A Revisionist History: How Archives are Used to Reverse the Erasure of Queer People in Contemporary History

In 1953, a group of Mattachine Society members in Los Angeles, who were eager to take a more activist stance on “homophile” issues, came together to publish the first national gay and lesbian periodical, ONE Magazine. ONE followed activist leader Harry Hay’s vision of gay and lesbian people as an oppressed minority group and challenged the status quo with cover stories on same-sex marriage and federal anti-gay witch hunts.

Don Slater, W. Dorr Legg, and Jim Kepner built on the success of ONE Magazine to create ONE Incorporated, the most accomplished gay and lesbian rights advocates of the 1950s. The organization was the first to establish a public LGBT research library (1953), provide social services to the LGBT community (1953), host conferences on LGBT rights (1955), teach classes in LGBT studies (1956), and publish a LGBT scholarly journal (1958).

As ONE Archives’ curator, David Evans Frantz, explained in an interview with KCET (a Los Angeles-area television station), archiving “wasn’t something ONE ever set out to do, though it was always an ongoing, if unplanned, activity of the organization.”¹ Starting with The Well of Loneliness in 1942, Kepner soon amassed a large library of gay and lesbian related materials in his Torrance, California, apartment, and began allowing researchers access to his collection. A board of directors was created and the collection was incorporated as the National Gay Archives in 1979 and then, as the scope of the collection expanded, the International Gay & Lesbian Archives in 1984.

In 1994 ONE Incorporated, and its vast research library, merged with the International Gay & Lesbian Archives to become the largest LGBT archives in the world. In 2010, ONE officially became a part of the University of Southern California Libraries system. “ONE’s power as a collection,” Frantz argues, “is in its spirit as an open, inclusive repository of the queer community and its insatiable, unwavering drive to preserve materials that mainstream institutions have historically deemed uncollectable or lacking merit.”²

Since its inception, ONE has taken on several incarnations and has been reinvented many times over the years to fit the needs of a growing and diverse queer population. Today, continuing with this tradition, ONE regularly reimagines and repurposes the collections by creating new and diverse access points into the histories, allowing them to be consistently rediscovered through a new generational lens. The newest access points include ONE’s educational programs, most notably the LGBT Inclusive Curriculum Project that introduces a LGBT-inclusive curriculum into Los Angeles area high schools.

FAIR (Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful) Queer History: Coming to a High School History Class Near You

There is no better way to ensure that the legacy of our community’s history lives on than by teaching it to our LGBTQ-identified youth. In July 2011, California passed the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), which was vital to the creation of safer schools for our LGBTQ-identified youth.

The bill updates references to certain categories of persons and requires instruction in social sciences to include a study of the role and contributions of LGBT Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other cultural groups to the development of California and the United States. Although the passing of the FAIR Education Act was a remarkable step forward, the bill passed with no specific mandates or time frames to create updated curriculum and no funding to provide trainings for teachers on how to implement this new LGBT-inclusive curriculum.

When the bill passed in 2011, updated textbooks were not scheduled to be produced until at least 2015, contingent on budget, which left, at minimum, a three-year gap before any type of statewide mandated LGBT-inclusive curriculum would reach the classrooms. Due to the institutionalized homophobia that pervades many communities and the lack of accountability at the state level, most districts across the state decided to simply ignore the FAIR Education Act altogether.

There are thousands of California teachers who understand how...