Protect Queer and Trans History!

History doesn't disappear on its own. It gets removed. It gets defunded. It gets quietly taken down from websites, stripped from school curricula, and shelved out of reach. And when that happens to LGBTQ+ history, the loss doesn't just affect scholars or researchers; it affects every queer and trans young person trying to understand who they are and where they come from.

Lambda Archives of San Diego has spent 39 years making sure that doesn't happen here.

Founded in 1987, we are the only dedicated LGBTQ+ archive serving the San Diego-Tijuana binational region. We hold the photographs, oral histories, organizational records, zines, cassette tapes, newspapers, and personal papers of generations of queer and trans San Diegans: activists, artists, organizers, lovers, elders, and everyday people who built community under conditions that often demanded they do so in secret. These materials exist because people saved them. They survive because we do.

What we do

Our digitization work is at the heart of our mission. We are currently preserving 81 at-risk audio cassettes, capturing voices and oral histories that exist nowhere else, through a Recordings at Risk grant. In partnership with San Diego Mesa College, we are digitizing hidden collections that have never been publicly accessible. A major multi-year initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation is helping us build the infrastructure to share these materials broadly, so that a researcher in Tijuana, a student in City Heights, and a donor in North Park can all access the same irreplaceable history.

We develop educational curriculum rooted in California's FAIR Education Act, bringing authentic LGBTQ+ history into classrooms and community spaces, with particular attention to the histories of queer and trans people of color, immigrant communities, and border residents whose stories are chronically left out of mainstream accounts. 

Our exhibits bring archival materials out of storage and into public life: a Stepping Stone 50th anniversary exhibit, and commemorative programming marking the 45th anniversary of the first reported AIDS cases, developed in partnership with Diversionary Theatre. These are not passive displays. They are invitations for community members to see themselves in history.

The Larry T. Baza Memorial Scholarship Fund honors the life and legacy of a beloved San Diego arts leader and advocate, investing in the next generation of LGBTQ+ artists and leaders so that the people who will carry our community's story forward have the resources to do so.

Why right now

We are living through a coordinated effort to remove LGBTQ+ people from public memory. Federal databases have been scrubbed. School curricula have been gutted. Funding for LGBTQ+ organizations has been slashed. In this environment, an archive is not a passive institution. It is a counterargument, made in primary sources.

Lambda Archives has always operated this way: on a lean budget, with a small and dedicated team, doing work that the broader funding landscape consistently undervalues. We have tripled our operating budget over the past several years, and we are approaching our 40th anniversary in 2027 with more momentum than ever. But momentum requires resources, and the political moment we are in has made stable funding harder to secure.

Give OUT Day is one of the most important fundraising moments of our year. Every dollar raised here goes directly toward preserving collections, supporting scholarships, building curriculum, and keeping our doors open to the community that made this history and deserves to hold it.

Join us

You don't have to be a historian to understand why this matters. You just have to believe that queer and trans people deserve to know where they came from, and that our stories are worth keeping.

Donate today. Share our page. Tell someone you know. Every act of support is an act of preservation.