Highlights from the Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection

Engaging Politics

LGBTQ communities in the United States have a long and impressive history of uniting together against injustices through such organizations as The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1950 and the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955. By the late 1960s and 1970s, there were a host of gay liberation and lesbian feminist organizations which proliferated across the country. And, by the 1980s and 1990s, such organizing embraced electoral politics as well as community organizing. [1]

As the Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection documents, such organizing found its way to the Central Coast. Organizations like Demeter, a non-profit feminist organization founded in the late 1970s on the Monterey peninsula,. shared political news through a newsletter and created feminist spaces, including women’s music events, to forge community. While not a lesbian organization, Demeter became a space where local lesbians could find and form community with other like minded feminists, efforts well documented in the collection’s Demeter holdings, much of which has been digitized.[2]

Another example is the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC), founded in 1984 to serve the LGBTQ communities in Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Monterey Counties. BAYMEC lobbied elected officials on behalf of the LGBTQ community and endorsed candidates whose positions and stance aligned with positive change and safety for the community [3]. A June 1994 issue of The Paper detailed BAYMEC’s goals, including fighting for civil rights, striving to end discrimination against lesbians and gays, educating public officials about their community, electing gays and lesbians to public office, and providing a voice for gays and lesbians in local political office [4].

Active members in a local chapter of the organization included Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson, who kept a paper trail of newsletters and meeting minutes detailing the work BAYMEC, and now preserved within this collection.[5] Friday, who moved to the Monterey area in 1967, was a co-founder of several environmental projects, a board member for the Monterey County AIDS Project (MCAP), and served as co-President of BAYMEC [6]. Carlson, was a founding board member of the Monterey County Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a founding member of the Monterey County Coalition for Fairness and a founding board member of the Monterey County Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Task Force. He was also the co-director of Monterey’s first Gay Pride Parade in 1992 and was a board member for BAYMEC in Monterey County.[7]. The two met in 1986, both volunteered in community-based organizations, participated in democratic politics and in time, helped build the fastest growing and evolving framework that included other successful activists [8].

Image source:

BAYMEC Pamphlet, ca 2002 (selection), Box 6, Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson Papers, MS-006, Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection. Archives and Special Collections, California State University Monterey Bay

References

[1] Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon $ Schuster, 2015)

[2] Demeter, Digital Commons@CSUMB, Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection, Archives and Special Collection, California State University Monterey Bay, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/demeter_community/

[3] Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC), 1994-2004, Finding Aid, Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson Papers, MS-006, Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection, Archives and Special Collection, California State University Monterey Bay, https://csumb.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/archival_objects/133,

[4] “BAYMEC,” The Paper, Volume 1, Number 1, June 1994, Monterey County LGBTQ History Collection, Archives and Special Collection, California State University Monterey Bay, https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/thepaper/2/.

[5] Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC), 1994-2004, Finding Aid

[6] Finding Aid to Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson papers, MS-006. California State University, Monterey Bay Archives and Special Collections. https://csumb.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/6

[7] Finding Aid to Matt Friday and Bruce Carlson papers

[8] Gary Karnes, Karen Araujo, and Juan Martinez, Voices of Change: The People's Oral History Project: Interviews with Monterey County Activists and Organizers 1934-2015 (Pacific Grove, CA: Park Place Publications, 2015)