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AIR#19. "The Black Ball" and poetry in archives

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 In conjunction with the celebration of LGBT History Month , we look back at the project “Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive”, by Andrew A. Anderson, Melissa Dinverno, and Christopher Maurer, which received the SAA’s Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award in 2025. This award is given to projects that go beyond the conventional archival uses to effectively raise public awareness of specific body of archival documents. The Memory in Motion project took the form of both an exhibition and a book, which explore the life and work of the Spanish writer through documents preserved by the Federico García Lorca Center in his hometown of Granada. This project stands out as an example of transatlantic collaboration aimed at disseminating an author’s work through their archival collection, bringing to light documentation that was previously little known or entirely unknown, also about the time García Lorca spent at Columbia University in 1929 . In 2024, Dinverno edited a book in S...
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AIR#18. Celebrate Pride Standing On Shoulders

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  Let's celebrate Pride visiting  Shoulders to Stand On (STSO). It's an ongoing initiative to document and preserve the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Rochester, New York. It began in 2003 as a project of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley [1] and was spearheaded by Evelyn Bailey (1946-2022), an LGBTQ+ activist, educator, and historian. Evelyn led a team of volunteers to collect, inventory, and find permanent repositories for materials documenting the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations. These materials are housed in the archives at Cornell University, the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Public Library, among other repositories (Bailey, 2018) . Rochester is a mid-sized city with an oversized history of LGBTQ+ activism and community engagement. Before Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ community in Rochester remained largely underground. Individuals with insider knowledge gathered in bars that catered to lesbian and gay clients , which were frequently r...
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AIR#17. Describing LGBTQ Archival Materials

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    The DSGS Annual Meeting is here! Do you want to learn about the latest on LGBTQIA2S+ achival materials description? Join us at the 38 th  Annual Meeting of the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Section (SAA-DSGS) on Monday, May, 4 th , 2026 from 1pm to 2.30pm (Central). Following a brief report on the Section’s activities, we will hear from three young professionals on the topic  Queer Complexities. Describing LGBTQ Archival Materials,  by Gabrielle Garcia, Ron Martin-Dent and Isaac Fellman. Today, with violence against LGBTQ+ communities on the rise, documenting and preserving their stories and narratives is crucial. How we describe LGBTQ+ archival materials is essential in document management workflows to ensure their accessibility and dissemination .  LGBTQ+ community archives are vital spaces for collecting, preserving, and sharing evidence of queer life and culture. At the same time, these archives face singular operational challenges. Whether it’s navi...
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AIR#16. The legacy of bell hooks

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To close the celebration of the  Black History Month , and advancing that March as the Women's History Month is coming,  Archives In Rainbow takes a look at the life, work and legacy of bell hooks, one of the most important voices in the study of pedagogy, race, feminism and class and decolonial srtuggles over the past fifty years. bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, into a working-class family. After studying in Stanford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she earned her doctorate in English from the Universtiy of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on the work of Toni Morrison in 1983, ten years before Morrison was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature.  The young Gloria first used her pen name, bell hooks, in 1978 when she published a short collection of poems titled And There We Wept . The pen name was a tribute to her grand-mother, Bell Hooks, but with the name in lowercase to focus attention not on herself bu...
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AIR#15. The ICA Declaration on LGBTQ+ Archives

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After the  Presidency statement  on LGBTQ+ archives in June 28th, 2024, and the   webinar  to present the Sex-Afective and Gender Diversity Working Group just one day before, the International Council on Archives (ICA) has taken a third step in the path of recognizing and valuing the archives of the sex-affective and gender diversity (SAGD) and the archival professionals who identified as SAGD people. Last October, 30th, the institution presented the   Declaration on LGBTQ+ Archives and Archivists  at the 20th ICA Congress in Barcelona. The presentation concludes a consultation and text drafting process that has been ongoing for the past few months. The initial idea was conceived by Carlos Serrano Vásquez, ICA Secretary, as a way to put on value the work made by LGBTQ+ archives in the last decades, to normalize and visiblize the existence of LGBTQ+ community archives, as well as a call to institutional archives to look the collections they kept and the prof...
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AIR#14. Archives Against Erasure: The NYC Trans Archives

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October was Archives Month and LGBT History Month, and one way to celebrate was attending the online panel discussion Archives Against Erasure: The NYC Trans Archives . The NYCTA was founded in 2023 and is distinguished as the first and only trans community-based archive in the Eastern United States. The NYCTA is run completely by and for trans people, collecting ephemera often passed over by traditional archives that highlights trans liberation and social justice. Each speaker brought their own unique skillset and insight into the past, present, and promising future of this archival initiative.   The panel consisted of NYCTA co-founders and members Red Washburn, Eli Erlick, Gabriel San Emeterio, Riah Lee Kinsey, and Elvis Bakaitis along with moderators Rachael Dreyer, Racine Amos, and Eric Fasick of Penn State’s Eberly Family Special Collections Library. Rachael opened and centered the talk by making a poignant connection between the work of the NYCTA and the 2016 article “To Sudd...
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AIR#13. The LGBTQIA2S+ Guide to A*R 2025

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With just few days left until the  ARCHIVES * RECORDS 2025 SAA Annual Meeting  begins in Anaheim, AIR brings you a guide featuring the LGBTQIA2S+ archives-related sessions: #01-Diversity Forum Mon Aug 25, 2025 11:45 AM - 1.00 PM. Location: Pacific C/D and Virtual. Not recorded Presented by Teresa Mora In light of the quickly changing landscape in regards to anti-DEIA actions at the national level the 2025 Diversity Forum will provide an opportunity for open dialog amongst archivists within a safe (and anonymized) space. The hybrid program will consist of a welcome from incoming Vice President/President-Elect, Brenda Gunn, a framing of the discussion and the opportunity to break out into small thematic groups to discuss how archivists are impacted in their daily work. Participants will be asked to think critically and creatively about how SAA might best support them and their work in this moment. The  SAA Diversity Committee  will compile notes from the conv...
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