ALLENTOWN, Pa. (WLVT) - Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center starts the new year with a new exhibit, offering the community the chance to see materials from the Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive for the first time. PBS39 featured the archive in a report in July 2019.
"That's a really special moment, but it's a start, not an end," said Adrian Shanker, the center's executive director, "and we're hoping to find the resources to continue to produce exciting exhibits that showcase important moments in our local LGBT history."
The archive is housed at Muhlenberg College. A group of five students from Muhlenberg and Lehigh University worked over the summer and during the fall semester to digitize every page of every Pride guide. The exhibit features guides from the first decade of the festival.
"What we decided to do was to have a timeline as part of the exhibit and the timeline really shows you the evolution of Pride festivals and the first decade of their existence," said Mary Foltz, Lehigh University's faculty leader of the exhibit team.
"These first 11 years of Lehigh Valley Pride were organized by courageous and dedicated volunteers," Shanker said. "Their work deserves to be showcased. Their work deserves to be seen and validated, because they did this work at a time that was very challenging for the LGBT community anywhere in the country, especially here in the Lehigh Valley."
The first Lehigh Valley Pride festival was in 1994, inspired by the March on Washington the year before.
"They started with just 1,000 people in attendance, and by year four, they had 4,000 people in attendance, and it just grew and grew from there," Foltz said.
"It's looking at a time period where there were still a lot of mourning of people lost to AIDS, and also looking at the transition to an activist movement focused on winning marriage equality," Shanker said. "So, it's a really critical moment in time for America."
"The Pride guides actually were a small slice of life for LGBT people from politics to healthcare to arts and culture," Foltz said.
The curators combed through the guides and picked out pages that helped illustrate life at the time. The guides stopped getting published after 2004, but they returned in 2019, inspired by the work from the archive.
"Today, we have a very different approach," Shanker said. "We have companies that are very excited to support our Pride festival. We have a community that shows up in very large numbers, but that might not have been the case in the early days, and it's important for our entire community to understand what that history looked like."
"When we work together, we can bring the archive to life for our community and for the larger community in the Lehigh Valley," Foltz added.
The exhibit will be here at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center through February 21. Curators will talk about the exhibit at a reception on January 29.