Sexuality Studies Resources Held in the UC Davis Shields Library's Special Collections Department

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(For film resources click here)

The Special Collections Department at UC Davis houses a number of books, serials and other research materials supporting primary research in the area of Sexuality Studies.  The Department has particularly strong resources in the area of research on GLBT issues.  Two areas where the Special Collections Department is especially able to provide support for research and instruction are the history of the gay liberation movement, and the history of lesbian and gay literature and publishing.

The Special Collections Department has the largest collection of gay and serial serials held in the UC system.  Items in the collection include an extremely rare copy of the first issue of the first lesbian serial published in America (Vice Versa, 1947), and complete or near-complete runs of a number of  pre-Stonewall gay and lesbian serials, such as  ONE Magazine (Los Angeles, 1953-1972), Mattachine Review (San Francisco: Mattachine Society, 1955-1966), and The Ladder (San Francisco/Reno: Daughters of Bilitis,1956-1972), as well as the publications of many other early gay organizations such as the Society for Individual Rights (San Francisco 1964-1976), the Association for Responsible Citizens (Sacramento 1965-1967), and the Janus Society (Philadelphia 1964-1969).  Also included are a number of the serials that sprung up immediately following the Stonewall Riots, including Gay Sunshine (San Francisco), Fag Rag (Boston), Gay Insurgent (Philadelphia), Gay Power (New York), and Gay Liberator (Detroit).  Additionally, Special Collections also houses a number of  examples of the wave of lesbian/feminist publications from organizations and publishers springing up in 1970s, such as  The Amazon Quarterly (Oakland), The Furies (Boston), Lesbian Tide (Los Angeles), and Womanspirit (Wolf Creek), to name a few.

Examples of significant literary works owned by the department, range from very early works such as sensationalized The Surprising Adventures of a Female Husband (London, ca 1746), to the hidden subtexts of works like Margaret Sweat's Ethel's Love-life (NY, 1859), to such privately published works as the Paris edition of Robert McAlmon's Distinguished Air (1925), to a number of examples from the first wave of openly gay and lesbian novels of from the late 1920s and '30s , such as G.S. Donisthorpe's Loveliest of Friends (1931), Anna Weirauch's The Outcast (1933), Gale Wilhelm's We Too Are Drifting (1935), Lilyan Brock's Queer Patterns (1935), and the anonymously published Diana: A Strange Autobiography (1939).  On a more minor (but not necessarily less significant) note, Special Collections also houses a collection of lesbian-themed pulp paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s, which marked for many people of that generation the first readily available works to provide literary presentation of the lives of lesbian women. Also notably these works document the mores of their period through their lurid covers and tellingly sensationalized blurbs.

The Special Collection Department also has a significant amount of material supporting the broader area of gender studies.  The Department is especially strong with regard to books documenting the historic changes in society's perception of the role and place of women, as well as the historic development of the women's right movement during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   In addition, the Department houses a number of nineteenth and early twentieth works treating such topics as sexual morality (from some very different points of view), sexual education, prostitution, birth control, and many other topics.

Contact person:
John Sherlock  
752-9868
Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian, Shields Library, UC Davis
jasherlock@ucdavis.edu