Black Gay and Lesbian Archive documents history
It's a little known fact that New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a part of the New York Public Library system, houses the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive, the largest collection of black "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, same-gender loving, queer, questioning and in the life cultural archives." Steven Fullwood has been able to gather 30 linear feet of materials including issues of MOJA, a newspaper that published in 1978 and 1979, and works from Barbara Smith, pictured, a founder of the Kitchen Table Press, as well as the work of many others. Steven explains, "The BGLA was developed for the expressed purpose of documenting contributions to the arts and culture by black same-gender loving people.
The archive project is divided into two phases. The first phase of the BGLA project is to gather materials for a period of five years (2000- 2005) in order to create a collection of materials, which would span a gamut of documented black same-gender loving history. The second phase of this venture is to place the materials in one or more reputable repositories for the expressed purpose of preservation and access to the public for research."
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