The Durham Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transexual and Questioning story has been preserved in Durham County Library in the form of historic repertoire.
Local residents brought posters, photographs and stories related to Durham’s LGBTQ history to the Durham County Library Saturday Oct. 22. At the event, librarians scanned photographs and recorded specific memories that people wanted to share in order to incorporate Durham’s LGBTQ history into the North Carolina Collection—its collection devoted to Durham’s history.
The collection, housed in the library’s main building on Roxboro Street, includes photographs, books and newspapers on topics ranging from the Tobacco Road and the civil rights movement to the arts. Although Durham hosted the first North Carolina Pride Parade in 1981 and is typically seen as a friendly, welcoming community for gays and lesbians, the library does not have a collection related to gay activism in Durham, said Lynn Richardson, local history librarian at Durham County Library who organized the event.
“We’ve got an LGBTQ community that’s been active for a long time, not only advocating its own civil rights but also making other contributions to the community such as owning businesses and being active politically,” Richardson said. “I want to make sure we document their history.”
Although the event did not draw “herds of people,” the library did receive a collection related to lesbian-owned businesses in Durham and some posters and photographs from several Pride Parades in the 1980s, Richardson said. She added that she recorded memories that four sources shared orally, which she hopes to transcribe and eventually post online. Several other volunteers had so many memories to share that Richardson made appointments to record and transcribe their oral histories at a later date, she added.
Richardson got the idea for the project when Durham County Library hosted a panel discussion about the 1981 pride march and Durham’s gay rights pioneers as part of its Commemorating Courage series last year, she said. The discussion drew approximately 100 people and felt like a “reunion” of activists who knew each other from the 1980s. Following the conversation, local activist Luke Hirst approached her and suggested the library start gathering and preserving LGBTQ documents and stories.
The fact that the pride marches of the 1980s are slipping further into the past added to the impetus to start the project, said Joanne Abel, humanities and adult programming coordinator at Durham County Library.
“A lot of people who were involved in the 1970s are getting old! We’re trying to save this stuff before people forget,” she said.
Although the event drew a small crowd, some of the people who did come in gave leads to new sources, which Richardson plans on contacting individually, Richardson said.
The library has put their collections on display in the past—for example, there was a display about the 1981 pride march in conjunction with the Commemorating Courage series—but the primary purpose of the North Carolina Collection is so the public can come to the library to do research about Durham’s history, Abel said.
Richardson emphasized the importance of the North Carolina Collection to Durham as a whole, and that it captures the full breadth and depth of Durham’s history, including LGBTQ activism.
“[The collection] is the one entity in the world whose main purpose is to preserve the history of Durham, and it’s located in the heart of downtown,” she said. “We want to preserve the depth of Durham’s history and make that accessible to the public.”
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