LGBTQ Archival Activism by Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.

The Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. conducts and funds archive activism--identifying, conserving and interpreting the LGBT historical record.

With the proliferation of digital storage, it's easy to take for granted that records will always be there. That assumption costs historical records every day. Documents don't just archive themselves. Hard copies are lost to accidents, fires, malicious destruction, deliberate destruction from misguided motives. (And let's not even think about that silly European crap about the "right to be forgotten"!)

LGBT history is an embarrassment to the mainstream, but it's part of the DNA of the queer community. It's important for our identity and survival.

(As an amateur packrat archivist, I vividly remember my sense of scandalization on learning how vastly different the modern philosophy of libraries is from what I had believed. I naively believed libraries would see themselves as archives, dedicated to preservation of knowledge resources. Nothing could be further from the truth. Library evangelists today preach only the gospel of circulation. Preservation be damned. If an item isn't circulating, they've been taught to see it as a parasite, sucking precious space and especially funding from items that the people want to read.) [stepping down from soapbox]

We need more organizations like this.