GRAMMY Foundation Awards Grant to Preserve ONE Audio Collections

April 11, 2013

The GRAMMY Foundation announced a $10,000 grant to support the preservation of ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives’ rich audio collections. The grant will fund the digital preservation of one-of-a-kind recordings of early LGBT activists dating back to the 1950s. The recordings capture the voices of early activists like Ivy Bottini, Morris Kight, and Phyllis Lyon as well as their views on topics ranging from military service, marriage equality, and the struggle for many basic legal protections taken for granted in our democracy.

ONE Archives was one of fourteen institutions that received a total of more than $200,000 in grants announced by the GRAMMY Foundation today. The awards will support a diversity of research, archiving and preservation projects by institutions ranging from the American Organ Institute Archive and Library at the University of Oklahoma to L.A. area organizations like the Arhoolie Foundation and the Pacifica Radio Archives, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, and the New York Philharmonic.

Thanks to support from the GRAMMY Foundation, ONE Archives will preserve and make available 177 hours of recorded lectures, interviews and oral histories that preserve the voices of the pioneering activists, scholars and artists who launched the LGBT struggle for equality over the past six decades. Keep checking ONE’s website and Libwire for links to the audio recordings preserved through the ONE Archives’ GRAMMY Foundation-supported project.

Image: Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), speaks at ONE Incorporated. October 5, 1969. ONE, Incorporated Records. ONE Archives at the USC Libraries