ONE Archives Newsletter #9

Thank you for supporting ONE Archives’ mission to protect queer history and make it accessible now and for years to come by visiting, attending programs and exhibitions, researching, volunteering, donating, and spreading the word. 

If what we do is important to you, please consider making a donation to support ONE Archives by clicking the Donate button below.  Your donation helps ensure that we can continue to provide high quality programs, exhibitions, and resources centered on the queer community.

Service

ONE Archives staff has been busy assisting patrons and providing access to our extensive collections.  Since January, we have welcomed 500+ visiting researchers to our reading room, and we’ve led tours and presentations for both members of the community and university students. We hosted classes from USC, UCLA, Occidental, Otis, and Scripps and provided tours for hundreds of people from organizations including California Conference for Equality & Justice, the Point Foundation, Equality California, Los Angeles United School District, LGBTQ+ Alliance of the American Alliance of Museums, Okaeri, History Reimagined, and Ripon, Wisconsin’s Social Justice Alliance. We also started regular monthly tour opportunities for the community. We have had a great response and will continue to offer monthly behind the scenes tours in 2026.

Processing News

We stayed busy with ongoing behind-the-scenes work to process collections. Highlights of recently completed finding aids include collections from Filipino American and AIDS/HIV activist Gil Mangaoang; trans artist and photographer Leon Mostovoy; artist and scholar Catherine Lord; writer and punk musician Emilio Cubeiro; historian Stuart Timmons; HIV/AIDS activist Mary Pickert, and scrapbooks from 1940s female impersonator Vern Martelle. Our volunteers also reviewed and revised more than 8,000 files in the Subject File collection finding aid.

Digitization

Thanks to a partnership with the Digital Transgender Archive, and funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), we completed a project early in 2025 to digitize a variety of materials documenting transgender people of color, including publications from the Transexual Action Organization (TAO) and a 1988 interview with Marsha P. Johnson. Thanks to a generous grant from the California State Library, we began a project to digitize a variety of materials from LGBTQ+ people of color organizations, such as Black and White Men Together, Gay Asian Pacific Support Network, Multi-ethnic Gay and Lesbian Exchange, and several others.

Spotlight on ONE in Getty exhibition Queer Lens

We loaned eight works to the Getty Museum’s landmark exhibition Queer Lens: A History of Photography, the most extensive exhibition on queer photography to date. The curator, Paul Martineau, paid several visits to ONE Archives and, in addition to having our works in the show, our image “Two Young Men Kissing in Photo Booth” c. 1953 was selected for the Queer Lens banner at the Getty and across town. In addition, our curator and interim-director, Alexis Bard Johnson, wrote one of the essays for the catalog. 

Working with ONE Institute

As in previous years, the ONE Archives staff also worked closely with our community partner, ONE Institute. In July, we hosted the LGBTQ+ History Teacher Symposium, organized by the ONE Institute and the UCLA History-Geography Project.  In November, we welcomed the latest cohort of ONE Institute’s Youth Ambassadors for a tour and research session for their next projects.  We also worked closely with guest curators to provide historical materials for the exhibitions It’s Where I Belong: 40 Years (and More) of Drag in West Hollywood and The Sky is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then & Now.

Books and Articles Published in 2025 that feature our collection

• Paul Martineau, Ryan Linkof, Jordan Bear, Ken Gonzales-Day, Alexis Bard Johnson, Derek Conrad Murray, Catherine Opie, and J. Paul Getty Museum, Queer Lens : A History of Photography, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2025.

• No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2025. 

• The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869-1939, edited by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis, New York, New York, London, Paris, Chicago, IL: Monacelli, a Phaidon Company ; Phaidon Press Limited ; Phaidon SARL ; in association with Alphawood Foundation Chicago, 2025.

• Amos Badertscher, Rafael Alvarez, Theo Gordon, Joseph Plaster, and James Smalls, Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories, edited by Hunter O’Hanian, Jonathan D. Katz, and Beth Saunders, New York, New York: Monacelli, 2025.

