 I had an experience similar to what most people of my generation had who were looking for information on being gay and not finding anything or certainly not finding anything that was supportive. When I was young there wasn't that much literature out and about and every new book I found was like this treasure. And the one place to go to possibly find something to address our curiosity or just to assure us that in fact we were healthy human beings who deserved a place on planet Earth was the library. To Be Without History has profound impact on a community and we knew we had it. It just wasn't to be found or seen anywhere and so this was an opportunity for us to collect that history and to preserve it as we were making it. Every person in mural had some influence on or some very direct role in the Hormel Center being built. Here we were in the early 90s being challenged once again to present ourselves as citizens who deserved a measure of equality that we were not yet receiving. And what could be a better project than something within a public library that would focus attention on our existence and our productivity and our our presence everywhere in the community. It's a rare opportunity that one would have to be involved in the planning of a great city main library. People looked at the library as a downtown library where poor people in the homeless hung out and there was no real constituency for the library. The state was in a recession and all of the furniture and everything else had to be raised privately. Steve's idea was to create a set of affinity groups who would be engaged primarily because they would have a specific location within the new building. The African-American community and the Asian-American community and the Tino American community and the LGBT community were asked to participate. It wouldn't be right not to have something that highlighted the lives of the gay and lesbian community. The library foundation and its director Martin Paley was concerned that we not set a precedent where the library is carved up on little pieces. And so we came up with the idea that we would raise money for this center and we would also raise a significant amount of money for the library as a whole because the collection would be everywhere within the library. Welcome to At the Public Library. I'm Jim Van Busker director of the Gay and Lesbian Center being planned for the San Francisco Public Library which will schedule is scheduled open in early 1996 in the new main library. And what we have here are materials from the collection. Lots of different materials from the NIAID press collection donated by Barbara Greer and Donna McBride. We have pulp novels and lesbian nuns. We have Randy Schultz manuscript collection. It's going to be a wonderful collection and I'm proud of San Francisco Public Library for being the first public library in the country possibly in the world to create a specific gay and lesbian center for this particular purpose. We got donations from across the country. We had people who were just waiting for some opportunity. It was seen as a way of making visible our heritage, making visible our selves, you know. It was very important to many, many people and some of those people were very comfortably well off and others just just had a few books to give or had $50 to share or whatever. It was across the spectrum. We planned a fundraising dinner that would draw attention and when I walked through the Port Couture at the Hyatt Regency I could see in a window a room that was set for dinner. It probably held three or four hundred people and I thought to myself oh my god this is a failure. I didn't quite figure it out until I was told that was the overflow room. We had people sitting in the foyer of the of the building if so many people wanted to be there. We didn't want to turn anybody or any check away and there was a woman there who had on very expensive shoes and I knew they were. I didn't have them but I knew they were and I looked at her and I said you know if you will just give us the money you paid for those shoes. The dinner raised more than half of the amount that we set as a goal. We also then did a lot of house parties and hopefully we inspired a lot of people at the dinner to take a step further and open their own homes and bring their own friends in so people who weren't at the dinner could become a part of the campaign. And that subsequently a total of I believe it was close to three thousand people contributed to the project. I can remember the press conference we did. You had a who's who in the LGBT community all sitting at the old main library history room and everyone wanted to be there to be part of it. They saw it as something historic. Many of these same fellows were involved in fighting Prop 6 back in 1978 and also were engaged in the formation of the human rights campaign. Many of them are gone now. Many of them are gone lost to the epidemic. There was a lot of concern about fundraising around it and we basically made a decision that we want you to give money but if you can only afford to give a small amount of something give it for the HIV epidemic if you can afford to do more than that then think of us as a second possibility. It's my understanding that this was the very first LGBT participation room component of a municipal building anywhere in the country. So it was a big deal. It was our integration into the greater community. One of the things I now remember is that written into our contract was that the the center would never be closed. That as long as the library was open and standing the Hormel Center would be in it. It's a queer city. You know there was a queer center at the public library. It kind of made sense and definitely affirmed for me that I made a good choice moving to San Francisco. You know that it was a place where being queer was just integrated into the most common parts of life here like the library. You know. I guess that when people ask me what have you what is the most important accomplishment in your philanthropy. That is probably number