The Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America (GLAMA) is celebrating LGBT History Month by hosting its second annual Trolley Tour on Saturday, Oct. 15, at Union Station. Local historian Ross Freese will narrate the hour-long tour through Kansas City’s LGBT past. Tour-goers may choose one of two departure times (11 a.m. or 1 p.m.) All proceeds benefit GLAMA collections.
LGBT rights activist Mickey Ray will be speaking between the two tours. Ray was the partner of Drew Shaffer, founder of the 1960s Phoenix Society, a local gay advocacy organization. Shaffer played a leading role in the first North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, which was convened in Kansas City. This year is the 45th anniversary..
GLAMA is a collaboration among the Kansas City Museum, LaBudde Special Collections of the Miller Nichols Library at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Jackson County Historical Society (JCHS). The archive contains papers and artifacts of several local persons and organizations, LGBT-themed articles and periodicals, scrapbooks, memoirs and costumes.
Stuart Hinds, head of LaBudde Special Collections, informed Camp that the archive has recently acquired donations from:
· Lavender Ladies, a local social group -- a large number of issues of The Ladder, several albums of women’s music and many published books.
· Chloe Wagner — a run of the Gay-News Telegraph, a scrapbook of photos from a local art festival, and the mirror that used to hang in Phoenix Books.
· Echo (Linda Ray) and Karin McAdams — a variety of women’s music, LPs, two early scrapbooks documenting Echo’s coming-out process, and a locally hand-made quilted banner that hung behind the performers at the National Women’s Choral Festival in Kansas City in 1989.
· Bill Todd and Art Bratt — material related to their work with GALA Choruses and nearly 40 scrapbooks of newspaper clippings (local and national), magazine articles and other ephemera related to gay and AIDS topics.
To donate documents or artifacts, or to record a unique oral history, contact Stuart Hinds at hindss@umkc.edu or 816-235-5712.
GLAMA Trolley Tour
11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15
Union Station 20 W. Pershing Rd.
816-483-8300 Kansas City, Mo.
To purchase tickets, go to kansascitymuseum.org.
For more information about GLAMA and its collections, go to glama.us.
To find other LGBT archives, go to bit.ly/hfmrdp.
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