Happy end of the semester, SJSU SAASC blog readers! We made it, and I’m proud of us.

For my final blog post as your SAASC Blog Editor, I’d like to highlight the Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA). BALA was founded in 2014 by curator, photographer and filmmaker Lenn Keller. Lenn’s vision was “a physical and online archive dedicated to the preservation of the richly diverse lesbian history of the Bay Area.” Although Lenn passed in 2020, her vision of a grassroots, community archive that celebrates activist history within the Bay Area lesbian community is very much alive. BALA hosts cultural events that highlight lesbian and women’s history, author readings, archiving workshops, and community meetings. BALA also trains young volunteers to interview lesbian elders to preserve their stories. 

According to their website, BALA’s collecting area focuses on “memorabilia and oral histories of lesbians who were visible and active during the 1970s and 1980s. Lesbians were leaders in the fight for women’s liberation. They broke barriers to make it possible for women to see themselves as more than society’s limited ideas of what they could be.” 

Why is preserving this history so crucial? BALA emphasizes how today “there is little trace of the culture and communities that Bay Area lesbians created during those decades. Those trailblazers are now aging, dying, downsizing and leaving the Bay Area. We are now at a critical moment, as two decades of this history are at risk of being lost forever if that history is not soon captured.” 

BALA is slowly but surely digitizing its collection so that more people can have access to materials “saved by Bay Area lesbian communities that represent their lives, work, loves, dreams, activism, creativity and art.” 

Here is a small sampling of BALA’s materials that have been digitized. 

 

For more context to the above item, check out Brooke Lober’s 2016 article on the legacy of the Lesbian Feminist Seder for the Palestine solidarity movement. 

Thank you to everyone who has engaged with the SJSU SAASC blog this year. I am grateful for the opportunity to highlight archives across the country and around the world that reflect the many ways in which struggling for a better world can manifest. Today, we mark day 10 of the CSU wide hunger strike for Gaza, in which SJSU students join more than 30 CSU students in protest of Israel’s blockade of food and water going into Gaza. Solidarity to the hunger strikers. May we, archivists and librarians, recognize the inherently political nature of our work and our potential to use our skills in the struggle for liberation and the birth of a new world. May we fearlessly defend and learn from the principled steadfastness of our archivist and librarian colleagues in Palestine. Free Palestine.