Where our history lives: from New York to Minneapolis, Chicago to San Francisco, gays and lesbians are building archives that will preserve queer history for future generations.

When noted explorer and anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum swung through Minneapolis on a book tour several years ago, Jean Tretter thought he'd ask the gay adventurer a simple question: What was his plan to ensure that future generations had access to his papers?

"Surprisingly, he really didn't have one," says Tretter, founder of the Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies, a historical archive at the University of Minnesota. "So we talked about it, and he decided to donate his personal papers to us because he was very concerned that his history and the history of the tribes that he worked with not be rewritten to exclude anything gay." Schneebaum formally donated his archives June 17, three months before his death in September. Tretter adds, "Too often the heterosexual world will rewrite our history and ignore any gay facets of our lives."

Tretter and his fellow LGBT archivists across the country are in a frantic race to preserve the ongoing history before it disappears forever. Members of the World War II generation are rapidly passing away, and those of the Stonewall generation are retiring. Complicating matters is the fact that unlike countries such as Canada and Australia, the United States has no definitive national LGBT archive; instead there is a mixed bag of far-flung freestanding repositories and university-based special collections.

That may begin to change in May 2006, which is when Tretter plans to cohost the first international conference for gay history collections on the University of Minnesota campus. "It really will be the first true academic world conference just for GLBT archives, libraries, museums, and special collections, which makes the very nice acronym ALMS," he says.

Expected speakers include gay rights icons Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny, and Tretter hopes the conference will bring more cohesion to the country's--if not the world's--gay archives. "We're not trying to force anything," he says, "but we do think it would be helpful to all of us to have some sort of international organization."

Indeed, Kameny's materials provide a prime example of the need for--and precious value of--gay archival preservation. On a recent visit to Kameny's home during preparations for his 80th birthday celebration, Bob Witeck, an out communications consultant in Washington, D.C., stumbled on a veritable treasure trove of gay memorabilia just gathering dust. "There in his attic are all of his papers and the original picket signs from the earliest marches," says Witeck. "It's like going back in time and finding the suffragettes' stuff in an attic. The issue for all of us is the same: How can we get Frank to make sure that an archive gets all of this? But it's like, 'How do you hold a wave upon the sand?'"

Understandably, the makers of gay history are often reluctant to part with their materials, which puts the onus of eternal vigilance and omniscience on gay archivists. "We have to know what's out there," says Karen Sendziak, president of the board of directors for Chicago's Gerber/Hart Library, which turns 25 in January. "It's part of our job. But we know when people have been activists for many years, so we usually know who's sitting on wonderful collections."

"It's an extended commitment, since simply because you ask someone for their papers doesn't necessarily mean they're going to give them to you," says Steven G. Fullwood, founder and director of the New York Public Library's Black Gay and Lesbian Archive Project, which opens its doors to the public in December. "You have to develop long-term relationships with people to show them that you're going to treat their materials with integrity and not just take them and sell them on the Internet."

Still, says Tretter, it behooves these individuals and their legacies to plan for the future, as difficult as that might be. "If people are sincere about wanting their contributions to the community and the world to survive, and that people also know that they're gay, it's best to donate while they're still alive," he says. "Now, that doesn't mean that I don't get phone calls at 2 in the morning saying, 'Oh, Jean, my partner just died, and his folks came over to the apartment and kicked me out and took all his gay stuff and threw it in the Dumpster. Won't you come over?' And so I'm Dumpster-diving at 3 in the morning to save what we can of the guy's materials."

On the opposite end of the Dumpster-diving spectrum, fortunately for archivists, materials sometimes simply fall into their laps. "Folks will come across an item that was in their closet for the last 20, 30, 40 years, and because they know about us they'll pause before getting rid of it," says Terence Kissack, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. "Just yesterday, for example, a guy came by completely unexpectedly and brought us this box of records of an African-American political group here in the Bay Area called LAGADDA, or Lesbians and Gays of African Descent for Democratic Action. His name is Donald Tarver, and he's concerned that the history of that group not be lost, that it be preserved, that it be integrated into the history of the larger LGBT community," he says.

And that, says Kissack, is ultimately what he and fellow gay archivists are trying to ensure for everyone. "We're all constantly asking ourselves, Are we capturing the histories of our lives?" he says. "Our mission is to honor that path and to make it useful to the future because history really is one of the most powerful resources for social, cultural, and political change."

Allen is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.