“OUT on the Left Coast: San Diego LGBT History” will be an online interactive image and sound resource documenting San Diego’s unique LGBT history.
SAN DIEGO, Calif. (Feb. 24, 2016) — California Humanities recently announced San Diego State University’s Love Library as one of its 2016 Community Stories grant awardees. The library was awarded $10,000 for its project entitled “OUT on the Left Coast: San Diego LGBT History.”
Community Stories is a competitive grant program of California Humanities, a non-profit that promotes the humanities in California. Grants are awarded to projects that give expression to the extraordinary variety of histories and experiences of California’s places and people to ensure that the stories can be shared widely.
“OUT on the Left Coast: San Diego LGBT History” will be an online interactive image and sound resource documenting the emergence of LGBT social movements in the San Diego and Northern Baja California regions.
Project directors, Anna Culbertson and Lisa Lamont, plan to use the San Diego Pride Parade as the initial focus for the website. The SDSU Library will digitize the moving and provocative graphics this phenomenon has generated over the years, including T-shirts, posters, buttons and banners, and combine these striking images with photographs and oral histories of early community activists.
The original materials for the project date from the late 1960s to the present and are housed at the Lambda Archives of San Diego, the region’s most comprehensive archive of LGBT history.
“The resulting collaboration will be a website and discovery tool to provide unprecedented public access to ‘living history,’” said Maureen Steiner, director of the Lambda Archives.
“SDSU library and Lambda Archives have sought for several years now to partner in a way that will impact both campus and community,” said Culbertson, who is also assistant head of Special Collections and University Archives at SDSU. “This resource will allow us to connect and engage students, community members and scholars through a history told directly by its participants.”
The project team will include staff from Lambda Archives and humanities advisors from SDSU’s LGBT major, Mathew Keufler and Walter Penrose. The major, which launched in 2011, was among the first of its kind in the country and will benefit from the resources made available to the public by “OUT on the Left Coast.”
The website will be launched with a public lecture series beginning in October 2016 and will be cross-promoted through San Diego Pride events.
“We envision using this website as a foundation upon which to add more content, creating a growing and evolving resource to foster greater community understanding and engagement with this important part of Southern California history,” said Gale Etschmaier, dean of the SDSU Library.
“California’s population has such a rich and varied story to tell — and we can all benefit from knowing more about each other,” noted Margaret Shelleda, chair of the board of California Humanities. “We are proud to award grants to those who find creative and effective ways of sharing our stories with new audiences and help connect Californians whose histories and experiences deserve greater and deeper appreciation.”
Since 2003, California Humanities has supported approximately 477 story projects and granted nearly $3.8 million to enable communities to voice, record, and share histories — many previously untold or little known. Through video, photography, murals, zines, documentary theater, audio projects, and more, these collected stories have been shared with broad audiences, both live and virtual.
California Humanities is an independent non-profit state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For more information on California Humanities, please visit www.calhum.org.
