Nestled between Walgreen’s Pharmacy and Badlands on 18th Street, the GLBT History Museum has been showcasing queer history from the archives of the GLBT Historical Society for the last four years, with a patronage of more than 45,000 visitors between 2011 and 2014.
Now marking its 30th anniversary, the Historical Society was founded during the height of the AIDS crisis as a repository for queer ephemera, manuscripts, and oral histories. While the initial motivation was to provide an archive for scholarly research, in the ’90s the founding members began to seek out ways in which they could share its extensive archives. As of 2012, the archives have grown to include over 5,000 posters, 4,000+ periodical titles from as early as the 1910s, 517 manuscript collections, and over 80,000 photographs.