Concerned that the Bay Area's lesbian past was quickly disappearing, Oakland resident Lenn Keller put out a call in April 2014 for anyone with stories to tell and ephemera to donate to contact her.
So began the Bay Area Lesbian History Archives Project. It grew out of a talk Keller had given a few months prior about the need to preserve "Bay Area lesbian legacies" and what was being done in regard to Bay Area lesbian history preservation.
As she notes on the project's website, "Currently, little representation of lesbians exists in local archives. Some are almost out of space, creating a critical and immediate need for a local facility to preserve and process the activist, cultural, and community history of lesbians from the last sixty years, and into the future."
Keller, 63, a photographer and filmmaker, in 1975 moved to the Bay Area. Six years later she began documenting the Bay Area lesbian scene, with a special focus on lesbians of color, and other marginalized communities through photography, film, video, and oral history.
Her collection of lesbian archival material includes posters, fliers, and other memorabilia. It is modeled after the Lesbian Herstory Archives located in Park Slope, Brooklyn and the June L. Mazer Archives in West Hollywood, billed as "the largest major archive on the West Coast dedicated to preserving and promoting lesbian and feminist history and culture."
The Bay Area collection, said Keller, "is not just for the lesbian community and it is not just for the queer community. I feel it is for everybody."
Her goal is "to house it, to preserve it, and to make it accessible to everyone."
Eventually, Keller would like to lease or purchase a building, most likely in Oakland or another East Bay city, where she can process the various items she is gathering and make them available online "for the enrichment of the public."
There already is the GLBT Historical Society, which maintains an archive accessible to researchers and others in downtown San Francisco and operates a museum in the city's gay Castro district. The preservation group traces its beginnings to the early days of the AIDS epidemic when gay community members began saving the belongings of the hundreds of men dying from the little understood disease.
There is also the San Francisco Public Library's GLBT Archival Collections, which houses the papers of many LGBT people and organizations, some of which is held on behalf of the GLBT Historical Society.
Since her collection has a more regional focus, Keller does not see her project as competing with the already established LGBT archives.
"There is a whole lot that has not been captured," said Keller, who is unsure of how many items she has amassed for the local lesbian archive and is starting to catalogue it.
Lexington Club history
One project with a specific focus that touches upon the more universal approach Keller has taken in documenting Bay Area lesbian history is the Lexington Club Archival Project. It is described by its founders as "documenting the stories, sounds and images of San Francisco's iconic queer and lesbian bar, the Lexington Club."
After 18 years of serving up drinks in a small, corner Mission district dive bar, the Lexington closed April 30. It was the last full-fledged lesbian bar in the city.
After news of its pending closure broke last fall, documentary filmmakers Susie Smith and Lauren Tabak decided to create a celluloid record of the Lexington's history.
"I heard about the closing via a Facebook post and had a deeply emotional reaction," said Tabak, even though it had been a while since she last visited the bar, citing "Netflix, domestic partnership, you get older" as the cause of her absence. "Nonetheless, I felt a deep sadness."
They captured the bar's last days with their cameras and have been filming interviews with its patrons and employees �" 40 to date �" in addition to collecting old photos, videos, and other ephemera from the Lexington's heydays. This summer the filmmakers plan to visit New York; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and New Orleans "to collect more stories from the lesbian diaspora," said Tabak.
They also have stacks of old Polaroids taken at the Lex over the years, a collection of hundreds of photos of patrons that needs to be organized.
"We feared the project would be overly nostalgic," said Tabak. "But it is a way to grieve and memorialize the space and show the public the importance of queer spaces. If the trend continues, younger people will be asking what is a lesbian bar?"
Assisting on the project is Diana Yip, 26, a queer woman born and raised in San Francisco who had only been to the Lexington once before it closed.
"There is no substitute for a peer-to-peer, in-person community," said Yip, adding that helping to gather patrons' recollections "allowed me to live the Lex experience through those stories. It has given me a chance to be part of a community I missed out on."
Separate from the video project, former patrons of the Lexington have been raising money to install a plaque in the sidewalk in front of the building that housed the bar. The project has drawn backing from San Francisco Beautiful, the Board of Supervisors, and San Francisco Public Works.
A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $5,400 toward a total goal of $6,500 to pay for the creation of the plaque, which is currently being produced, as well as its installation.
"This is an opportunity for us all to give back and say thanks, and to immortalize its presence on 19th and Lexington," notes a message on the donation page. It adds that, "Remember �" we never had to pay a cover or drop a dime. All we had to do was show up and walk in. Now's our time to give back."
Both the Bay Area lesbian archives and Lexington Club film archival projects were featured at a kick off event held June 10 for California Pride: Mapping LGBTQ Histories. The online database, which is crowd-sourced and hosted by History Pin, features places and sites of significance to the LGBT community throughout the Golden State.
Anyone can add a specific site to the map �" found at http://www.historypin.org/project/469-california-pride/ �" as well as post photos, other images, or videos that correspond to the address. Already people have posted about LGBT places in Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Fresno, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, and Eureka.
One posting recalls the history of the former Los Guilucos School for Girls in Santa Rosa, which housed "delinquent and wayward" teenagers, many of whom were lesbians. When a dozen of the residents were transferred in March 1953 to the Mendocino State (psychiatric) Hospital for "engaging in homosexual practices," according to the posting, the remaining women rioted.
The mapping project is an offshoot of the work being done by Donna Graves and Shayne Watson, the authors of a citywide LGBTQ historic context statement for San Francisco now under review by city planning and historic preservation staff. After the women revise the 355-page draft document, they expect to publicly release it sometime this fall ahead of official adoption by the city.
"We knew that these histories can't get told without people's personal stories," said Graves, a public historian based in Berkeley who is straight. "It is important to get them now. So many structures and places that hold these histories are being replaced."
One of the lost places featured on the California Pride map is Maud's, a lesbian bar that was located at 937 Cole Street in San Francisco's Cole Valley neighborhood from 1966 to 1989. Since 2009 former Maud's patrons have gathered at the site, now home to the bar Finnegan's Wake, the Saturday of Pride weekend.
This year's reunion will take place from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 27. During the event Graves and Watson will be teaming up with StoryCorps to record reminiscences from six of the Maud's regulars.
Not only will the recordings become part of StoryCorps' OutLoud initiative, snippets of them will be added to the Maud's pin on the California Pride map.
"As far as we know, the Maud's reunion is the only event of its kind in the country where an LGBT bar's former patrons reclaim the space every year to honor and remember their history," Watson, an architectural historian based in San Francisco who is lesbian, wrote in an email. "It's an incredibly poignant example of grassroots preservation and a very sweet event."
To learn more about the Maud's reunion, visit its Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/events/980402068671089.
For more information about the Bay Area Lesbian History Archives Project, visit its website at http://labryshealthcarecircle.com/ace/balhap.html.
To learn more about the Lexington Club Archival Project, visit http://www.lexingtonclubarchivalproject.org/.