The Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive, a partnership between the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Trexler Library, Muhlenberg College, is excited to share several collections of oral histories from members of the Lehigh Valley LGBT community. Our first collection, "Stories from LGBT Older Adults in the Lehigh Valley," is the result of a collaboration among faculty and staff from area institutions along with partners from within the community. Begun through a partnership with Lehigh University's South Side Initiative, this oral history collection was led by Dr. Mary Foltz, a faculty member in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University.

In 2021, we added oral histories collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which members of the community discuss the current public health crisis as it affects LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as reflecting on experiences of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s and '90s.

Both of these initiatives have been sponsored in part by the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium, with generous support provided by a grant to Lafayette College from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Following our original grant-funded projects, team members continue to collect oral histories from community members.

This site utilizes the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), an open-source application developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, which allows word-level search capability within time-stamped transcriptions, and facilitates indexing and the addition of keywords.