Colorado was a battleground during the Amendment 2 era in the early 1990s. The Western History and Genealogy Department (WHG) of the Denver Public Library is proud to house organizational records of Equality Colorado and other pioneering community groups, as well as collections of personal papers of notable Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Coloradans.
In 2015, WHG partnered wiith the Colorado LGBTQ History Project at the Center on Colfax to preserve the archives of the LGBTQ+ community in Denver. This partnership has added over 30 collections to the Western History Collection. The collections explore the HIV/AIDS epidemic, support and activist organizations, social clubs, and the personal papers of the LGBT+ community.
WHG also has an extensive collection of publications including Big Mama Rag, Out Front and many newsletters from small regional LGBTQ+ organizations from the 1970’s and 1980’s. The collection also includes a large selection of monographs documenting LGBTQ+ life in the Trans-Mississippi West.
Western History Subject Index
Western History Subject Index (formerly the General Index) card file contains more than seven million entries on four million cards. Developed over the last century, it provides access to newspapers, local histories, biographical works, newsletters and journals.