one through ten. It was a dream come true. You know there was a party in the library on the main floor. It was a good party. It was a disco party. It was an opportunity to be formal and flamboyant at the same time. And it was just spectacular. And the whole building was just wild. The library space was ours so we had six floors. There was music, there was dancing. I guess to me it was the first opportunity that the LGBT constituents had to allow themselves a level of enjoyment that had been taken away by AIDS. I guess I was getting a little jaded like okay we've done it. It's open. Gay and lesbian hip hip hooray. I wonder if it's it's not needed. Then because I was the gay and lesbian subject specialists books started appearing on my desk. One copy and it had been cut up. Well that's too bad things get vandalized. Well now there's two copies. Next week there's some more and some more. And finally there were a lot. And so we would take them out of the box and lay them out on tables. And you could feel the hate. They were just radiating energy. And I talked to a couple of artist friends and they said oh well you know we do altered books all the time. We work with books and source material and then we create different kinds of artwork. And the artwork was incredible. There were quilts. There were paper mache. There were sculpture. And as powerful as the artwork it was were the artist statements. And it was so moving and important and the community really responded and really came together. That's one of the Hormel Center's crowning victories I think. The James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center has joined with parents, families, and friends of lesbians and gays to sponsor a free lecture discussion series at San Francisco's main library. The Hormel Center went and goes far beyond the confines of this beautiful room. So I would like you to join with me in welcoming Kevin Jennings. There were just lots and lots of rich opportunities and personally I learned so much and I learned from the people who either proposed programs or participated in programs. I remember one that we did with the New York Times and they said oh well we want to do one on sports. The Charette Auditorium was packed. Standing room only and people were starved for these voices, these people to see them in person. In the sports arena it was really important because it was so closeted and so homophobic. We did a lot of collaborations with community organizations. Moving on now to the third floor of the main library for a look at Sylvester Metamorphosis, chronicling the life of the influential disco diva who epitomized San Francisco gay life in the 70s. Sappho, no ordinary housewife, pays homage to Sappho the Greek poet and is sponsored by the Sappho Project. Gertrude and Alice from the collections of Hans Gallus and the San Francisco public library. Tom Klein selected works, gay life, HIV and AIDS explored in sculpture and assemblages. The work that Diana and I did we traveled the United States in two years and did an epic sweep of the country so you get a sense of the spectrum and the variation of lesbian families. Managing an LGBT center and being responsible for programming and exhibition and collections is constantly fascinating and changing and never routine. Everybody loves this room. They love the mural, they love the exhibits and people enjoy the intimate feel of being in here. So I started a meditation group in the Hormel LGBT Center and every Wednesday from 12 to 12 30 I lead a partially guided meditation. The highlights for me really have been programming, meeting fascinating people like the historian Lillian Faderman, writers like Dorothy Allison, poets like C.A. Conrad. I'm the faggot at dinner asking to be alone with the children. It's really about going out of your own space and developing friendships going to their art shows, their historical societies and saying you know I want to know what you're doing. In 2007 the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival gave us all their boxes of stuff which include videos, DVDs. We've had people contact us from all over the world elated to discover that we had perhaps the one existent copy of a film. I would like to be reaching out more to collect more archival collections that we would like to have. For example Ricky Stryker owned some very important lesbian institutions like Maud's and Amelia's. Really important bars which were gathering places. Another one of my favorite collections is the Freedom to Marry collection. In 2015 grassroots activist Mollie McKay brought in 22 scrapbooks. This is a really important collection and in addition to that we have former mayor Gavin Newsom's collection of thousands of letters he received. The Radar Reading Series has been one of our most important programs. It's been a monthly series. It was started by author Michelle T. I began Radar Reading Series in 2003. I had done a lot of events that were mostly like in dive bars or cafes and it was just really nice to get the opportunity to bring it out of those environments. It felt like it was it would be elevated. It would be an elevated queer literary experience and I felt like the community deserved that. Radar has been a sort of intergenerational thing. I really wanted it to be a combination of people who have published works and people who aren't there yet. They're working on their first book or their performance poets so their work isn't necessarily being created for the page but more for performance. The fact that the reading was held at the library and that there was some sort of guaranteed stipend for the reader made all the difference in the world. I remember finding out that Radar was the place for queer cruising. If you wanted to find a date you came to Radar. I mean I think that that's one of the most crucial aspects of the readings in all of our mission statement and what we do is creating queer community. Our community has been displaced. There are not that many spaces for people to hang out especially if you're not a party monster. I feel like this