Our Vision

The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives is a vital force in collecting, preserving, and uplifting lesbian, feminist, and queer women's history. The Mazer provides academics, researchers, creatives, and the community a space to access and explore the past while paving the way for future generations to understand and create their own legacy. 

The Archive includes personal papers, organizational papers, photographs, periodicals, subject files, books, audiovisual materials, and ephemera spanning decades creating a living record of community activism, creativity, resilience, and love.

Our mission is to collect, preserve, and make accessible lesbian, feminist, and women’s history as a means of providing a link between multi-generational lesbians through the following:

1. Provide research and resource facilities to the community
2. Develop educational events, opportunities, and programs
3. Create social activities infused with a presence of Lesbian/feminist history and future possibilities

Mazer Highlights

Excerpt from Who We Are

“The lesbian world that I first came into, here in Los Angeles almost forty years ago, seemed to me to exist only in darkness. Our world seemed to have been invented in that moment of time. We had no past--or if we did, no one knew or could tell me about it. Because we had no knowledge of those who came before us, our isolation and loneliness felt tragic and inevitable. It is no wonder that the few books that were written had sad titles such as We Walk Alone or Odd Girl Out.

Twenty years later, in the 1970s, the lesbian world began to change. We realized, as we dreamt of the Lesbian Nation, that we could and must make our lesbian communities strong. Part of our struggle was to fight the erasure that had always been used to keep us weak. We had to proclaim not only our immediate presence but the fact that many went before us, that we did indeed have a history. It was in this climate that The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives was created.

Hundreds of lesbians and feminists have been inspired to donate artifacts of their personal and collective histories. The Archives encourages all lesbians to deposit the everyday mementos of your lives so that others can discover them in the future. The privacy of any donor is protected to whatever extent she desires.”

— Lillian Faderman