Ken Yeager Papers at King Library Highlight LGTBQ+ Research Resources

For Antonia Rock, ’25 History, archiving and preserving the letters, memorabilia and photographs that make up library collections is a special, if not intimate, process. As a student assistant for Special Collections & Archives at San José State’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, Rock works to preserve the materials provided by donors like legendary Spartan Ken Yeager, ’76 Political Science.

The new Ken Yeager Papers add to the growing number of historic LGBTQ+ materials available for members of the public to peruse. In 1984, Yeager co-founded BAYMEC, a four-county LGBTQ+ political action committee, and in 1992 he made history as the first openly gay elected political official in Santa Clara County when he served as trustee of the San José Evergreen Community College District. He also held office as a San José City Councilmember from 2001-2006 and on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors from 2007 to 2018.

“To put archives in the simplest terms, people give us big boxes of stuff, and I help preserve them,” she said. “I’ll put their papers in acid-free folders and boxes, and I’ll sort them [to make them] accessible to researchers. Then I upload that information online for people to find, and help facilitate researcher appointments for people to view the collections.”

When Rock began sorting through the 26 boxes that comprise Yeager’s latest collection, she felt a familiar pang of emotion.

“I get emotionally invested in the collections,” she added. “It’s an honor getting a view into these people’s lives and being a part of their legacy.”

Documenting social change

Though Rock and the Special Collections & Archives team are just beginning to process Yeager’s boxes of materials, there are additional LGTBQ+ research resources already available through the library, both online and in person. On Nov. 19, the SJSU King Library hosted Queer Researcher Re(Quest) at the new Digital Humanities Center on the first floor, an event that showcased the library’s new and existing LGBTQ+ collections: a treasure trove of queer history, culture and research opportunities.

The event, co-sponsored by SJSU King Library, the SJSU PRIDE Center and the Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC) Community Foundation, included a preview of digital humanities and scholarship opportunities and a breakdown of LGTBQ+ research resources. Director of Special Collections & Archives Craig Simpson recommended researchers visit the archives of award-winning photographer Ted Sahl, and experiment with keyword searches to discover additional LGTBQ+ historical resources. Simpson explained that Special Collections & Archives has about 10,000 items (many physical, some digital) across 30 different collections.

“Ted Sahl took an astonishing number of photographs of the gay and lesbian community in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s,” Simpson said at the event. “He was a pioneer who did a lot of groundbreaking work; one of his collections has approximately 10% of our total digital objects.”

Yeager’s collection, which includes material from his political campaigns, health assessments of the LGBTQ+ community in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, memos and correspondence, captures an important era in local and national history. At the event, he shared that when he ran for political office in San José, he was often told to “run in San Francisco because that’s where all the gay people are.”

By bringing records of his political career to King Library, Yeager’s work is coming full circle. 

“San José State means so much to me,” he said at the SJSU King Library event. “I came up here from Riverside, where I could not be an openly gay person. I found a great home here at San José State.”

Contextualizing history

There are many ways that SJSU students, faculty and members of the public can engage with digital humanities and special collections. Students in Associate Professor of Digital Humanities Kim Knight’s class worked with Digital Scholarship Librarian Nick Szydlowski and University Archivist Carli Lowe to create Archives in Conversation: SJSU Student Experience Before Two Major Historical Crises.

Left to right: King Library Dean Michael Meth, University Archivist Carli Lowe, Director of Special Collections & Archives Craig Simpson, Project and King Library Communications Lesley Seacrist, Ken Yeager and Nick Szydlowski, scholarly communications and digital scholarship librarian at King Library. Photo by Lesley Seacrist.

The project collects data from the Spartan Daily archives into a new format to create a conversation about the experiences of two marginalized communities: SJSU Japanese student experiences before World War II, and SJSU LGBTQ+ experiences before the AIDS epidemic. As it says on the digital exhibit, “the systematic incarceration of Japanese Americans and the historic anti-gay sentiment in America both work to oppress, but the groups they oppress have had very different circumstances. The oppression based on race and ethnicity is not the same as the oppression based on sexuality and gender.”

The Introduction to Digital Humanities students, with help and advice from Szydlowski and Lowe, created online timelines to compare the two eras. The result? An interactive approach to presenting history by way of archives and digital collections.

“Context is an essential component of archival collections,” said Lowe. “A single document often does not have as much meaning as a document that is one of many in a folder, that is one of many in a box, that is one of many boxes. When archivists arrange collections, we do so with the critical importance of context in mind. 

“Moving some of these records into the digital realm allows people to recontextualize them and consider their meanings in new contexts without losing their original context. It also opens them up to additional layers of recontextualization as communities find them more easily online and consider them from their own diverse perspectives. This can then lead people back to the original collection in its original context, bringing those diverse perspectives back to the realm of physical archives. ‘Archives in Conversation’ is one example of taking materials from an archival collection and considering them in a new context.” 

As the Venn diagram uniting Special Collections & Archives and the Digital Humanities Center grows, student assistants like Antonia Rock are getting hands-on experience with history — and learning how to maximize its impact. 

Recently, while working on a collection of a retired university professor, Rock discovered a collection of his Boy Scout membership cards from decades before. A few weeks later, an 11-year-old called Special Collections & Archives to report that the Boy Scouts of America were celebrating their centennial, and did the library have any historical materials about the organization? 

“I said, ‘Yes, come visit!’ And when he arrived, I got to show him the cards, and let them take photos,” she said. “It was really special.” 

Learn more about Special Collections & Archives at King Library.