reading series is like our official reading series like people love coming here. In a time where it's hard to feel hopeful about the arts in San Francisco, about like low-income artists in San Francisco, about like queer artists, queer artists of color in San Francisco. We're still sort of like I do feel like the pioneers of like queer writers and that just makes me feel like you know we have a future here. Make it ours again. I want to make some black history with you. As far as the future I would hope that this center would would in real ways not just symbolic or not just honorific ways but in real ways let the new young people come up and know it's okay you know and we're here for you. I see the center continuing to grow continuing to acquire collections either donated or purchased. I think we could probably do even more fundraising on it. I would like to have younger people have more say I would like to do more collaborations with LGBTQ youth. When I meet someone in San Francisco who hasn't been here in shock you know because we have such an amazing opportunity to see our history to see how it changed. I was in the room and I saw this young boy and he seemed to be getting frustrated and I started to go over to help him and he kind of darted out like okay but then he came back and then I was able to approach him and I said can I help you and he said well yeah I'm looking for a book about gay teens like me. We walked over to the teen section and I found a copy of MI Blue and then he stopped for a second he said well if I check this out will my parents find out? I said no the library records are confidential he said oh that's good because they're Catholic and they it would kill them that they knew I was gay and I'm not out at school. He started to leave and he turned around and he he said I just want you to know I'm really glad that you're here for people like me and that was 20 years ago and I still can't tell that story without crying because that's what we were doing we were building something for those kids and the kids that we used to be. I had an experience similar to what most people of my generation had who were looking for information on being gay and not finding anything or certainly not finding anything that was supportive. When I was young there wasn't that much literature out and about and every new book I found was like this treasure and the one place to go to possibly find something to address our curiosity or just to assure us that in fact we were healthy human beings who deserved a place on planet Earth was the library. To be without history has profound impact on a community and we knew we had it it just wasn't to be found or seen anywhere and so this was an opportunity for us to collect that history and to preserve it as we were making it. Every person in mural had some influence on or some very direct role in the Hormel Center being built. Here we were in the early 90s being challenged once again to present ourselves as citizens who deserved a measure of equality that we were not yet receiving and what could be a better project than something within a public library that would focus attention on our existence and our productivity and our our presence everywhere in the community. It's a rare opportunity that one would have to be involved in the planning of a great city main library. People looked at the library as a downtown library where poor people in the homeless hung out and there was no real constituency for the library. The state was in a recession and all of the furniture and everything else had to be raised privately. Steve's idea was to create a set of affinity groups who would be engaged primarily because they would have a specific location within the new building. The African-American community and the Asian-American community and the Tino American community and the LGBT community were asked to participate. It wouldn't be right not to have something that highlighted the lives of the gay and lesbian community. The library foundation and its director Martin Paley was concerned that we not set a precedent where the library is carved up on little pieces and so we came up with the idea that we would raise money for this center and we would also raise a significant amount of money for the library as a whole because the collection would be everywhere within the library. Welcome to At the Public Library. I'm Jim Van Busker director of the Gay and Lesbian Center being planned for the San Francisco Public Library which will schedule it open in early 1996 in the new main library. And what we have here are materials from the collection, lots of different materials from the NIAD press collection donated by Barbara Greer and Donna McBride. We have pulp novels and lesbian nuns. We have Randy Schultz manuscript collection. It's going to be a wonderful collection and I'm proud of San Francisco Public Library for being the first public library in the country possibly in the world to create a specific gay and lesbian center for this particular purpose. We got donations from across the country. We had people who were just waiting for some opportunity. It was seen as a way of making visible our heritage, making visible ourselves, you know. It was it was very important to many, many people and some of those people were very comfortably well off and others just just had a few books to give or had $50 to share or whatever. It was across the spectrum. We planned a fundraising dinner that would draw attention and and when I walked through the Port Couchere at the Hyatt Regency I could see in a window a room that was set for dinner. It probably held three or four hundred people and I thought to myself oh my God this is a failure. I didn't quite figure it out until I was told that was the overflow room. We had people sitting in the foyer of the of the building if so many people wanted to be there. We didn't want to turn anybody or any check away and there was a woman there who had on very expensive shoes and I knew they were. I didn't have them but I knew they were and I looked at her and I said