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In 2016 Kansas City installed a marker that celebrated its role as host to the first meeting of the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations in 1966. The marker was the first to commemorate this historic gathering of gay rights activists as well as the first to recognize Missouri's LGBTQ history. This article charts the effort to install Kansas City's marker as a case study of the issues involved in documenting LGBTQ history. What began as a community collecting initiative quickly evolved into an effort that included students, city officials, and a federal heritage area. The authors--a founder of the community collection initiative, a public history educator, and a public history student--demonstrate how those involved attempted to navigate questions of ownership and shared authority. Ultimately, the authors ask public historians to see themselves as potential allies to, rather than authorities of, the communities with which they work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on letters and essays written by teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s, and building on my historical research on same-sex desiring girls and girlhoods in the postwar United States, I ask how teenage girls in the 1970s and early 1980s pursued answers to questions about their feelings, practices, and identities and expressed their subjectivities as young lesbian feminists. These young writers, I argue, recognized that they benefitted from more resources and role models than did earlier generations, but they objected to what they saw as adult lesbians' ageism, caution, and neglect. In reaching out to sympathetic straight and lesbian public figures and publications, girls found new ways to combat the persistent isolation and oppression faced by youth whose autonomy remained severely restricted by familial, educational, and legal structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ephemeral evidence, or ephemera (including posters, flyers, and other materials created for short-term purposes), poses numerous challenges to archivists and researchers seeking to understand their provenance, veracity, and significance. In particular, scholars of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people and communities frequently encounter such materials since ephemera has become a central element of much queer archiving practice. Drawing on an ongoing research project examining the history of gay and lesbian college student organizing as an example, this article suggests how oral history can help “animate” ephemera, providing researchers a way to enhance the interpretive value of such fleeting evidence. Oral histories can transform “queer campus ephemera,” traces of 1970s queer student histories in the form of flyers, posters, and short-lived newsletters produced by gay and lesbian students, into more substantive evidence of the social and political climate in which such students lived, went to school, and organized. Through these examples, the article explores the benefits (and limitations) of using oral history to interpret ephemeral archival evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]