Photo: Mary Hilliard for The New York Public Library
Last night was the inauguration of the New York Public Library’s LGBT committee at the massive 42nd street Humanities and Social Sciences branch -- the big one with the stone lions out front, where one imagines bespectacled researchers spending months pouring over ancient tomes under green lamps (except that actually happens here).
The event introduced the committee's mission to make the library's giant queer history, lit, art, media, and photo archives available to the public, at branches across the city and online. The committee solicits donations of materials (like photos from the Mattachine Society protests in the 1960s, posters and meeting minutes from ACT UP, the first gay and lesbian pride parade poster from 1970, Walt Whitman's Blue Book, the first Black gay newspapers, letters from Virginia Woolf to her lover Vita Sackville-West while she was basing the character of Orlando on her and snapshots of that butch patriot Gertrude Stein), and it also solicits the funds to catalog, organize, scan, and make the collection available to the public, to researchers, and online to anyone who can access the web.
Especially exciting is that LGBTs in Egypt, Iran, and other otherwise prohibitive places, can access some of the collection online through the site. Author Edmund White, above, spoke about the nature of libraries as refuges for young gays learning about themselves and our place in the world -- who else here dove right for an unabridged dictionary and looked up as many queer words as possible? -- and other notable literary types like David Plante and Tony Kushner attended as well.
Committee co-chairs Hermes Mallea and Carey Maloney (also a couple) mentioned that when the Saint donated its posters from dance party AIDS fundraisers to the collection, the two looked at one another and realized that it was at that very party 26 years ago they met one another. (They spoke more candidly about the fundraising parties they threw when the were launching the NYPL's young donor's committee; the events, produced by infamous club promoter Jackie 60, had to be reined in when the blue hairs took objection to a dwarf go-go dancer who was nude from the waist down.)
Check out the site's blog edited by Jason Baumann (himself a fascinating guy, a former member of ACT-UP and Queer Nation, and Radical Faerie), and browse through some of the collection's massive photo archives. The library is at work processing thousands more donated images.
-- MATTHEW BREEN
Previously > More gay history with Out staffers
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