you know if you will just give us the money you paid for those shoes. The dinner raised more than half of the amount that we set as a goal. We also then did a lot of house parties and hopefully we inspired a lot of people at the dinner to take a step further and open their own homes and bring their own friends in so people who weren't at the dinner could become a part of the campaign. And that subsequently a total of I believe it was close to three thousand people contributed to the project. I can remember the press conference we did. You had a who's who in the LGBT community all sitting at the old main library history room and everyone wanted to be there to be part of it. They saw it as something historic. Many of these same fellows were involved in fighting Prop 6 back in 1978 and also were engaged in the formation of the human rights campaign. Many of them are gone now. Many of them are gone lost to the epidemic. There was a lot of concern about fundraising around it and we basically made a decision that we want you to give money but if you can only afford to give a small amount of something give it for the HIV epidemic if you can afford to do more than that then think of us as a second possibility. It's my understanding that this was the very first LGBT participation room component of a municipal building anywhere in the country so it was a big deal. It was our integration into the greater community. One of the things I now remember is that written into our contract was that the the center would never be closed. That as long as the library was open and standing the Hormel Center would be in it. It's a queer city you know there was a queer center at the public library. It kind of made sense and definitely affirmed for me that I made a good choice moving to San Francisco you know that it was a place where being queer was just integrated into the most common parts of life here like the library you know. I guess that when people ask me what have you what what is the most important accomplishment in your philanthropy that is probably number one through ten. It was a dream come true. Now there was a party in the library on the main floor. It was a good party. It was a disco party. It was an opportunity to be formal and flamboyant at the same time. And it was just spectacular and the whole building was just wild. The library space was ours so we had six floors. There was music, there was dancing. I guess to me it was the first opportunity that the LGBT constituents had to allow themselves a level of enjoyment that had been taken away by AIDS. I guess I was getting a little jaded like okay we've done it it's open gay and lesbian hip hip hooray. I wonder if it's it's not needed. Then because I was the gay and lesbian subject specialists books started appearing on my desk one copy and it had been cut up. Well that's too bad things get vandalized. Well now there's two copies. Next week there's some more and some more and finally there were a lot and so we would take them out of the box and lay them out on tables and you could feel the hate. They were just radiating energy and I talked to a couple of artist friends and they said oh well you know we do altered books all the time. We work with books as source material and then we create different kinds of artwork and the artwork was incredible. There were quilts, there were papier-mache, there were sculpture and as powerful as the artwork it was were the artist statements and it was so moving and important and the community really responded and really came together. That's one of the Hormel Center's crowning victories I think. The James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center has joined with parents, families and friends of lesbians and gays to sponsor a free lecture discussion series at San Francisco's main library. The Hormel Center went and goes far beyond the confines of this beautiful room. So I would like you to join with me in welcoming Kevin Jennings. There were just lots and lots of rich opportunities and personally I learned so much and I learned from the people who either proposed programs or participated in programs. I remember one that we did with the New York Times and they said oh well we want to do one on sports. The caret auditorium was at standing room only and people were starved for these voices these people to see them in person. In the sports arena it was really important because it was so closeted and so homophobic. We did a lot of collaborations with community organizations. Moving on now to the third floor of the main library for a look at Sylvester Metamorphosis chronicling the life of the influential disco diva who epitomized San Francisco gay life in the 70s. Sappho no ordinary housewife pays homage to Sappho the Greek poet and is sponsored by the Sappho Project. Gertrude and Alice from the collections of Hans Gallus and the San Francisco Public Library. Tom Klein selected works gay life HIV and AIDS explored in sculpture and assemblages. The work that Diana and I did we traveled the United States in two years and did an epic sweep of the country so you get a sense of the spectrum and the variation of lesbian families. Managing an LGBT center and being responsible for programming and exhibition and collections is constantly fascinating and changing and never routine. Everybody loves this room. They love the mural. They love the exhibits and people enjoy the the intimate feel of being in here. So I started a meditation group in the Hormel LGBT Center and every Wednesday from 12 to 12 30 I lead a partially guided meditation. The highlights for me really have been programming, meeting fascinating people like the historian Lillian Faderman, writers like Dorothy Allison, poets like C.A. Conrad. I'm the faggoted dinner asking to be alone with the children. It's really about going out of your own space and developing friendships going to their art shows their historical societies and saying you know I want to know what you're doing. In 2007 the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival gave us all their boxes of stuff which include videos, DVDs. We've had people contact us from all over the world elated to discover that we had perhaps the one existent copy of a film. I would like to be reaching out more to collect more archival collections that we would like to have. For example Ricky Stryker owned some very important lesbian institutions like Maud's and Amelia's really important bars which were gathering places. Another one of my favorite collections is the Freedom to Marry collection. In 2015 grassroots activist Molly McKay brought in 22 scrapbooks. This is a really important collection and in addition to that we have former mayor Gavin Newsom's collection of thousands of letters he received. The Radar reading series has been one of our most important programs. It's been a monthly series. It was started by author Michelle T. I began Radar reading series in 2003. I had done a lot of events that were mostly like in dive bars or cafes and it was just really nice to get the opportunity to bring it out of those environments. It felt like it was it would be elevated. It would be an elevated queer literary experience and I felt like the community deserved that. Radar has been a sort of intergenerational thing. I really wanted it to be a combination of people who have published works and people who aren't there yet. They're working on their first book or their performance poets. So their work isn't necessarily being created for the page but more for performance. The fact that the reading was held at the library and that there was some sort of guaranteed stipend for the reader made all the difference in the world. I remember finding out that Radar was the place for queer cruising. If you wanted to find a date you came to Radar. I mean I think that that's one of the most crucial aspects of the readings and of our mission statement and what we do is create a queer community. Our community has been displaced. There are not that many spaces for people to hang out especially if you're not a party monster. I feel like this reading series is like our official reading series like people love coming here. In a time where it's hard to feel hopeful about the arts in San Francisco, about like low-income artists in San Francisco, about like queer artists, queer artists of color in San Francisco, we're still sort of like I do feel like the pioneers of like queer writers and that just makes me feel like you know we have a future here. Make it ours again. I want to make some black history with you. As far as the future I would hope that the center would would in real ways not just symbolic or not just honorific ways but in real ways let the new young people come up and know they're it's okay you know and we're here for you. I see the center continuing to grow continuing to acquire collections either donated or purchased. I think we could probably do even more fundraising on it. I would like to have younger people have more say I would like to do more collaborations with LGBTQ youth. When I meet someone in San Francisco who hasn't been here on shot you know because we have such an amazing opportunity to see our history to see how changed. I was in the room and I saw this young boy and he seemed to be getting frustrated and I started to go over to help him and he kind of darted out like okay but then he came back and then I was able to approach him and I said can I help you and he said well yeah I'm looking for a book about gay teens like me. We walked over to the teen section and I found a copy of MI Blue and then he stopped for a second he said well if I check this out will my parents find out? I said no the library records are confidential. He said oh that's good because they're Catholic and they it would kill them if they knew I was gay and I'm not out at school. He started to leave and he turned around and he he said I just want you to know I'm really glad that you're here for people like me and that was 20 years ago and I still can't tell that story without crying because that's what we were doing. We were building something for those kids and the kids that we used to be. I had an experience similar to what most people of my generation had who were looking for information on being gay and not finding it or certainly not finding anything that was supportive. When I was young there wasn't that much literature out and about and every new book I found was like this treasure. And the one place to go to possibly find something to address our curiosity or just to assure us that in fact we were healthy human beings who deserved a place on planet earth was the library. To be without history has profound impact on a community and we knew we had it. It just wasn't to be found or seen anywhere and so this was an opportunity for us to collect that history and to preserve it as we were making it. Every person in the mural had some influence on or some very direct role in the Hormel Center being built. Here we were in the early 90s being challenged once again to present ourselves as citizens who deserved a matter of equality that we were not yet receiving. And what could be a better project than something within a public library that would focus attention on our existence and our productivity and our presence everywhere in the community. It's a rare opportunity that one would have to be involved in the planning of a great city main library. People looked at the library as a downtown library where poor people in the homeless hung out and there was no real constituency for the library. The state was in a recession and all of the furniture and everything else had to be raised privately. Steve's idea was to create a set of affinity groups who would be engaged primarily because they would have a specific location within the new building. The African-American community and the Asian-American community and the Tino American community and the LGBT community were asked to participate. It wouldn't be right not to have something that highlighted the lives of the gay and lesbian community. The library foundation and its director Martin Paley was concerned that we not set a precedent where the library is carved up on little pieces. And so we came up with the idea that we would raise money for this center and we would also raise a significant amount of money for the library as a whole because the collection would be everywhere within the library. Welcome to At the Public Library. I'm Jim Van Busker director of the Gay and Lesbian Center being planned for the San Francisco Public Library which will schedule it open in early 1996 in the new main library. And what we have here are materials from the collection, lots of different materials from the NIAID press collection donated by Barbara Greer and Donna McBride. We have pulp novels and lesbian nuns. We have Randy Schultz manuscript collection. It's going to be a wonderful collection and I'm proud of San Francisco Public Library for being the first public library in the country possibly in the world to create a specific gay and lesbian center for this particular purpose. We got donations from across the country. We had people who were just waiting for some opportunity. It was seen as a way of making visible our heritage, making visible ourselves, you know. It was very important to many, many people and some of those people were very comfortably well off and others just just had a few books to give or had $50 to share or whatever. It was across the spectrum. We planned a fundraising dinner that would draw attention and and when I walked through the Port Coutre at the Hyatt Regency I could see in a window a room that was set for dinner. It probably held three or four hundred people and I thought to myself oh my god this is a failure. I didn't quite figure it out until I was told that was the overflow room. We had people sitting in the foyer of the building. So many people wanted to be there. We didn't want to turn anybody or any check away and there was a woman there who had on very expensive shoes and I knew they were. I didn't have them but I knew they were and I looked at her and I said you know if you will just give us the money you paid for those shoes. The dinner raised more than half of the amount that we set as a goal. We also then did a lot of house parties and hopefully we inspired a lot of people at the dinner to take a step further and open their own homes and bring their own friends in so people who weren't at the dinner could become a part of the campaign. And that subsequently a total of I believe it was close to three thousand people contributed to the project. I can remember the press conference we did. You had a who's who in the LGBT community all sitting at the Old Main Library history room and everyone wanted to be there to be part of it. They saw it as something historic. Many of these same fellows were involved in fighting Prop 6 back in 1978 and also were engaged in the formation of the human rights campaign. Many of them are gone now. Many of them are gone lost to the epidemic. There was a lot of concern about fundraising around it and we basically made a decision that we want you to give money but if you can only afford to give a small amount of something give it for the HIV epidemic. If you can afford to do more than that then think of us as a second possibility. It's my understanding that this was the very first LGBT participation room component of a municipal building anywhere in the country. So it was a big deal. It was our integration into the greater community. One of the things I now remember is that written into our contract was that the the center would never be closed. That as long as the library was open and standing the Hormel Center would be in it. It's a queer city. You know there was a queer center at the public library. It kind of made sense and definitely affirmed for me that I made a good choice moving to San Francisco. You know that it was a place where being queer was just integrated into the most common parts of life here like the library. I guess that when people ask me what have you what is the most important accomplishment in your philanthropy that is probably number one through ten. It was a dream come true. You know there was a party in the library on the main floor. It was a good party. It was a disco party. It was an opportunity to be formal and flamboyant at the same time. And it was just spectacular and the whole building was just wild. The library space was ours so we had six floors. There was music, there was dancing. I guess to me it was the first opportunity that the LGBT constituents had to allow themselves a level of enjoyment that had been taken away by AIDS. I guess I was getting a little jaded like okay we've done it it's open gay and lesbian hip hip hooray. I wonder if it's it's not needed. Then because I was the gay and lesbian subject specialists books started appearing on my desk one copy and it had been cut up. Well that's too bad things get vandalized. Well now there's two copies. Next week there's some more and some more. And finally there were a lot and so we would take them out of the box and lay them out on tables and you could feel the hate. They were just radiating energy. And I talked to a couple of artist friends and they said oh well you know we do altered books all the time. We work with books as source material and then we create different kinds of artwork. And the artwork was incredible. There were quilts. There were paper mache. There were sculpture. And as powerful as the artwork it was was were the artist statements. And it was so moving and important and the community really responded and really came together. That's one of the Hormel Center's crowning victories I think. The James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center has joined with parents families and friends of lesbians and gates to sponsor a free lecture discussion series at San Francisco's main library. The Hormel Center went and goes far beyond the confines of this beautiful room. So I would like you to join with me in welcoming Kevin Jennings. There were just lots and lots of rich opportunities and personally I learned so much and I learned from the people who either proposed programs or participated in programs. I remember one that we did with the New York Times and they said oh well we want to do one on sports. The caret auditorium was packed. Standing room only and people were starved for these voices these people to see them in person. In the sports arena it was really important because it was so closeted and so homophobic. We did a lot of collaborations with community organizations. Moving on now to the third floor of the main library for a look at Sylvester Metamorphosis chronicling the life of the influential disco diva who epitomized San Francisco gay life in the 70s. Sappho no ordinary housewife pays homage to Sappho the Greek poet and is sponsored by the Sappho Project. Gertrude and Alice from the collections of Hans Gallus and the San Francisco public library Tom Klein selected works gay life HIV and AIDS explored in sculpture and assemblages. The work that Diana and I did we traveled the United States in two years and did an epic sweep of the country so you get a sense of the spectrum and the variation of lesbian families. Managing an LGBT center and being responsible for programming and exhibition and collections is constantly fascinating and changing and never routine. Everybody loves this room. They love the mural. They love the exhibits and people enjoy the the intimate feel of being in here. So I started a meditation group in the Hormel LGBT Center and every Wednesday from 12 to 12 30 I lead a partially guided meditation. The highlights for me really have been programming meeting fascinating people like the historian Lillian Faderman writers like Dorothy Allison poets like C.A. Conrad. I'm the faggot at dinner asking to be alone with the children. It's really about going out of your own space and developing friendships going to their art shows their historical societies and saying you know I want to know what you're doing. In 2007 the Frameline International LGBT film festival gave us all their boxes of stuff which include videos DVDs. We've had people contact us from all over the world elated to discover that we had perhaps the one existent copy of a film. I would like to be reaching out more to collect more archival collections that we would like to have. For example Ricky Stryker owned some very important lesbian institutions like mods and amelias really important bars which were gathering places. Another one of my favorite collections is the freedom to marry collection in 2015 grassroots activist Molly McKay brought in 22 scrapbooks. This is a really important collection and in addition to that we have former mayor Gavin Newsom's collection of thousands of letters he received. The radar reading series has been one of our most important programs it's been a monthly series it was started by author Michelle T. I began radar reading series in 2003. I had done a lot of events that were mostly like in dive bars or cafes and it was just really nice to get the opportunity to bring it out of those environments. It felt like it was it would be elevated it would be an elevated queer literary experience and I felt like the community deserved that radar has been a sort of intergenerational thing. I really wanted it to be a combination of people who have published works and people who aren't there yet they're working on their first book or their performance poets so their work isn't necessarily being created for the page but more for performance. The fact that the reading was held at the library and that there was some sort of guaranteed stipend for the reader made all the difference in the world. I remember finding out that radar was the place for queer cruising. If you wanted to find a date you came to radar. I mean I think that that's one of the most crucial aspects of the readings in all of our mission statement and what we do is creating queer community. Our community has been this place they're not that many spaces for people to hang out especially if you're not a party monster. I feel like this reading series is like our official reading series like people love coming here. In a time where it's hard to feel hopeful about the arts in San Francisco, about like low-income artists in San Francisco, about like queer artists, queer artists of color in San Francisco, we're still sort of like I do feel like the pioneers of like queer writers and that just makes me feel like you know we have a future here. Make it ours again. I want to make some black history with you. As far as the future I would hope that the center would would in real ways not just symbolic or not just honorific ways but in real ways let the new young people come up and know they're it's okay and we're here for you. I see the center continuing to grow continuing to acquire collections either donated or purchased. I think we could probably do even more fundraising on it. I would like to have younger people have more say I would like to do more collaborations with LGBTQ youth. When I meet someone in San Francisco who hasn't been here in shock you know because we have such an amazing opportunity to see our history to see how changed. I was in the room and I saw this young boy and he seemed to be getting frustrated and I started to go over to help him and he kind of darted out like okay but then he came back and then I was able to approach him and I said can I help you and he said well yeah I'm looking for a book about gay teens like me. We walked over to the teen section and I found a copy of MI Blue and then he stopped for a second he said well if I check this out will my parents find out? I said no the library records are confidential so that's good because they're Catholic and they it would kill them if they knew I was gay and I'm not out at school. He started to leave and he turned around and he said I just want you to know I'm really glad that you're here for people like me and that was 20 years ago and I still can't tell that story without crying because that's what we were doing. We were building something for those kids and the kids that we used to be.