In this presentation, Laura Cooper Brown will present the class project from LIS 668 Projects in Moving Image and Sound Archiving, which is the digital video oral history of the Daughters of Bilitis, which was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the United States (founded in 1955 in San Francisco).

The stories contained within the oral histories touch on issues of 1950s social oppression, feminism and women’s sexuality, and provide a timely contrast with recent legal and cultural developments related to LGBT populations, such as the overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act and California Proposition 8 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The collection of video tapes are archived by the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, NY, which is one of the world’s oldest LGBT archives (it is celebrating it’s 40th anniversary this year).