally announce the acquisition of this remarkable work of art, which has joined the archives’ Art and Artifacts Collection. The panel, painted sometime in the mid-1960s, is the work of Chuck Arnett (1928–1988), a ballet dancer turned artist. Arnett painted it as a recreation of a mural he had originally executed on a glass storefront window that graced the wall of the Tool Box, a motorcycle and leather bar on the east corner of 4th and Harrison Streets in San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood. Opened in 1961, this was one of the first gay leather/motorcycle bars in the city and became a pioneering leather establishment in this neighborhood that would come to be the epicenter of the city’s leather and kink community in the 1960s through the 1990s.

A Calling Card

The interior murals at the Tool Box, all painted by Arnett, were probably the establishment’s best-known calling card. Arnett painted one set of oversized murals along the south-facing, Harrison Street walls, and painted two mural panels on the glass storefront windows on the west-facing, 4th Street walls. One of the original glass murals was accidentally shattered when an angry janitor threw a broom across the room (the janitor later apologized to Arnett), prompting Arnett to paint several replicas on wood, including this one, probably painted in situ or from a photograph of the original. In contrast to the obscurity of the 4th Street panels, the Harrison Street murals became internationally known after photographs of the interior of the Tool Box were featured in a groundbreaking 1964 spread in Life Magazine entitled “Homosexuality in America.”

Though much loved and remarked-upon by patrons, Arnett’s remarkable Tool Box artwork was on display only a brief time; the Tool Box lost ground to other leather bars in the neighborhood and closed in 1971, and the building—with the Harrison Street murals still affixed to the southern wall—was torn down in 1975. Because the original glass panels were not shown in the Life spread nor in 1975 photographs of the building’s demolition, this panel provides valuable evidence of Arnett’s original artistic intent for his complete Tool Box decoration scheme. The panel was purchased and donated to the GLBT Historical Society in 2021. The donor acquired it from a San Francisco couple who had themselves purchased it at a garage sale some 30 years ago, and it had remained in their storage unit until last year.

Documenting Differences

We are still working with experts to determine when Arnett painted this panel and to fully document its provenance. Mike Caffee, an artist and former roommate of Arnett’s, and leather historian Gayle Rubin, have helped the GLBT Historical Society’s archives team with these efforts. In particular, Caffee identifies the leftmost figure as a portrait of biker and photographer Joe Winters. “[He was] drop-dead, movie-star handsome,” Caffee explains. “Chuck was smitten and included him many times in the murals.” Caffee also notes that rather than endowing the man in the white T-shirt with a tattoo of a black panther—a common motif used at the time to cover up older, unwanted tattoos—Arnett chose to give the tattooed figure a campy pussycat tattoo, while the text “My Sin” is borrowed from a women’s perfume by that name sold by Lanvin. Some interesting differences from the original glass panel include the fact that this mural includes men with blond hair, gray clothing, and a visible hand holding a bottle, none of which were present in the glass version.

While we are continuing to consult with experts in the field, we would love to hear more from the public about the Tool Box mural, especially if anyone has photographic evidence of the original glass panels. Our aim is to provide a complete picture of what the Tool Box looked like in its heyday!

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Curating With the Community in the New Year

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For over ten years, the GLBT Historical Society Museum has been a showcase for LGBTQ history, art and culture. Among our most beloved initiatives has been our Community Curator Program. This program invites members of the public, historians and curators to develop exhibitions under the guidance of GLBT Historical Society curatorial staff. As the society’s director of exhibitions and museum experience, I’m pleased to announce that after temporarily suspending the program in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have now launched a new format for our Community Curator Program!

Varied Approaches

Interest in community-curation models has grown dramatically in the museum and curatorial world over the past decade. Since we first swung open the doors to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro in 2011, about half of our temporary exhibitions have been conceived and curated by members of the public. Community curation has enabled us to mount unique exhibitions that reflect a wider variety of interests, approaches and topics than would otherwise have been possible.

In 2016, for instance, Julián Delgado Lopera and Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción curated an exhibition exploring the concept of ambiente(“environment”)  in the LGBTQ Latinx community. In 2017, artist and professor E.G. Crichton invited LGBTQ artists to create new artworks inspired by past issues of OUT/LOOK, a historic periodical of the late 1980s and early 1990s held in the society’s archives. And in 2019 Melissa Hawkins’s thirty-year-old photographs depicting bars and parties in the SoMa neighborhood formed the core of an exhibition about culture and resilience in the nightlife world during the worst years of the AIDS crisis.

