In the mid-1970s—well into the gay liberation movement—members of the Gay Academic Union were fracturing along class lines. Some scholars wanted to chase the legitimacy and resources of institutional support, attempting to find a place for queer study within the formal university. Others rejected the precarity of appealing to an unfriendly straight academy, preferring to create alternative institutions that catered specifically to queer needs. This dynamic played out within the early movement to establish a queer archives in New York City. Lesbian members of the Gay Academic Union separated from the organization to form the Lesbian Herstory Archives, founded on a radical, DIY ethos that emphasized the retooling of archival standards to better serve the community. This story is well-told; however, my research concerns another archival project, never before written about in a scholarly publication, that documents the impulse towards professionalized archives. In the Barbara Gittings papers at the New York Public Library, I unearthed her attempt to found a National Gay Archives within the NYPL. For two years, the NGA committee communicated with the leadership of the NYPL Research Libraries, submitting formal proposals to establish an archives that met all the professional standards of the time. The NGA committee was largely composed of professional librarians and archivists who made an appeal to authority, levying their credentials as a way to surpass previous barriers to queer inclusion in the academy. My presentation will argue that the papers of the National Gay Archives proposal are an archive of queer-class relations in themselves, as they extensively demonstrate the reasoning behind early attempts to professionalize queer history. Understanding this professionalized perspective is essential to modern conversations on the security of queer trust in the university, particularly during the current president’s war on DEI.
My poster will include images of the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, displaying the visual contrast between the degrees of professionalization. I will also include images of the shaped objects (t-shirts, buttons, flags) that became a key point of contention between the NGA committee and the NYPL, and snippets of visually interesting correspondence found in collections at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago.