Sahl, Ted, Kat Fitzgerald, Patrick Phonsakwa, Lawrence McCrorey, Darryl Pelletier. "6-1978 Harvey goes to Gay Pride San Jose." Photograph. King Library Digital Collections.
Primary sources are found in libraries, archives, universities, government repositories, church documents, and a range of other organizations. Numerous digital collections provide access to primary source materials which may otherwise be inaccessible to the general public. The selections included here represent a small number of primary source materials related to AIDS, Stonewall, the Gay Rights Movement, and other topics of interest in LGBTQ history.
According to the Library of Congress, "Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period." Primary sources are the direct, uninterpreted records of a subject or event, or "the raw materials of history" (LOC, 2017). These may include letters, diaries, first person accounts, memoirs, speeches, interviews, birth/death records, artifacts, historical records, images, photographs, lab books, manuscripts, government publications, and some forms of newspaper articles.
Using primary sources for research allow for personal engagement with events of the past which helped shape the world as it is today, and promote a deeper understanding of these events. Because primary sources are often incomplete and without context, they help promote critical analysis and discovery as they are examined against what is already known about an event or a period in history. Primary sources also enable the researcher to construct knowledge about specific times, places, people, and events.
The Internet is an excellent resource for locating primary source materials, especially materials that have been digitized. Here are a couple of strategies from the American Library Association to locate primary source materials.
Use a Keyword Search
Select keywords related to your research topic and include the phrase primary source as part of the search. For example:
lgbt history primary sources
This will retrieve many authoritative and valid websites containing histories, digitized documents, and primary source collections housed in university special collections, libraries, archives, and organizations.
Use a Primary Source Title
Identify a title of a primary source by reading a secondary source on the topic (e.g., encyclopedia, book, article, etc.). Search for the specific title online, enclosing the full title in quote marks to narrow the likely results list. Credits, acknowledgements, image captions, and bibliographies are good pointers to primary sources.
For example, The Gay Revolution (Lillian Faderman, HQ 76.8 .U5 F33 2016) includes two sections of Acknowledgements and Notes in the back of the book, which provides details about the archives, estates, and foundations where original source materials (e.g., letters and manuscripts) were retrieved from.
Adapted from "Finding Primary Sources on the Web", American Library Association, January 11, 2015. http://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/primarysources/finding (Accessed January 18, 2017) Document ID: 7bd7b564-6106-dec4-b928-899fc3f75548
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more.
FBI - The Vault is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Library which contains 6,700 documents and other media that have been scanned from paper into digital copies. The Vault includes an extensive collection of documents related to Gay Rights and Popular Culture. Materials related to prominent LBGTQ figures such as Harvey Milk, Rock Hudson, Marlene Dietrich, the Gay Activists Alliance, and Eleanor Roosevelt, are contained within the Vault.