Photos: Joe Altman collection California Historical Society At right, BAR publisher Bob Ross, who was emperor, and Empress Ginger in the 1978 parade. Leonard Matlovich, left, in the 1979 Pride parade. 'My ethics don't say 'we won't process this without funding,' but we are looking for support,' Bersch said, adding that the Flower Market project has to be done first. The society is currently focusing on digitizing a large project about the California Flower Market, also in San Francisco, in the early 20th century. These two collections have been identified more recently as high priority.'īersch said that if the society has more donations it will be able to get the photos online more quickly. 'For some of those older collections there wasn't adequate staff to process them at the time, so there's this backlog.
'Over the years, people at CHS in different departments would collect things on their own and bring them to the vaults,' Bersch said. The snapshots were discovered in boxes in the society's archives, according to Al Bersch, a trans man who is a digital archivist with the society, which is based in the city's South of Market neighborhood.
The California Historical Society is in the process of digitizing two collections of photographs and negatives from the wild and heady early days of LGBTQ liberation in San Francisco.
