"They are mainly important for their documentation of San Francisco's gay community and for recent shots of San Francisco which the library collections lack. 1978 to 1983 but they bulk in 1979," the letter states. Norris worked for Walter Jebe's camera shop in the Excelsior neighborhood, according to the letter, before opening up his own store. Haller wrote that he "squired a group of materials from a garage sale on Masonic in the Haight neighborhood which appear to have belonged to one Steven S. The society knows the origin of the first collection because it was discovered with a typewritten letter to then-historical society library director Bruce Johnson from Douglas Haller, curator of photographs, dated March 11, 1986. Photos: Joe Altman collection California Historical Society At right, BAR publisher Bob Ross, who was emperor, and Empress Ginger in the 1978 parade. Leonard Matlovich, left, in the 1979 Pride parade. "My ethics don't say 'we won't process this without funding,' but we are looking for support," Bersch said, adding that the Flower Market project has to be done first. The society is currently focusing on digitizing a large project about the California Flower Market, also in San Francisco, in the early 20th century.
These two collections have been identified more recently as high priority."īersch said that if the society has more donations it will be able to get the photos online more quickly. "For some of those older collections there wasn't adequate staff to process them at the time, so there's this backlog. "Over the years, people at CHS in different departments would collect things on their own and bring them to the vaults," Bersch said. The snapshots were discovered in boxes in the society's archives, according to Al Bersch, a trans man who is a digital archivist with the society, which is based in the city's South of Market neighborhood. The California Historical Society is in the process of digitizing two collections of photographs and negatives from the wild and heady early days of LGBTQ liberation in San Francisco.