Local transgender residents who have personal collections of historical items about their community are invited to a workshop San Francisco Public Library staff are hosting to learn how to best protect their individual archives. Those interested in beginning to preserve their own materials are also welcome to attend and will be sent home with an archival starter kit.
Purposefully scheduled to occur during Transgender History Month, the August 17 workshop is the first devoted to transgender community archivists that the library has sponsored. More than 40 people have already expressed interest in attending.
"The program is to support community archivists, to reach out to communities, and let them know that their stories and their memories are important and need to be preserved," said Katherine Ets-Hokin, a straight ally who is a librarian archivist with the library's San Francisco History Center. "And to empower people to control their own narratives. Maybe narrative isn't the right word, to control their own legacy. When researchers write books, they use primary sources and archives are a primary resource."
This is the second such gathering archival staff with the city's library have hosted this year that focuses specifically on LGBTQ home archivists. The first, in January, was held for members of the local queer Black community.
Video artist and filmmaker Texas Starr, a trans guy who chairs the advisory board for the library's James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, will be among those speaking at Saturday's workshop. It will take place from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Hormel Center's reading room on the third floor of the Main Library in the city's Civic Center.
"This is fantastic," Starr said. "This is really incredible for our community to get to be able to learn the tools that we need to preserve our history."
The purpose of the gathering is not to seek new materials to accession into the San Francisco History Center's collection or that of the Hormel Center, stressed organizers. Rather, the intention is for the library archival staff to share the tricks of the preservation field with attendees so they can ensure their ephemera, photographs, papers, and other historical items they have collected over the years are protected for perpetuity.
"The reason why someone should come to this is just to gain skills," said Cristina Mitra, a queer woman of color who has been the Hormel Center's program manager since 2021. "We are trying to make sure the skills our archivists have and are trained in are not just held in those people."
Preserving photos
One topic area to be covered will focus on preserving photographs. Ets-Hokin shared with the Bay Area Reporter one tip she plans to bring up is to not write with pens or regular pencils on the backside of photos, as the ink can bleed into the front of the picture or onto another photo if stored in a pile. She said the best writing instrument to use is a 4B pencil, which is part of the starter kit attendees will receive and can be found at local art supply stores.
"It's got soft lead and won't create a crease or imprint in the photo," she noted.
Mitra added that the city's foggy climate will be another focus of the discussion. It presents unique issues for storing archival materials, she noted.
"We want the community members to understand we live in San Francisco where there is a lot of moisture in the air. We will go over how that is impacting their own photos," said Mitra.
Another purpose of the workshop is to introduce trans community archivists to each other so they can learn about the various materials people have collected, confer on best practices going forward, and think about ways to share their various collections with the community at large.
"We are hoping people leave with some excellent skills and build some community with people interested in similar things," said Mitra, who is in the process of setting up a collaborative relationship between the Hormel Center and the Argentinian preservationist group Archivo Trans.
The organizers also aim to emphasize that materials documenting the lives of everyday people are just as valuable as that of more prominent members of the trans and queer communities.
"People hear the word archives and will think, 'Oh, I haven't done anything important enough. I am not Harvey Milk.' You don't have to be Harvey Milk to have your materials in the archives," said Mitra, referring to the city's first gay supervisor.
She recounted having such a conversation during the city's LGBTQ film festival with a member of a local LGBTQ car enthusiast group. They have been wondering what to do with the boxes of materials they have preserved over the years detailing its history and didn't think it was of value to an archive.
"Not true," Mitra said she told the person.
Workshop attendees are welcome to bring an item from their home collections, within reason, to share at the event, like a book of photographs or some small holding of theirs.
"If you have say, a mannequin of some significance, you probably should not bring that," said Mitra.
The purpose for attendees to do so is to discuss what sorts of things people are collecting and how best to store them, said Mitra, not because the library may want to add the items shared to its holdings.
"This is not us saying, 'We want this from your community in our collection.' This is us saying, 'We are here for you and want to share with you what we know.' There are many ways for you to be able to preserve and share your own memories and your community's memories," said Mitra.
The workshop is also a way to have a conversation with attendees about the things they should be thinking about if they want to someday donate their collections. If they were to die, have they left instructions in a will or told a friend or family member where they would want to see their archives be housed?
And for trans individuals, noted Ets-Hokin, have they thought about if they would want their given name at birth to be used as part of their donor identifier information or not.
"With archives, the name you use is so important," she said. "Making that decision for yourself is part of the process."
Building future partnerships
Leaders of the Hormel Center have acknowledged over the years that the collection is lacking in terms of representation of the transgender community. They have purposefully been looking to remedy that discrepancy.
"San Francisco's transgender community is underrepresented in the local archival repositories," said Starr. "We have so much history, and so much that is born in San Francisco, and it is not reflected. That is why we want to train the community how to present their collections to whatever archive they might choose, and tell our story. Because it is so fantastic, so much has changed in such a short amount of time. We need community archivists to help tell the story."
It was one reason why Starr donated his personal video collection to the Hormel Center, as the B.A.R. reported last year. Starr first began making video art in the early 1980s, and over the decades produced hundreds of titles and filmed numerous community events, demonstrations and other gatherings.
"It is huge," noted Mitra.
The library is now working on making the roughly two terabytes of recorded material accessible to the public, with a goal of opening a viewing room at the San Francisco Main Library sometime in 2025 for it and other video archives in its collections. Starr's recordings are also to be uploaded to the library's digitalsf.org website so it is globally available.
"This is the present and the future; we are going to get more and more of these. Texas' is just our first digital-born collection," said Mitra.
One collecting focus for the library is material related to the Compton's Cafeteria riots that people have preserved and may be interested in donating. As the protest against police harassment of the eatery's trans customers sometime in August 1966 — the exact date of the incident at the Tenderloin Compton's location has been lost to history — gains more prominence, city librarians have been fielding more questions about it from researchers and members of the public.
"We just don't have anything," said Ets-Hokin, to show people when they do make inquiries. "We have menus but not from that Compton's."
Mitra told the B.A.R. she had caught a news segment done for trans history month about Compton's that had used a short archival video clip and wondered about its provenance.
"Well, who has that?" she had asked.
Through the workshops for community archivists, Mitra aims to build relationships with LGBTQ individuals who have collected archival materials and may one day be interested in donating their collection to an archive, whether it be the Hormel Center or another depository focused on historical preservation. She noted that one's collection size isn't important, having recently been contacted by someone who wanted to pass on an AIDS pin from the 1990s.
"I really want to make sure we are an open door. Literally call me or call us and let's chat," said Mitra. "No collection is too small."
The Saturday workshop is free to attend. To RSVP, click here.
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