Reprinted with permission from History Happens

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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 […]

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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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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 […]

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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 […]

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Making Space for Other Voices: An ACT UP Veteran Looks Back

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n honor of World AIDS Day, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Mason, whose current project is an art, care and community-expanding network called Queering Dreams that they recently cofounded with Jason Wyman, also worked with the San Francisco AIDS Project as a case worker in the 1990s. Mason was one of 23 ACT UP veterans who sat for an oral history as part of the GLBT Historical Society’s ACT UP Oral History Project, which was completed last year […]

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A Rosetta Stone of My San Francisco Life

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Back in May, we ran a story about a digitized collection we made available this spring: the Daniel A. Smith and Queer Blue Light Videotape Collection. This remarkable collection consists of nearly 100 half-inch videotapes recorded by the Queer Blue Light (QBL) Collective, a grassroots guerilla project that documented the politics and culture of the local LGBTQ community in the 1970s. The footage was all shot on a Sony Portapak, one of the first self-contained videotape recorders from the late 1960s.  While the majority of the tapes document the activities of the QBL Collective, they also include footage by QBL […]

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Displaying More of Our Rainbow: A Conversation With Ms. Bob Davis

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The Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive (LLTA or Louise), founded and managed by professor Ms. Bob Davis, is a fiscally sponsored project of the GLBT Historical Society. Located in Vallejo, California, it is one of the world’s largest repositories of archival materials pertaining to transgender and gender-nonconforming people in the world. In honor of Transgender Awareness Week this November, we interviewed Ms. Bob about Louise’s latest projects and on the significance of transgender history. What are some of the initiatives that LLTA has been focusing on during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? Ms. Bob: Back in 2019, I gave a […]

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A Woman Worth Knowing: Reflections on the Passing of Sally Gearhart

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This past July, the LGBTQ community lost one of its most stalwart and influential leaders: Sally Gearhart (1931–2021). A multifaceted, multitalented woman, Gearhart wore more hats in her lifetime than many of us could in several: she was a teacher, feminist, science-fiction writer, and political activist. She became the first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track faculty position at the university level when she was hired in 1973 by San Francisco State University, where she established one of the first women’s and gender studies programs in the country. Among her contributions to the struggle for LGBTQ rights was her fight […]

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Back to the Stacks: Two Archives Grants Provide Autumn Momentum

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Despite the new challenge presented by the Delta variant of COVID-19, the GLBT Historical Society’s archives are preparing for an exciting autumn. Since June, when onsite archives access became possible once again, we have been safely welcoming in-person researchers (along with the museum, vaccinations are now required for access). Executive Director Terry Beswick also spearheaded a successful effort, joined by eight other queer archives in the state and led by State Senator Scott Wiener, to submit a request to the California legislature for $750,000 in funding for the fiscal year that began July 1 to support ongoing recovery efforts. And […]

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Unexpected Fragments Through Powerful Hashtags at GLBT Historical Society’s Archives

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As the GLBT Historical Society’s archives reopen, we’re looking back on the things that kept us going through a lonely year. One of them was the National Archives’ monthly Twitter collaboration, #ArchivesHashtagParty. Each month, archivists all over the country post historical items with the same theme—ranging from insects (#ArchivesBugs) to cakes (#ArchivesBakeOff), elections (#ArchivesGetsTheVote) to educators of color (#ArchivesBlackEducation). The National Archives selects each theme two weeks in advance, setting off a scavenger hunt for just the right item in each archivist’s collection. Digging Deep The beauty of #ArchivesHashtagParty is that it encourages us to dig deep. You might not […]

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