This Transgender Archive’s Oldest Artifacts Tell a Story of Courage and Community

This photograph is of Reed Erickson, a trans pioneer who helped educate the world about transgender people. Born Rita Erickson in 1917, Reed officially changed his name in 1963 and had gender confirmation surgery two years later.

A successful entrepreneur and wealthy businessman, Erickson founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF). His initiative funded innumerable research and education projects that taught the public about transgender people, sex reassignment and gender identity. At the time of this photograph, Reed was 14 years old and still lived as "Rita."

This volume of Sexology contains an early scientific attempt to characterize how gender nonconforming individuals in the 1950s behaved. It also showcases the biases common at the time, referring to transgender behaviors as “deviations” and blaming things like cross-dressing on “the smothering mother.”

In this 1961 photo, Alison Laing poses in evening wear, one of 36 photos taken from 1956 to 1965 by an unknown individual—most likely, the Advocate speculates, her wife, Dottie. 

Laing is a pioneer in the trans community. She cofounded the Renaissance Education Association, a non-profit that educates and supports trans people, and helps transgendered people with presentation tips to this day.

This 1960 magazine is just one edition of Female Impersonators on Parade, a magazine highlighting drag queens and other gender nonconforming individuals. The pictures inside give a fascinating glimpse into the often-undocumented world of drag, along with commentary on how cross-dressers got used to women's clothing and accounts of the difficulties faced by men who dared to appear in public as women.

“The amateur female impersonator likes the gay social movements he finds in the company of others with the same likes and desires in experiencing the graceful life of a woman,” read one article. “The sympathetic understanding they derive in knowing that others are in the same plight as themselves often compels them to take the chance of being arrested by attending so-called ‘drag’ balls, where they can act and dance like women and discuss the latest feminine fashions of the day.”

Like drag balls, Female Impersonators on Parade itself wasn’t immune to prosecution and discrimination: In 1964, the magazine was investigated by a New York legislative committee studying “offensive and obscene material.”

This edition of Vanguard Magazine: The Magazine of the Tenderloin gives a sense of the issues faced by transgendered individuals living in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Covering everything from poverty to anti-gay laws, prostitution to the hippie movement, the sometimes explicit magazine was founded by street youth.

A letter in the magazine illustrates one of the reasons why San Francisco was a haven for gay and transgender youth during the 1960s—community:

“In this letter to you, I want to give moral support to anyone who may want to do what I’ve done, but isn’t sure of quite how,” wrote an anonymous author. “The change in me came after years of living without an identity. Not long ago I didn’t know who I was. Now I know.” The letter was simply signed “A Tenderloin Resident.”