Fresno State archive gets $126,000 to preserve LGBTQ history

A $126,000 state grant will help Fresno State race to preserve five decades of Central Valley LGBTQ history before more of it is lost to time, neglect or lack of funding. The money will expand the Central Valley Rainbow Archives, a project the university says is the first public and academic archive dedicated to LGBTQ2+ history in the San Joaquin Valley.

The California State Library award will support Fresno State’s Special Collections Research Center as it builds around the collection of Jeffery Robinson, the Fresno activist and organizer who died in 2022. Robinson’s materials stretch from the 1970s to the present and include photographs, oral histories, Fresno Pride Parade videos from 1991 to 2023, HIV/AIDS community records, activism ephemera, LGBTQ2+ bar materials and newspaper archives from The Frontrunner, Q and A and Newslink.

That kind of recordkeeping matters in a region where LGBTQ history has often gone undocumented. Fresno State says the archive is designed to make those stories publicly accessible, and the grant comes through the state’s Preservation and Accessibility of California’s LGBTQ+ History program, which has funded similar preservation efforts in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2024. For Fresno County, the stakes are local and immediate: what gets saved now will shape what students, families and researchers can learn later about who built queer life in the Valley.

The work will not happen in isolation. Fresno State is partnering with Qistory, the Fresno-based LGBTQ2+ public history organization founded by Robinson, and with Trans-E-Motion, which serves transgender communities in Fresno and Madera counties. Katherine Fobear, associate professor in Fresno State’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, founder of the university’s LGBTQ2+ studies minor, a Trans-E-Motion board member and co-chair of Qistory, said much of Central Valley LGBTQ history has not yet been preserved, recorded or written about. The grant, she said, will help build an archive for future generations.

Tammy Lau, head of Fresno State’s Special Collections Research Center and University Archives, called the project a “true community archive” and said she is excited about the student research and partnerships it will create. The grant will also support public workshops on archiving, oral history and processing historical materials, along with training for Fresno State students, faculty and staff, and high school LGBTQ2+ clubs.

Fresno State says the project will include a public lecture series and an exhibition in summer 2028, giving Robinson’s collection a visible public life after years of being scattered across personal files, community spaces and memory. It also grows out of earlier mapping work by Qistory, including Mapping Queer Fresno, which documented the Tower District, the Fresno Rainbow Pride Parade, transgender and nonbinary histories, HIV and AIDS in Fresno, the Imperial Dove Court and queer activism by communities of color.