Diane F. Germain Collection
Full finding aid and list of materials
Diane Germain’s materials have been processed in two parts.
The first collection of materials was processed in 2011 and is located in UCLA's Special Collections as part of their relationship with the Mazer. In addition, a shortened finding aid based on this collection was created by a UCLA student receiving their Masters in Library Science.
Read the UCLA Special Collections’ finding aid for the Diane Germain Papers.
The second collection was processed in 2023 as part of a California State Grant awarded to the Mazer in 2020. It is currently located at the Mazer.
Read the finding aid for the Diane Germain Collection processed in 2023.
An efficient way to search for specific materials within these finding aids is to use Ctrl+f (Windows computer) or Command+f (on a Mac).
Biography
Diane F. Germain was born January 23, 1942 in Winooski, Vermont, though most of her time living in Vermont was spent in Burlington on lovely Lake Champlain. She attended the University of Vermont, graduating in 1964. In this time, her mother and older sister moved to California, and after graduating from college, Diane followed them out west. She attended graduate school at the University of California Los Angeles, graduating with a master’s degree in psychiatric social work in 1975.
In her master’s thesis, she wrote about the role of the social worker in inpatient psychiatric care at the Veteran’s Affairs hospital in Brentwood, California. Looking back, she wishes she had written about a topic related to sexuality; but being a young lesbian who came out slowly rather than all at once, she held back. However, as Diane navigated the lesbian world, she became braver as she saw what other lesbians were doing, eventually leading her to a life dedicated to lesbian activism. In 1978, Diane left Los Angeles for San Diego, excitedly following a group of hip and progressive friends she met at graduate school at UCLA.
Diane is a founding member of Dykes on Hikes, The Lesbian Referral Services, Beautiful Lesbian Thespians, and the California Women’s Art Collective. As a volunteer for the Lambda Archives of San Diego, she noticed a lack of lesbian representation in the archive.
To fill this gap, she conducted interviews, oral histories, and collected materials from lesbians in Southern California. Diane was also a member of Las Hermanas, a coffee house and women’s cultural center, and the Califia Community, a feminist educational retreat that held conferences in the woods to discuss topics related to anti-racism, class, and sexism.
Always doodling and searching to express herself as a lesbian through art, Diane was the staff Cartoonist for HotWire: The Journal of Women’s Music, Culture of Chicago, and Lesbian News, though her comics appear to many more publications, including The Lavendar, Fuzzy Friends, and Thursday’s Child, to name a few. Whoever had a lesbian publication, Diane would send comics. Her work even appears in a lesbian newspaper in Italy.
Diane has been described as a “Lesbian Encyclopedia” because she writes down and saves everything, remembers everyone’s names, and strives to preserve as much history pertaining to women and lesbians as she can. Diane continues to donate materials to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive with regularity.
