![\"\"](\"https:\/\/eastbayexpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/Dr.-Kerby-and-Toshia-Christal-for-web.jpg\")
<\/a>ARCHIVAL PRESERVATION From right, Dr. Kerby Lynch, the archive\u2019s current director, assists photographer\/dancer Toshia Christal to digitize documents and encase the originals in acid-free plastic. (Photo by A.V. Benford)<\/p>\nThe memory keepers who came before<\/p>\n
Keller was not alone in this work. Lisbet Tellefsen, an Oakland-based archivist and curator, has spent three decades gathering one of the country\u2019s most significant private collections of late-20th-century African Americana, which includes the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, Black LGBT culture and political graphics. She co-founded Ach\u00e9: A Black Lesbian Journal in 1989; her papers now live at Yale, with pieces of her collection hung at the Smithsonian, SFMOMA and the Oakland Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tellefsen and Keller are two versions of the same devotion\u2014one moved into the nation\u2019s great institutions while the other stayed in a grassroots house in the Eastmont Hills, which answers to no one but its own people. Both insisted this history was not optional to keep.<\/p>\n
The relics previously gathered feed into \u201cDirectory of Dreams: Bay Area Lesbian Economies and Radical Care, 1970\u20131995,\u201d BALA\u2019s own exhibition on the grassroots networks of mutual aid and self-determination Bay Area lesbians built for one another when no one else would.<\/p>\n
What the renaissance left behind, and what\u2019s replacing it<\/p>\n
The Bay Area that gave rise to Keller\u2019s lesbian renaissance has largely disappeared. But the East Bay kept creating new third spaces even as the old ones closed. Club Q, a house photographer\u2019s vision, captured every patron against a white backdrop, a yearbook of the eternally ethereal. The Golden Ratio, a Black-lesbian-owned bar at 15th and Franklin, gathers today\u2019s archivists and queer community leaders. B. Tourmaline, a sex-positive crew founded in Oakland on June 13, 2023, builds Black\/queer\/trans\/kink education spaces where the youngest attendees are 21 and the oldest past 60\u2014Keller\u2019s intergenerational thread, still holding.<\/p>\n
That thread is the entire point of June 13. The day paired BALA with Eastside Arts Alliance\u2019s Community Archival Resource Project (CARP) and Artist as First Responder, the organization founded by cultural strategist Ashara Ekundayo, on the second installment of a series built around Black queer families in Oakland and the wider Bay Area.<\/p>\n
People came up that punishing hill carrying shoeboxes and photo albums, hard drives full of photos and Pride parades, and snapshots from the Nia Collective\u2014a nonprofit built to provide kinship, friendship and networking for lesbians of African descent. Dawn Rudd, a photographer and longtime fixture of the Bay\u2019s Black feminist scene, brought images from Nia\u2019s earliest days, recalling the time with the specific ache of having lived inside a golden age without fully knowing it was one.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone was so intelligent and so driven and so alive,\u201d Rudd said, flipping through pictures of herself and her friends in their 20s and 30s. \u201cIt was a rich time. I\u2019m so glad I was a part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n