A More Structured Process

While we temporarily paused new in-person exhibition proposals in 2020 and 2021, the break provided an opportunity for us to evaluate the program, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement. We have now updated and relaunched the program, providing a more structured application process, a revised set of timelines, clearer expectations and better support. These changes are designed to assist prospective curators in crafting strong proposals and further developing their professional skills in the process.

In line with the society’s Five Year Strategic Plan, adopted in 2021, we are especially looking forward to receiving exhibition proposals that focus on people with disabilities; people and communities of color; Native American/Indigenous people and communities; lesbians and women; and bisexual, transgender and gender-nonconforming or nonbinary people and communities. To support this goal, the new exhibition application form will be available year round. We welcome and will consider all proposals that demonstrate alignment with our mission.

Since 1985, the GLBT Historical Society has been a labor of love rooted in the LGBTQ community, and our museum has likewise sought to embody the society’s community-centered roots. This is your museum. We hope you’ll participate in the curatorial process.

To learn more about the Community Curator Program,please visit our new webpage, where you will find extensive information. The application form is available on that page and will be accepting proposals from January 10. And finally, I’m always available to answer your questions!

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Bridging the Lesbian Past and Present

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Over 30 years ago, Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve, the most successful lesbian magazine in the world, connecting lesbian community, changing the way lesbians are seen by the mainstream, highlighting the transgender experience, raising awareness of attacks on LGBTQ rights and amplifying the work of lesbian activists. One of the three 2021 recipients of the GLBT Historical Society’s History Maker Awards, Stevens reacquired Curve and co-founded the Curve Foundation last year to empower the Curve community — lesbians, queer women, trans women and nonbinary people of all races, ages and abilities.

The Foundation’s mission is to spur storytelling and cross-generational dialogue by supporting journalism inspired by the tradition of Curve magazine, investing in the next generation of intersectional leaders and bolstering community archives to ensure LGBTQ women’s culture and history are known. In addition to a fellowship to support emerging journalists, the foundation is establishing its own digital archives to preserve the living legacy of Curve magazine and inspire future writers. The foundation is currently hiring an archivist to oversee the launch of this initiative. We sat down for a chat with Stevens and Jasmine Sudarkasa, the Curve Foundation’s executive director.

The GLBT Historical Society’s archives enable people to learn about the LGBTQ past. Likewise, how are the new Curve Foundation’s activities inspired by the past 30 years of Curve magazine?

Jasmine: The work of the foundation is rooted in the magazine’s legacy: we resource stories and storytellers that embody authenticity, cultivate a sense of belonging and support intergenerational trust and resilience. These values are inspired by lesbian legacies of community building and culture work, particularly as embodied in Curve magazine. Putting these values into practice, then, we maintain two programs: The Curve Award, to resource LGBTQ storytellers, and The Curve Archive, which curates, activates and preserves lesbian stories well into the future.

Franco: There is no other organization that bridges our past and our present so directly. By preserving and making the Curve Archive available, we are honoring our history and making it visible and accessible today. By supporting today’s journalists and inviting them to find inspiration in the archives, we are fostering an intergenerational dialogue. All of the foundation’s programming is rooted in our history as a way of not only preserving our past, but also informing how we carve out our future.

The Curve Award is designed to foreground the voices of those who have been marginalized or censored. What kind of support do recipients receive?

The five winners of the Curve Award receive a $5,000 cash award, one-on-one mentoring through the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association (NLGJA), cohort-based professional development and opportunities for outward-facing visibility. This might include conference presentations at NLGJA, writing opportunities for Curve, and so on. We are incredibly proud of the 2021 cohort—they are an incredible cadre of emerging journalists and have been published everywhere from the New York Times to Them. Applications for the 2022 cohort will go live in April, and we hope to hear from many more journalists this year. 

The Curve Archive will make the entire run of Curve magazine available to the public in 2022; how has the GLBT Historical Society’s work helped with this project?

The GLBT Historical Society has been an invaluable partner to us in our first year of operations. The archival and development teams have been incredibly gracious, helping us to understand what it really takes to orchestrate and operate a compelling archive. We have a lot of gratitude for the leadership of the society in both setting the standard for efficacy and creating space to teach new partners in the field. It’s a very generous way to steward LGBTQ history, and very much in line with our approach to the work.

Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve in 1990. She has served on the board of GLAAD, was a founding board member of the San Francisco LGBT Center, and has worked extensively to promote lesbian visibility and educate media professionals on the lesbian market. Franco is the subject of the documentary Ahead of the Curve (dir. Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, 2020).

Jasmine Surdakasa is the executive director of the Curve Foundation. She learned philanthropic practice while serving as the program fellow for the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, exploring equitable methods and power-sharing. Before philanthropy, she served as the senior trainer on behalf of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), subject agency of the film Very Young Girls.

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