As part of my first research trip to the United States I visited a number of archives in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Historical/archival research is a key aspect of the project Media Amateurs in Gay Culture: in order to formulate theories on the media history of self-staging by gay men we first of all have to access relevant self-narratives. Whereas nowadays self-images can be quickly and easily accessed via YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, or by using the smartphone technology that is becoming an increasingly important and integral part of people’s personal lives, the material required for an historical perspective can often only be obtained through painstaking research and analysis. For this reason, archives devoted to documenting the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are the first port of call for researchers in this field, although here, too, it is not always immediately clear what kind of private photographs or other visual material the collected papers contain. In contrast to their German counterparts, American archives of gay and lesbian history – or at least the ones I visited (ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles; GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco; James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center, San Francisco; San Francisco Historical Photography Collection) – have very good online catalogues that are centrally accessible through the Online Archive of California (OAC). This enabled me to carry out more detailed research prior to my visit. It must be noted, however, that most inventories only give a rough idea of what form the pictorial material takes, what is depicted, and how the photographs are organized and arranged within the context of an individual collection or estate. I therefore had no choice but to immerse myself in the chilly depths of these archives (it was unusually cold in Los Angeles back in March) – a challenge that was eased considerably by the helpfulness and professional curiosity of the archivists. Among the more than 3 million collected items housed at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives (founded in 1952, it is the oldest collection of ‘queer history’ in the United States), I found large quantities of photo albums, photographic series and scrapbooks that have been made available for reference and scholarly analysis. The material covers the period from 1895 through to the present day, with a particular focus on the 1950s to the 1990s. At the GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco), on the other hand, I discovered material from the period of the Second World War that promises to provide revealing insight into the lives of gay and lesbian soldiers in the context of the Allied Forces. My visit to the San Francisco Historical Photography Collection underlined the importance of direct contact with archival staff. Without their valuable advice and assistance I would never have accessed sources such as the community photography project “Shades of San Francisco”, initiated by the San Francisco History Center. Its goal is to compile private photographs of different neighbourhoods – such as The Castro or Valencia Street, into an image of the city that represents its true diversity. The fact that private photographs are being used here for the purposes of urban sociological research and historical documentation is interesting not only from the perspective of visual history and visual sociology, but also because – by featuring members of the LGBT community – it touches on issues of queer self-staging in an urban context that have been around at least since Stonewall and the advent of pride parades. At the same time, however, the extent to which these photographs can be analyzed and interpreted may prove be limited – the biographical contextualizations ultimately amount to little more than a few pieces of information, with the result that the sociocultural function of the images is difficult to determine beyond the iconographic representation of particular poses and gestures.
Nevertheless, the importance attached to these photographs by the San Francisco History Center seems to reflect a trend towards focussing more closely upon the self and its staging, representation and conceptualization – a trend that is also influenced by technological advances in social networks developed in Silicon Valley near San Francisco.
