Walking past the Lavender Library on 21st Street, you could
easily mistake it for one of Sacramento’s many bookstores. But as
soon as you walk inside it becomes apparent that what you’re
actually seeing is a treasure trove of the city’s local LGBTQ+
history.

Originally opened in 1997, the Lavender Library Archive and
Cultural Exchange, or LLACE, has spent the nearly three decades
building an archive of local LGBTQ+ media. Clint Vigen, one of
the original founders of the library, said the decision to open
LLACE was primarily due to the seemingly imminent closure of the
Lambda Center, not the LGBT Community Center, that same year.

“At that time the Lambda Community Center was on rapid decline
and was about to go out,” says Vigen. “They rented out three
spaces in the Jackson Building, which is now Big Brother Comics,
and they were eventually brought down to three rooms in that
building, and they couldn’t rent all three rooms.”

One of those rooms was the Jane Roundtree Library, and the
community center made the decision to throw away the collection
there. Vigen said that Michael Bennet, the librarian of the
space, alerted Gail Lang of The Open Book about the disposal.

“Gail rounded up everybody that she could that would pay
attention and listen to what was happening,” Vigen remembers. “We
took back that Jane Roundtree library, and we moved it
temporarily into Gail’s basement.”

The library would find a home at the B Street Theater, then still
on B Street, for two years before moving to its current location
on 21st Street in 2000. Nancy McKernan, who has served on the
board since 2012, did the painting for the new location and says
she’s amazed by how much it’s grown. 

Clint Vigen, Kerry Parsons, Michelle Trujillo, Nancy McKernan and
Rayna Sheftman stand at the opening counter at the Lavender
Library on 1414 21st Street. (Photo by Jacob Peterson)

“The library was just a three-shelf A-frame in the very
beginning,” McKernan said.“There were mostly VHS tapes; we didn’t
have DVDs and stuff like that back then.” 

That small collection has expanded quite a bit in the following
years. Kerry Parsons, the director of the archives and
collections department, says there is a wide variety of different
media available to the public there, including a variety of
serialized material.

“We focus on local magazines and publications, and we also have
some national publications on our shelves and DVDs people can
check out,” Parsons says.

While much of the material in the library is available to check
out, there are items in the archive that can only be used for
reference material. Michelle Trukillo, the lead archivist, says
many of these reference materials are works that would be
difficult or impossible to replace if they went missing.

This distinction is “one of the big differences between library
and archives,” Trujillo says. Archives “deal primarily with
unpublished material, unique materials and photographs that are
on site, and people can’t check them out to take home.”

The library is in the process of digitizing its collection,
working with the group California Revealed, a state-funded
initiative, to convert much of the material there into a digital
library. Parsons says this digitization allows more people to use
LLACE’s archives for “serious research.”

“There are people doing more articles on LGBTQ+ history that are
interested in coming in to do research on things,” Parsons says.

One of the challenges of digitization is cost. Previously,
California Revealed offered the services for free, but Trujillo
says federal cuts caused them to need to charge.

“This is the first year we’ll have to be paying for the
digitization, because we want to keep going and we want to
support California Revealed,” Trujillo says. “That’s a real
tangible effect of what’s happening at the federal level and how
it’s affecting us.”

The library is also working on cataloging its own history. Those
duties fall on Rayna Sheftman, a volunteer historian. A
Sacramento State student, Sheftman’s task is to go through the
library’s documents and put that history together into an
accessible format.

Volunteers for the Lavender Library table at the Sacramento Pride
Festival, giving out information to people interested in visiting
and supporting the library. Trujillo and Parsons estimated the
library had 80 to 90 volunteers, the highest number in its
history. (Photo by Jacob Peterson)

“We don’t have an accessible, documented version of our own
history as an organization,” Sheftman says. “So my role has been
going through internal documents, newspaper articles — anything I
can find, basically — to document that history.”

Sheftman’s work fulfills one of the many roles needed to keep the
library running. They note that in addition to archival work,
volunteers help with day-to-day operations and outreach,
including tabling at Sacramento Pride.

“We have a huge volunteer base that keeps the doors open at the
library and keeps it a community space,” Parsons says.

Community support and donations are also a key part in keeping
the library running. While LLACE does apply for grants, Parsons
says the majority of financial and material support comes from
individual donations.

“We don’t have any government funding; it’s just the public
donating funds and material,” Parsons says. “It is tough in the
current economic climate, but the LGBTQ+ community has been
amazing. They give support when they can.”

Parsons says that, in her view, the local queer community offers
strong support even when their own financial situations are not
secure. Trujillo says this appears to have been the case
historically as well.

“That speaks to historically marginalized communities being
responsive and sensitive to those changes and knowing those
challenges will be there,” Trujillo says. “There’s such a deep
sense of belief and care in our space here, and that comes
through in the time that our volunteers spend here and the
projects that we do.”

On top of archival work, the library also acts as an important
space for the local queer population. Trujillo and Parsons both
found the library because they were looking for a community.

“Having a safe space for people to go and be amongst other
people, their peers, their elders, is incredibly important,”
Parsons says. “There are members of the community who don’t want
to go to bars and have a place like the Lavender Library where
they can hang out and be with other people.”

Trujillo says that it is also important for the library to be a
free resource, as it allows people to participate in social
events no matter what their economic situation is.

“People can come and be who they are here, but there’s also a
sense of a shared something,” Trujillo says. “Everyone doesn’t
have the same experience, but we have the same sense of mutual
affirmation of others dignity no matter how you show up.”

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