Research Guides: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Studies: Digital Primary Source Collections

Digital Collections and Projects

AIDS Memorial Quilt Records (Library of Congress)
This online collection presents digitized images of the AIDS Memorial Quilt panel maker files housed in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The panel maker files contain more than 150,000 mementos and ephemera submitted by Quilt panel makers to the NAMES Project and the National AIDS Memorial, which memorializes victims of HIV/AIDS.

Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Primary Sources)
Digitized primary sources on social, political, health, and legal issues concerning gender and sexuality, and impacting LGBTQ communities around the world. Includes newsletters and newspapers, government documents, manuscripts, pamphlets, and more. Contributing repositories include: Kinsey Institute, British Library, Lesbian Herstory, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, National Library of Medicine, and more. UCLA provides access to Parts I and II (LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940), Part III (Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century), Part IV (International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture), and Part VI (Community and Identity in North America).
Digital Transgender Archive
International open access online hub focused on accessibility of transgender history. DTA is a collaboration among more than twenty institutions, including digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world.
Gale Primary Sources
A cross-search platform of 21 databases available from the Gale Group, including historical newspapers (formerly NewsVault), The Making of Modern Law, U.S. Declassified Documents Online, among others. They can be searched as a group or as a selected subset.

"Gay is Good: Digital Collections in LGBTQ U.S. HIstory"
A list of selected major digital projects (College & Research Libraries News, 2019)

Gender: Identity and Social Change
Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Includes sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
History Commons: LGBTQ+ Social Justice & Culture
Captures and preserves activist voices from the 1980s to the present, with a special focus on content at risk of disappearing, particularly in oppressive countries. Covers blogs, magazines, videos, podcasts, tweets, zines, and other new media.
HIV, AIDS & the Arts
This digital collection is dedicated to exploring how art has served as a form of activism, seeking to document ways in which groups and institutions, both within and outside of formal art worlds, have worked to support artists impacted by HIV/AIDS. The collection will preserve approximately 75,000 pages and items of primary sources, including, but not limited to, sheet music, manuscripts, playbills, production notes, visual art, and personal papers.

The HIV/AIDS Epidemic and Public Broadcasting
From the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, this exhibit places featured programs within a contextualized history of the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States and the U.S. response to AIDS in Africa following the decline of new cases in the U.S.

Homophile Movement: Papers of Donald Stewart Lucas, 1941-1976 (Archives Unbound)
Documents the professional activities of activist Donald S. Lucas. The majority of the collection dates from 1953 to 1969, and contains material relating to the early homosexual civil rights movement (the homophile movement) and the San Francisco manifestation of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Includes the administrative and work files of the Mattachine Society, the Mattachine Review, Pan-Graphic Press, and the Central City Target Area of the San Francisco EOC.
Independent Voices
Full text of more than 1000 open access alternative publications from the 1960s-1980s covering feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, LGBTQ+ activists, and more.
LGBT Magazine Archive
Searchable archive of major periodicals devoted to LGBT+ interests, dating from the 1950s to more recent years. Includes many of the most influential, long-running 20th/21st-century magazines in this field, including The Advocate. UCLA subscribes to Collection 1 of this database.

LGBTQ History Resources: Gay Liberation Front
"There’s a lot of stuff out there about Stonewall and the history of GLF. How can you sort through it all? What’s accurate? Who has an agenda? The resources and links here have been chosen by our membership because we feel they most accurately represent our history. If you have a resource you’d like to have listed on this page, contact us."
LGBTQ+ Politics and Political Candidates Web Archive (Library of Congress)
"[C]aptures digital content related to LBGTQ+ political candidates and political issues and topics at various levels of government, with a focus on lesser-known local and state politics."
LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive (Library of Congress)
"[C]ollects and preserves online content which documents LGBTQ+ history, scholarship, and culture in the United States and around the world. Sites include domestic and international non-profit organizations, journalism and news, creative works and expressions, historical records, and more."

LGBT Thought and Culture
Online portal with full text books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements from the 20th century to the present. The purchase of LGBT Thought and Culture was made possible through a generous gift from the David Bohnett Foundation.

