I often wonder what happened to my mom in her youth. Growing up, it seemed that her purpose was to teach me how to navigate my environment while staying alert at all times. Always being on the alert were my mom’s watchword. She taught me how to assess situations and how to approach a car at night or how to walk alone at night. Such lessons began when I was in the second grade. Sometimes the adult me thinks that I was too young. But then again, maybe not. Regardless, thus, from an early age, I knew there was something about my body, about me (a lesbian even then) that was vulnerable. To some ex ..read more

Lilian Faderman needs no introduction as an international literary scholar on lesbian history. The materials she has donated to the Mazer is an expansive collection of correspondence, photos, cassette tapes and newspaper clippings, along with manuscripts for three of her books Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (1991) and Chloe Plus Olivia (1994). This reflects the amount of research she conducts for all of her work. The photos and correspondence are immensely valuable to the archive because there is context and attached information. So often archivists are sortin ..read more

    If it wasn't for the Mazer, I would not have known about Sisterhood Bookstore, founded in 1972. I started coming out my senior year of high school (1998), a year before Sisterhood closed (1999). My coming out process included Friday night adventures with my best friend who is also a lesbian, to West Hollywood, to Little Frida's coffee shop. Neither one of us had any money but we needed to get the hell out of Orange County—gasoline be damned. Whoever had the most gas in their car, drove. Back then, we didn’t have navigators or cell phones. We drove places hoping we were going in ..read more

Even though I grew up in a relatively progressive college town in Illinois, and even though I had been totally in love with my best friend in middle school and was greeted with “well. I knew that” when I told mother I was gay in my bedroom in school, I still felt unsure about who I was, what being gay really meant, and where to go from there. I worked at the library as a shelver, had a crush on the girl that sat in front of me and played flute in band, and every Friday night sat with a good friend at a restaurant over cokes and chicken fingers talking about it all, careful to avoid using the a ..read more

Archivists spend a lot of time thinking about paper. The history of paper is long and meandering, with humans using whatever was environmentally available or easily traded to make the paper. From papyrus to parchment, cotton, and even wild fig tree bark in Mexico, paper was time consuming to make and could be expensive. It wasn’t until the 20th century that humans began using wood pulp to make paper; an innovation that made books more accessible to anyone. Book production exploded and niche markets began to appear.     This included a market for fiction for lesbians, who were starve ..read more

Happy February, friends! This month, our Mellon-funded UCLA Community Archives Lab archivist intern Hall Frost is highlighting our Tees Collection. From music festivals, to Pride, sport events, and political marches, our Tees collection has a bit of everything and spans from the 1970s through the 2010s. The wide range of designs and categories means there’s something to resonate with everyone; this nostalgia and connection is one reason this collection is so loved. For example, maybe you also love Holly Near, or even saw her on the Nuclear Free Future tour in the early 1980s?     O ..read more

This month, Hall Frost is back to highlight the JoAnn Semones and Julie Barrow Collection. JoAnn and Julie live in Half Moon Bay and have been married for 30 years. Both lovers of the outdoors—specifically the ocean—the two met while working for the Environmental Protection Agency around 1989. Long time volunteers for several organizations in San Mateo county, the two were Plover Watch volunteers at Half Moon Bay State Beach and docents at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, among many others. Julie went on to devote 16 years to developing and preserving the programs and grounds at Pigeon Point. JoAn ..read more

This month, our Mellon-funded UCLA Community Archives Lab archivist intern Hall Frost is highlighting Diane Germain and her contributions to the archives. I came across Diane’s collection while helping the Mazer write finding aids as part of a Community Archives class at UCLA. I was struck by her innate calling to save everything, something I, a minimalist, and my partner, who saves everything, disagree on. In the moment, it’s hard to think that bits and pieces of your life could someday be valued by people in the future. Yet, Diane knew exactly that. She saved things relating to lesbians from ..read more

Perhaps this is or isn’t the most relatable narrative when navigating one’s personal path in this life, but for me, sexuality was something on a far off cloud — conceptual in nature and distant by design. I grew up in a home where shame and fear of a Creator permeated through our psyche. Television, movies, books, magazine, music all provided a pathway into what felt like another dimension, contextualizing our wants and cherry picking our needs. I couldn’t be less in touch with myself. Queer meant unusual, this I knew — but what did that mean for me? The question typically did not linger longe ..read more

This month, we’re excited to feature the Margaret A. Porter collection shared by our Communications Director, Angela Brinskele. Margaret Porter’s Library contains over 20 boxes of books. Much of her library contains books about the lesbians in Paris at the turn of the last Century. She studied them for most of her life and even published some of the few translations of of the works of Renee Vivian and Natalie Barney as well as collecting some of the rare other few translations made, such as the book included below by Karla Jay and Yvonne M. Klein. Writer, poet, linguist, researcher, musician ..read more