International Gay and Lesbian Archives

Historical Note

The Great American Yankee Freedom Band was a gay marching band established in Los Angeles in 1978, following the lead of San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, founded earlier that same year. The Lesbian and Gay Band Association was "a national organization founded [in 1983] to encourage and perpetuate the community band movement in the lesbian and gay community."

Administrative History

In 1942 in San Francisco, Jim Kepner started collecting books on the gay and lesbian experience. It soon turned into a small private collection, which he then took with him to Los Angeles, then to New York, then to San Francisco again, before eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1951.

By the 1970s, after amassing a larger library of gay- and lesbian-related books and materials in his Torrance, California, apartment, Kepner began allowing researchers access to his collection. In 1975, he named it the Western Gay Archives (WGA). In 1979, a board of directors was created, the collection was incorporated in the State of California as the National Gay Archives: Natalie Barney/Edward Carpenter Library (NGA), and the materials were moved to an office at 1654 North Hudson Avenue in Hollywood, California. The archives changed its name to the International Gay & Lesbian Archives: Natalie Barney/Edward Carpenter Library (IGLA) in 1984. In 1988, the collection was moved to another office space on Robertson Blvd. in West Hollywood.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kepner served as curator of IGLA. The operations were maintained by its board of directors, minimal staff and group of volunteers. In the Fall of 1994, the board of directors of IGLA and ONE Institute voted to merge the GLBT archival collections and libraries from both organizations. The boards of directors merged as well, and the resulting organization was named the ONE Institute/International Gay and Lesbian Archives.

Source: "Jim Kepner board materials and notes," Box 1, Folder 29, International Gay and Lesbian Archives Records, Coll2012-002, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California

Historical Note

First Tuesday (also referred to on its early mailings as The Los Angeles Gay Community Forum for Information and Communication) was an informal meeting group of gay men and lesbian women that met--when sponsored by a participating organization--on the first Tuesday of a given month. Meetings were social occasions that often involved cocktails and dinner followed by an open forum where groups were invited to share general information "about their current activities and upcoming events and shared concerns." First Tuesday meetings sometimes served as fundraisers, or to provide a forum for dealing with an immediate issue affecting the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community.