Tragedy and triumphs: The nonprofit safeguarding San Diego’s LGBTQ+ history

Above: A Nexstar video on the history of Pride Month.

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — It is a place one could easily miss just walking down the street in University Heights.

The Lambda Archives, a local history center tucked away behind Diversionary Theater, has been a fixture of San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community for decades.

While it is a lesser-known organization compared to the likes of San Diego Pride and San Diego LGBT Community Center, its role in the San Diego-Baja California region has been critical: documenting and safeguarding its LGBTQ+ residents’ past.

Nicole Verdes, who uses “they” and “she” pronouns, has been involved with the nonprofit since 2015, beginning as a volunteer before working their way up to become its managing director.

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Verdes’ path is one nearly all of the history center’s full-time staff has followed: “History nerds,” as they say, first join the organization as volunteers, driven by the belief in its founding mission to preserve and collect artifacts from the region’s vibrant LGBTQ+ history.

It is a mission that began nearly 40 years ago with Robert “Jess” Jessup, a gay naval medic who served in Vietnam and was a pioneer in San Diego’s LGBTQ+ civil rights movement, and Doug Moore, who is credited with founding San Diego Pride.

Around 1987, in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the two began to collect the personal effects of those who had passed to honor their stories and share them with others in the community.

“[Jessup] took that initiative to really ensure that those items and who these people were as human beings and their contributions were remembered,” Verdes said. “As part of that, he really started collecting personal papers, photographs, protest signs — things like that.”

With that, the Lesbian and Gay Archives of San Diego was born, later becoming the Lambda Archives — an homage to the use of the Greek letter “Lambda” as a symbol for change in the early days of the “Gay Liberation Movement.”

Today, the archive is considered one of the best maintained collections dedicated to LGBTQ+ history in the country. Everything from flyers for events, books, journals, photographs and zines — a type of self-published, small-circulation magazine — can be found among the archive’s stacks.

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Much of what is housed in the archive ended up there by way of donation, in varying degrees of organization. Nonetheless, curating it all takes hours of sifting through papers and research, on top of scanning and digitizing some of the items to make them available to the public.

The ephemera spans decades of San Diego’s LGBTQ+ history, all the way back to the 1930s, offering everything from windows into what everyday life was like for the community to how San Diegans responded to landmark events like the HIV/AIDs epidemic or Stonewall Uprising.

But the through line for the community-driven archives is simple: It’s people.

“When people think of history, they think of these big events and these hugely massive, historically significant things that happen,” Verdes said. “But, when you really break it down, our history is comprised of people and people’s experiences.”

“Certainly the collections that we have here reflect what individuals, what their lives were like, who they were as people, what their contributions were or just how they were living their lives here locally,” they continued.

Hearing those stories from the source is one of Verdes’ favorite parts of their task in preserving the history of San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community, whether through conducting interviews or by listening to people recount their experiences in the Lambda Archives’ oral history collection.

“There’s something really compelling about learning history in a way that you’re sitting face to face with somebody that’s telling you their story, their journey, how being a part of the community has impacted them personally,” Verdes said.

It is deeply important work, Verdes says, not only to help new generations navigate their world, but to give the often overlooked or forgotten stories of LGBTQ+ people renewed life.

“When you really break it down, our history is comprised of people and people’s experiences.”

Nicole Verdes, Lambda Archives managing director

“Sometimes I listen to our oral histories and there’s a common question at the end, like ‘What are you going to end up doing with this?’” Verdes said. “They can’t believe that somehow their history won’t resurface in the future, but it does.”

According to Verdes, that is why education is such a central component to the mission of the Lambda Archives: Learning of the past can strengthen a community and serve as a guide for its future.

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Recognizing and understanding the local history collected at the Lambda Archives — one full of struggle and tragedy on top of hard-won triumphs and immense joy — can be a critical tool to grapple with issues currently facing the LGBTQ+ community, they explained.

“It’s apropos that [San Diego] Pride’s theme this year is ‘Making History Now’ because that is a central component of what we do here,” Verdes said. “History is not always something that is so far in the past. It’s something that’s actively happening today — it’s the issues that we’re facing, the events that we’re holding, the coalitions that we’re building.”

“History is not always this negative thing,” they said. “Sometimes there’s a lot of joy in the things that resurface.”

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