Bay Area Reporter: Exclusive: Silicon Valley LGBTQ history website goes live. “The website is debuting ahead of LGBTQ History Month in October. The virtual Queer Silicon Valley exhibition includes archival documents, personal narratives, photographs, interviews, and videos of the LGBTQ+ community in Santa Clara County.”
LGBTQ history
Internet Archive: The Legend of GayBlade
Internet Archive: The Legend of GayBlade. “The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as ‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’. Once thought to have been lost, the game’s software was recently discovered and preserved—and is now available in the Internet Archive!”
Condé Nast Traveler: This New Map Is Digitizing LGBTQ+ Travel Guides from the ’60s and Beyond
Condé Nast Traveler, with a thanks to Esther S.: This New Map Is Digitizing LGBTQ+ Travel Guides from the ’60s and Beyond. “In 1964, California businessman Bob Damron was filling a void. A frequent traveler himself, he began publishing his guides annually as a way to help queer individuals, particularly gay men, navigate both their hometowns and unfamiliar spaces (similar to the earlier Negro Motorist Green Book, which aided Black travelers). Damron’s guides, colorful and discreet, listed known queer haunts across the U.S., as well as their defining features. Now, [historian Eric] Gonzaba and co-primary investigator Amanda Regan are using Damron’s 1965-1980 books to map historical queer spaces, moving state by state in an effort to understand the trajectory of queer communities and place them in context. Their archival project, titled ‘Mapping the Gay Guides,’ is a collection of digital maps, each covering a year of Damron’s guides.”
University Times: USI to Launch Online Archive Hailing Students’ Role in Marriage Equality
University Times: USI to Launch Online Archive Hailing Students’ Role in Marriage Equality. “The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) [has launched] an archive of reports, photos and videos… to celebrate the role of students in the 2015 marriage equality referendum…. It features details on the first time a USI president called for marriage equality – in 1977 – as well as how students’ unions pushed for exams to be moved so students could vote in the referendum.”
KPIX: Photo Tribute To 50 Years Of San Francisco Pride Celebrations Goes Online
KPIX: Photo Tribute To 50 Years Of San Francisco Pride Celebrations Goes Online. “The exhibition features photojournalism, portraits, posters and magazine covers from prior Prides. Many images came from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives but others are from other institutions and more than a dozen independent queer photographers.”
Attitude: Cancelled BFI Flare Goes Online With 230 Films, And We Are Pumped
Attitude: Cancelled BFI Flare Goes Online With 230 Films, And We Are Pumped. “Some cinema lovers are already stuck at home over the coming weeks due to the Corona Virus pandemic, which forced the BFI Flare London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival due to start yesterday [18 March] to cancel. But in great news for queer film fans everywhere, the festival will now become BFI Flare at Home.”
Erasing 76 Crimes: Online archive focuses on LGBT Kenyans from 1800s on
Erasing 76 Crimes: Online archive focuses on LGBT Kenyans from 1800s on. “Activist and author Denis Nzioka has launched KumbuKumbu, a new free resource that collects and preserves records documenting Kenya’s sexual and gender diverse cultures from the 1800s to today. Still in its early stages, the growing collection includes newspaper articles, book and film reviews, and research to showcase stories with ‘historical depth and understanding’.”
Queer in the Suburbs: Hidden histories of Peel Region (University of Toronto Mississauga)
University of Toronto Mississauga: Queer in the Suburbs: Hidden histories of Peel Region. “‘Groundbreaking’ research from U of T Mississauga is creating a new record of the unique experiences of LGBTQ2+ people living in Canada’s suburbs. The project collects first-person oral histories from current and former LGBTQ2+ residents of Peel Region and establishes an important new archive of suburban queer experiences. Select stories will also be featured in an upcoming exhibit at the Brampton-based Peel Art Gallery Museum + Archives (PAMA).”
SFYOU: Meet the professor engineering the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, Elise Chenier (The Peak)
The Peak: SFYOU: Meet the professor engineering the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony, Elise Chenier. “It’s likely that the majority of people reading this have not heard about something called the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (ALOT). The brainchild of Elise Chenier, an oral historian and professor at SFU, ALOT was founded in 2010 and is primarily a digital collection of audio and video recordings centring around people who have identified as lesbian at some point in their lives. The goal of ALOT is to bring to light both lesbian and queer women histories that mainstream history has largely overlooked.”
The Irish Times: Yes Equality campaign photographs donated to National Library
The Irish Times: Yes Equality campaign photographs donated to National Library . “More than 6,000 photographs of the Yes Equality campaign have been added to the National Library of Ireland’s digital archive, almost five years after the referendum that cleared the way for same-sex marriages to take place.”
Slate: Lives on the Line
Slate: Lives on the Line. “These handwritten logbooks offer a unique glimpse into the U.K.’s queer history. The help line started in 1974, partly to draw on the energy generated by the American Gay Liberation Front in the early ’70s. Volunteers set up the first phone line in the basement below a socialist bookshop in Kings Cross in London. They surely could not dream of the freedoms that were to come to LGBTQ people in the next few decades, or that Switchboard would still be taking calls in 2020.”
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: UWM Team Receives Prestigious Mellon Grant for “Archive Mining”
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: UWM Team Receives Prestigious Mellon Grant for “Archive Mining”. “The ‘LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project’ will use machine learning tools and data analysis and visualization to build and process text datasets extracted from a variety of AV materials in these collections, including collections of oral histories, local television news and radio broadcasts, and early LGBTQ+ community cable programming.”
Washington Post: The Library of Congress will house the archives of the famous AIDS quilt
Washington Post: The Library of Congress will house the archives of the famous AIDS quilt. “Mike Smith remembers how the disease ravaged San Francisco’s Castro district, the heart of the gay community. How you’d pass emaciated men on the street, covered in cancer scars, and how, by the summer of 1987, a thousand men in a 10-block radius had died…. On Wednesday, Smith, [Cleve] Jones, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) gathered to announce that the quilt project’s vast paper archive was coming to the Library of Congress and the quilt itself was headed back to San Francisco, where it began.”
Remezcla: This Photo Archive Holds the Untold History of Colombia’s Trans Community
Remezcla: This Photo Archive Holds the Untold History of Colombia’s Trans Community. “Each photograph is a gateway to many stories. That’s what the Bogotá-born artist Manuel Parra, known as Manu Mojito, learned early on as he met the trans ‘mothers’ of Colombia’s capital. These women shared with him vintage photographs from their family albums — of parties, beauty pageants, pride parades and of complex lives that had gone unnoticed by most of society. Then, almost eight years ago, Parra conceived the idea of Colombia Trans History. He imagined an archive of images, taken from the photo albums of trans women, that could weave together an alternative telling of trans women’s history in relation to what had been narrated by the predominant media of the times, which usually framed trans women as criminals.”
Vancouver Courier: B.C. Gay and Lesbian Archives collection has been digitized
Vancouver Courier: B.C. Gay and Lesbian Archives collection has been digitized. “The collection also reflects a broad range of LGBTQ2+ experiences and activities in the Vancouver area from the 1960s through to the present — including Aboriginal drag performers and HIV/AIDS activists, LGBTQ2+ community seniors, transgender activists, youth groups and LGBTQ2+ religious groups. It documents the evolution of a traditionally marginalized community, which has been historically underrepresented in archival holdings.”