Opening March 12 | GLBT Historical Society Museum
ABOUT This Exhibition
Directory of Dreams: Bay Area Lesbian Economies and Radical Care, 1970-1995, curated and co-presented by the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, traces the everyday labor of Bay Area lesbians who refused erasure and built community networks rooted in care, solidarity, and economic self-determination.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, lesbians across the region created networks of survival through women-run cafés, bookstores, print shops, galleries, credit unions, and service businesses. These were more than small enterprises—they were spaces where work, organizing, and desire converged into living economies of mutual aid.
At the heart of the exhibition are the grassroots tools that made these worlds visible to one another: self-published business directories, maps, flyers, menus, advertisements, and other ephemera that connected people to jobs, housing, political spaces, and affirming services in a society that often denied them all.
Through focused case studies, the exhibition shows how lesbians organized their own labor, pooled skills, and created spaces of belonging in the face of economic and social exclusion. These were acts of reclamation, teaching new ways of working, organizing, and caring for one another. Here, economy was not just about profit, but about shared values and responsibility.
Directory of Dreams invites visitors to reflect on how these networks of radical care shaped lesbian life in the Bay Area—and what it means to build and sustain shared systems of care today.
About The Bay Area Lesbian ArchiveS
BALA was founded in 2014 by curator, photographer and filmmaker Lenn Keller, who recognized the critical need for Bay Area lesbian history to be preserved. Lenn’s vision was a physical and online archives dedicated to the preservation of the richly diverse lesbian history of the Bay Area -- an archives where anyone could access materials about a community that contributed so much to the Bay Area and California. A core group of women who shared Lenn Keller’s vision came together to help make the archives a reality.
Learn more at www.bayarealesbianarchives.org/
About the GLBT Historical Society
Founded in 1985, the GLBT Historical Society is a global leader in LGBTQ+ public history. The Society collects, preserves, exhibits, and makes accessible to the public materials and knowledge to support and promote understanding of LGBTQ+ history, culture, and arts in all their diversity. In 2011, the Society established and continues operating the first museum of LGBTQ+ history and culture in the United States. Through the Dr. John P. DeCecco Archives, the organization maintains one of the world’s largest archival collections of LGBTQ+ historical materials.
EXHIBITION SPONSORS
This exhibition is made possible with generous support from the following sponsors and institutions:
