Black lesbians’ contributions to pro-queer and pro-black movements are pivotal but their stories are often under-told. 

The Bay Area Lesbian Archives is a library centered on radical lesbian history. Founded by Lenn Keller in 2014, its mission is to preserve the contributions of lesbian history from the 1940s – 1990s, and correct the undertelling of these stories. 

Keller was born in 1951, and grew up in Chicago during the Great Migration. She moved to Harlem during the Renaissance era, learning from the legendary James Van Der Zee. Taking her under his wing, where she developed a stronger grounding in her identity as a Black lesbian. Her portraits captured the resilience of her communities in Harlem. She finally settled down in San Francisco in the late ‘70s, when the city was in a huge pivotal radical moment. 

“It’s the new left movement during that time; you had the Black Panthers, Gay Liberation Front, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement,” the archive’s executive director, Kerby Lynch, explained. “She sees all these things and immediately becomes a collector of everything.”

Lenn Keller passed her the torch to the Bay Area Lesbian Archives. “Her life was all about transformation and being a witness to society changing right before her,” Lynch said.

She met Lenn Keller in 2016 while working on her first research project during college, and, like me, was also searching for something bigger than herself. We sat in the archival room, surrounded by books, protest flyers, pins and other relics from the fights for lesbians’ and women’s liberation. I felt, for one of the first times, like I was a part of something bigger than myself too. Through the 2000s, Kerby told me how Keller was a mother figure and mentor to her. She passed away in 2020, leaving Kerby to continue her life’s mission. 

“She felt like we needed to create an institution that particularly recognized the contribution of lesbians because that is one part of the new left movement that is super under-recognized,” Kerby said

Meeting Kerby was a breath of fresh air. She has an aura of cool, mixed with deep passion. She’s deeply conversant with lesbian history and Black feminism overall. She gave me a long list of books to read by Pat Parker, the poet and activist. She showed me a Black lesbian newsletter, Onyx, which was a magazine style newsletter made for and by Black lesbians of the Bay Area. 

As I felt the gritty pages between my fingers, I was most struck realizing that women would put in ads for anything from work to carpooling. I saw ads for many businesses along the mainstay of Valencia Street in San Francisco, which was a lesbian cultural corridor of the Bay Area.  

Kerby continued to pour into me with more information than I could handle. Growing up in Texas as a black masculine lesbian I was never affirmed in my sexuality, but I never let that define who I was as a person. Seeing these beautiful women come together for a greater cause than themselves I couldn’t help but view this as a full-circle moment.