Collections and Exhibitions
Collections
Global Lavender Voices
The Initiative in Sexualities and Genders is anchored by materials gathered in the John Hay Library’s Global Lavender Voices Strategic Collecting Direction.
Global Lavender Voices celebrates the lived experiences, contributions, accomplishments, and cultures of LGBTQIA2S communities, both in the United States and internationally. From literary and print collections of gay pulp novels and contemporary zines to manuscript and archival holdings evidencing local and global networks of activism, scholarship, and creative production, Global Lavender Voices collects, preserves, and makes accessible diverse queer histories for the Brown community and beyond.
Exhibitions
Pockets of Pleasure: Gathering Global Lavender Voices
Global Lavender Voices collections are highlighted in a forthcoming exhibition, Pockets of Pleasure: Gathering Global Lavender Voices. Curated by Leo Lovemore, Co-Director of ISG and Librarian for History, Society, and Culture, the exhibition will open in April 2027 in the first-floor gallery of the John Hay Library.
Pockets of Pleasure invites intimate encounters with Global Lavender Voices collections, asking us to consider how themes of pleasure, care, intimacy, desire, and resistance have shaped what we can (and cannot) know about queer pasts and what we might imagine for queer futures.
From leather jackets and tarot decks to community health directories and cruising guides, these materials tell multifaceted stories about how queer life is nourished and sustained across time and space.
What pleasures do you carry in your pocket? What stories do they tell? What is our collective responsibility to our stories and the pockets they live in? What does the pocket know that the archive never will?
Join us in April 2027, for an exhibition opening and a series of events and programming that will bring us together in community to consider these histories and the possible futures they portend.