• Millie Wilson, Jill H. Casid, Beatriz Cortez, Richard Hawkins, Kang Seung Lee, Jess Rath, and Luckman Gallery,  Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams, edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell, Los Angeles, CA: Inventory Press, 2025.

• Ben Miller, “Parody, Punk and ‘Terrorist Drag’: Inside the World of Vaginal Davis,” New York Times, September 9, 2025.

Exhibitions

Our galleries transformed throughout the year…

We kicked off the year with a packed house for Club Kaya, presenting two exhibitions that celebrated 30 years of Kaya Press, the award-winning Asian diasporic publisher. We were delighted to host them through the exhibitions Kaya Micro Operas: Alternatives to Archiving by Kaya’s artist-in-residence Alan Nakagawa, and Portrait of a Publisher as Political Project: 30 Years of Kaya Press, displaying ephemera from Kaya’s archive. 

In June, we opened Fairy Prince and The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive. 

In Fairy Prince, Halo Starling and the ONE Archives staff transformed our downstairs gallery into a fully immersive meditation on the radical faeries and sanctuary space, situating Starling’s mixed media collage and video work with highlights from our collections at the archive. 

The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive featured portraiture from our art collection. We selected from legacy collections, like those of Laura Aguilar and Eve Fowler, and recent donations, such as work by Arthur Tress and James Huber & Michael Hossner, to serve as physical evidence of the diversity and perseverance of our community. On view until January 10, there is still time to see the show! Check our website for open hours.  

In September, Curatorial Assistant Quetzal Arévalo took the lead on curating a one day pop-up exhibit on queer and trans music history as part of TRANSA: A Celebration at Getty Center. Presented in conversation with Queer Lens and $3 Bill, on view at the Getty this summer, the pop-up reading room explored figures such as Vaginal Davis and Jayne County through vinyl records, compact discs, photographs, and ephemera from the Archives. 

This fall, we were delighted to host the exhibition Holding Patterns by Alexandra Juhasz an installation on loss, archival care, and technologies of memory that was grounded by the deathbed videos of Jim Lamb and Juanita Mohammed Szczepanski, close friends of Juhasz. They were complimented by the collections of three individuals from the archive: Mina Kay Meyer, Yolanda Retter, and Kenneth L. Wiederhold. 

Programs

2025 was a year of meaningful programs. Friends old and new gathered for the closing party of Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A. with performers Edgar Fabián Frías and Armen Ra, tarot reading, and button-making. We welcomed hundreds of guests into the Archives for Club Kaya, a performance-packed night of celebration and recognition for our friends at Kaya Press. Just recently, we hosted Ken Gonzalez-Day and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in conversation with Amelia Jones. We also organized Last Address Tribute: Los Angeles with Alex Fiahlo and Alexandra Juhasz, where two coach buses led attendees on a site-specific journey that honored Chicanx artists and activists. 

ONE in the Press, 2025: 

Students from Ripon High School visit West Hollywood to learn about LGBTQ community 

ONE Archives at the USC Libraries receives $4.2 million in gifts endowing curator, director positions

'Fighting Erasure' How Two LA-Based Collections are Preserving and Presenting LGBTQ History

LAist Airtalk: SoCal History: Preserving LGBTQ+ history in California and beyond

Meet the 1940s secretary who used office time to produce the first lesbian magazine

Sci-fi, Magick, Queer L.A. reviewed in Artforum

Farewell to Joseph Hawkins

Joseph completes his research leave this year and officially retires as director of ONE Archives on December 31, 2025 after more than 25 years of service. He will be greatly missed. Joseph's legacy will continue long after his retirement, as ONE continues to build on the reputation and standards he established. For more about Joseph's many contributions at ONE Archives, please see this USC News article.

 That’s a wrap!

We can’t wait to share more about upcoming projects and spotlight specific staff members in the new year. Stay tuned, and Happy Holidays! 

Lexi, Loni, Michael, Bud, and Quetzal  

If you’ve made it this far…congratulations! You have received an exclusive photo of Marsha P. Johnson, our outdoor archive kitty.