Overview and History
The Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive preserves, digitizes, and exhibits materials from the LGBT community in our region of Pennsylvania. Our collection includes artifacts from numerous local LGBT publications as well as political, religious, and social organizations, including the papers of activists, community leaders, politicians, and residents. In addition, we collect oral histories from LGBT residents in the Lehigh Valley. Our collection documents the transformative political work of regional leaders and organizations as well as the vibrant cultural and social scene developed by LGBT communities in Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, and the surrounding boroughs.
Mission
Our mission is:
1. To preserve regional history through the collection of artifacts and documents from residents and local LGBT publications as well as businesses and political, religious, social, and arts organizations.
2. To make our regional LGBT archives accessible to community members, students, and researchers through organization, digitization, and exhibition.
3. To create and present exhibitions that provide historical context and understandable narratives about LGBT communities in the Lehigh Valley.
4. To collect oral histories of LGBT residents that discuss the specific experiences of LGBT people in the Lehigh Valley.
5. To develop intergenerational conversations about LGBT history in the Lehigh Valley and generally to build greater understanding of political history in our region
6. To narrate the Lehigh Valley’s role in the national LGBT movement.
7. To partner with regional organizations including libraries, colleges, and universities to offer presentations about the history of Lehigh Valley LGBT communities.
Your Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive
The archive contains materials from a wide variety of regional organizations that reveal that vibrant and effective political activism of local LGBT leaders. For example, with papers from Pennsylvania Gay and Lesbian Alliance, our archive showcases how LGBT leaders created voters’ guides that showed how politicians supported—or did not support—LGBT people and worked successful to elect a number of candidates in favor of legislation that protects the rights of LGBT people. We also preserve material from organizations like Fighting AIDS Continuously Together (F.A.C.T.), which reveal the consistent community work to support HIV+ people in our region and to fight for non-biased healthcare as well as greater governmental commitment to research for a cure and care for those suffering from HIV and AIDS.
The archive also contains a number of impactful regional publications that document the vibrant LGBT social scene in the Lehigh Valley as well as local and national political struggles. Above Ground and Gaydar magazine are two publications that give visitors to the archive a sense of the many social events occurring in our community throughout the 90s and early 2000s while providing coverage of Allentown’s anti-discrimination ordinance, proposed federal legislation like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the fight for marriage equality.
Beyond political organizations and regional publications, the archive includes memorabilia from two area bars—Diamonz’s Bar and Nightclub and Candida’s Bar—as well as social and arts organizations like the Gay Men’s Chorus and A Chorus Celebrating Women. Finally, we preserve the personal papers of a number of community leaders, including LGBT activists, politicians, reporters, and religious figures. Along with the focus on LGBT leaders, our archive contains a number of oral histories of LGBT residents and allies in the Lehigh Valley.
As we continue to collect materials for the archive, we hope that community members will visit the archival site to explore digitized materials, consider donating your materials to the archive, or agree to an oral history with one of our team members. We hope that LGBT members of our community will see the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive as an important resource for learning about our history and as a professional managed site to share your archival materials and your life story.
Valuing Regional LGBT History
In the absence of widespread public education about LGBT history, regional community archives and centers become the primary sites through which LGBT people learn about our past, grapple with historic civil rights struggles, and encounter the dominant local social outlets like bars and clubs important for previous generations. Further, because LGBT historians tend to focus on large urban centers like New York City or San Francisco in accounts of liberation movements, community archives importantly document how smaller regions both connect to larger national platforms and develop our own effective activist efforts to pass anti-discrimination ordinances, other forms of legislation, or to address health crisis like the AIDS epidemic. We need regional LGBT archives because they showcase the deep history of regional populations too frequently left out of civic and state narratives and side-lined in national accounts of LGBT history. So, too, we need regional LGBT archives because they are rich resources for instigating community conversations about our past and the more equitable futures that we struggle for today.
Beyond serving as resource for exploring LGBT movements for equality in previous generations, regional archives inspire intergenerational conversations about LGBT life experiences within specific cultural milieus. With our oral history collection, visitors to the archive are able to explore stories of LGBT residents who came of age in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and navigated homophobia, biphobia and transphobia within families, workplaces, and larger communities. Our oral history collection also shows the resiliency of regional LGBT communities as residents participated in building rich community spaces, organizations, and family structures that helped them navigated homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. In combination with materials from organizations in the Lehigh Valley, our archive showcases a wide range of LGBT cultural place-making in our region that created the foundation for our vibrant community today. Too frequently younger generations of LGBT people are unable to learn about the lives of earlier generations; our archive allows for intergenerational learning about diverse experiences of LGBT people in our region and how earlier generations built affirmative spaces to celebrate LGBT people.
Ultimately, our regional archive promotes understanding of the social and political history of LGBT communities in the Lehigh Valley. Through exhibits, digital access to archival materials, and community conversations about portions of the archive, we create deep regional engagement with the many contributions of LGBT people to the Lehigh Valley, the struggles of LGBT people in the face of bias and discrimination, and the various strategies used to encourage the flourishing of individuals and our larger LGBT community.
