Hundreds of lesbians and feminists have been inspired to donate artifacts of their personal and collective histories. The Archives encourages all lesbians to deposit the everyday mementos of your lives so that others can discover them in the future. The privacy of any donor is protected to whatever extent she desires.

Twenty years later, in the 1970s, the lesbian world began to change. We realized, as we dreamt of the Lesbian Nation, that we could and must make our lesbian communities strong. Part of our struggle was to fight the erasure that had always been used to keep us weak. We had to proclaim not only our immediate presence but the fact that many went before us, that we did indeed have a history. It was in this climate that The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives was created.

The lesbian world that I first came into, here in Los Angeles almost forty years ago, seemed to me to exist only in darkness. Our world seemed to have been invented in that moment of time. We had no past--or if we did, no one knew or could tell me about it. Because we had no knowledge of those who came before us, our isolation and loneliness felt tragic and inevitable. It is no wonder that the few books that were written had sad titles such as We Walk Alone or Odd Girl Out.