Lambda Archives of San Diego

The Lambda Archives, a local history center tucked away behind Diversionary Theater in University Heights, has been a fixture of San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community for decades. Driven by the belief in its founding mission to preserve and collect artifacts, its role in the San Diego-Baja California region has been critical: documenting and safeguarding its LGBTQ+ residents’ past.

It is a mission that began nearly 40 years ago with Robert “Jess” Jessup, a gay naval medic who served in Vietnam and was a pioneer in San Diego’s LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, and Doug Moore, who is credited with founding San Diego Pride.

Around 1987, in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the two began to collect the personal effects of those who had passed to honor their stories and share them with others in the community. Jessup took that initiative to really ensure that those items and who these people were as human beings and their contributions were remembered, As part of that, he really started collecting personal papers, photographs, protest signs — things like that.

With that, the Lesbian and Gay Archives of San Diego was born, later becoming the Lambda Archives — an homage to the use of the Greek letter “Lambda” as a symbol for change in the early days of the “Gay Liberation Movement.”

Lambda Archives preserves and makes available the tangible record of the community including the personal documentation of individuals who have lived, worked and been active members of our communities, and the organizational records of business, community and service groups that have served our needs and interests. Lambda Archives’ Collections include:

• Perhaps most significant are the collections of original and unique records and personal papers of local LGBTQ+ activists, organizations and political campaigns including the records of the first openly gay person to run for public office in San Diego, and the records from campaigns to stop homophobic ballot initiatives, from “No on 6” in 1978 to “No on 8” in 2008. Large collections include the records of Update, Dignity San Diego, and Doug Moore’s records of San Diego Pride.
• LASD houses complete or nearly complete runs of virtually all San Diego and Tijuana (and some significant regional or national) LGBTQ+ periodicals, most of which are not available elsewhere and some of which may have not survived outside LASD’s facilities.
• Newsletters for more than 40 local LGBTQ+ organizations (AIDS, art, sports, business, women’s Latino, Asian, Native American, religious, service, social, transgender, bisexual, leather and other interests) demonstrate the diversity of the region’s LGBT community.
• Ephemera (materials that are produced to be discarded when an event is over) are a valuable and evocative source of information about any time period. LASD’s collections include flyers, announcements, bumper stickers, buttons, calendars, catalogues, flyers, posters, hundreds of t-shirts, and more!
• The Audio-Visual collection includes numerous video & tape Interviews, LGBTQ+ music, educational films, and footage of numerous Pride parades.
• There is an extensive collection of thousands of photographs and slides.
• Photo Digitization Project – A new ongoing collection of digital materials, including more than a thousand emails, plus digital photos, website captures, and other digital records.
• Our Research Library contains more than 5,000 titles including non-fiction, fiction, biographies, and pulp fiction, which are accessible to the public.

Lamda Archives depends entirely on private donations, private foundations, and grant funding for support. Thanks to this ongoing support, more and more of the collection is cataloged and searchable online.