Mazer Archive at UCLA
Digital records and finding aids for June L. Mazer Archives housed at the UCLA Library.

1980s Culture and Society
Compiles archival collections housed across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Content ranges from zines, newspapers and ephemera, to oral histories, films and photographs. Grassroots materials produced by left-wing organizations and underrepresented groups are presented alongside government records and mainstream media to showcase the key social, cultural, and political concerns of the decade.
Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin and the Daughters of Bilitis (Archives Unbound)
This collection documents many decades of Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin's work for and leadership of, the LGBT movement and the women's rights movement in both in San Francisco and nationally. Included are minutes, correspondence, and notes related to their work with the ACLU, the San Francisco Coalition for Human Rights, the Commission on Crime Control and Violence Protection, the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. Lyon and Martin were also central to the struggle that pushed the National Organization for Women to an understanding of the centrality of the freedom to sexual expression.
Political Extremism and Radicalism (Gale Primary Sources)
Primary source documentation of 20th Century (1900s-2010s) fringe groups from both the right and left of the political spectrum in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Supports researchers addressing historical questions on philosophical, social, political, and economic ideologies as well as on contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, race, religion, civil rights, universal suffrage, and more. UCLA subscribes to parts I and II.
Content note: this database contains visual and textual material representing various historical viewpoints related to race, gender, sexuality, terrorism, and other subjects, including terminology and concepts that may be considered offensive by modern standards. These materials are provided for academic research and teaching purposes.
Politics, Social Activism and Community Support: Selected Gay and Lesbian Periodicals and Newsletters (Archives Unbound)
This collection of periodicals focuses on newsletters issued by gay and lesbian political and social activist organizations throughout the country and on periodicals devoted to gay and lesbian political and social activist agendas. It also includes serial literature exploring the challenges and complexities of building gay and lesbian communities.
Power to the People: Counterculture, Social Movements, and the Alternative Press, Nineteenth to Twenty-first Century
Showcases a range of ideas, initiatives, and social movements devoted to people-powered politics and organizing from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries with subjects such as the civil rights movement, the 1960s counterculture movement, and other social movements in U.S. history. Paints a broad picture of the counterculture and many disparate organizations that represent this moment in modern Western history.
Queer Pasts
A collection of primary source exhibits for students and scholars of queer history and culture. Each of the document collections includes a critical introductory essay that helps explain the significance of the primary sources. This database prioritizes the experiences and perspectives of under-represented historical groups, including people of color, trans people, and people with disabilities.

Queering Polish Memory: Fundacja Q
From UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program. The Fundacja Q (Poland) is a non-governmental organization working to expand knowledge about queer history and create a culture of coexistance. The foundation hosts workshops, events, and classes that create space and opportunity for LGBTQIA+ individuals living in Poland. This digital collection includes community heritage such as photographs, postcards, written personal memoirs, short-run printed materials, zines, personal documents, correspondence, posters as well as internal documents and official records.

Sex and Sexuality
Digital collection exploring attitudes towards human sexuality, gender identities and sexual behaviors throughout the twentieth century. Includes the unpublished papers of prominent sexologists, sex researchers, societies, advocacy groups and campaigners working across America and beyond during the twentieth century.
The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives
This searchable database brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary. The database covers subjects in arts, music, and leisure, civil rights, counter-culture, law and government, mass media, new left and emerging neo-conservative movement, student activism, Vietnam War, women's movement, etc.

Transgender Media Portal
Based at Carleton University's Transgender Media Lab, this new portal documents the aesthetic, political, and cultural work of audiovisual media created by transgender, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming filmmakers and artists.

UCLA Library Digital Collections
Rare and unique digital materials developed by the UCLA Library to support education, research, service, and creative expression, including the AIDS Poster Collection, the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive and more.
UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program
The Modern Endangered Archives Program aims to digitize and make accessible endangered archival materials from the 20th and 21st centuries, including print, photographic, film, audio, ephemeral and born-digital objects.