Museum Collections
Collections
We are currently drafting a collections plan and policy, which will be voted on by our Board of Directors by the end of the year. If you have inquiries or ephemera you’d like to offer, please contact Lauraberth Lima at llima@americanlgbtqmuseum.org.
Public programs aimed at collecting at-risk ephemera are already active while our policy is in development. Learn more about these initiatives below!
Lavender Names Project
The Lavender Names Project is a collaboration between the American LGBTQ+ Museum and Up Until Now Collective, created in tandem with the 10th Anniversary Tour of the trailblazing opera Fellow Travelers which launches at Seattle Opera in February, 2026 before traveling to more than a dozen U.S. cities.
The ephemera collected in his collaboration will become part of the American LGBTQ+ Museum’s digital archive and will also appear on stage at the end of each Fellow Travelers opera performance. It will act as a living memorial to the many LGBTQ+ people who suffered decades-long discrimination by federal and local governments in the United States, including the military, from the “Lavender Scare” in the 1950s, to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the 1990s, to today.
Queer Legacies Project
Queer Legacies Project (QLP) is an in-person workshop series developed by the American LGBTQ+ Museum in partnership with The Feminist Institute, a digital archiving project, and SAGE, a service and advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ elders with centers in the Bronx, Harlem, Chelsea, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. QLP aims to illuminate the personal histories and ephemera of NYC’s LGBTQ+ elders through these intimate facilitated archiving workshops.
The project convenes LGBTQ+ elders to emphasize the importance of their personal archives and stories within the greater narrative arc of LGBTQ+ history in the U.S. These workshops help participants preserve their personal archives for future generations by cataloging the stories and ephemera that reflect the valuable histories of their lives.