A recent GOOD magazine article about the past and future of American gay bars features an extensive interview with Joseph Hawkins, director of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, as well as images drawn from the ONE Archives' collections. The USC Libraries acquired the ONE Archives in 2010. It is the largest repository of materials related to LGBTQ history in the U.S.
Titled "Is Gentrification Killing the Gay Bar?", the story by Eric Sasson tracks the changing meaning of LGBTQ commercial spaces—and the efforts of the ONE Archives to document and share those spaces' histories:
Hawkins’ work with the ONE archives has been a way to pass down these stories to new generations. “People forget what things were like and there’s a real beauty and charm to these discoveries,” he says. “We want to know about it and when I tell young people about it, in classes that I teach, I never find that they’re bored or they dislike it. They actually love it. They love hearing the history. They love seeing pictures.”
Read the full story on the GOOD website.