Twenty-four years after they first celebrated their commitment to each other, Cora Latz and Etta Perkins renewed their vows. Surrounded by staff at the Jewish Home for the Aged, the two women wore kippahs and sat side by side under a chuppah made from a rainbow flag. A sign behind them read “Mazel Tov Cora & Etta,” alongside a photo from their first ceremony in 1973.
Fortunately, someone at the 1998 ceremony took photos and held onto them.
The images are now among dozens of items in the just-completed digital collection Jewish LGBTQ Voices and Activism, a publicly available archive that traces the history of LGBTQ Jewish life in the Bay Area and beyond.
A project of the GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives, the collection is the culmination of a yearlong effort by the archives team to identify, curate and digitize Jewish materials. The team sifted through thousands of general items related to LGBTQ regional history, donated and gathered since the nonprofit’s 1985 founding in San Francisco.
The Jewish Pride Fund, a giving circle of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, funded the undertaking.
On the historical society’s website, visitors can explore a “primary source set” culled from all of the Jewish materials in the archives. The set includes firsthand accounts of specific periods of queer history, photographs, articles, audio clippings and zines. (View at tinyurl.com/jewish-lgbtq.)
The primary source set is among 37 such sets created to better represent the diverse communities within the LGBTQ community, according to archives director Kelsi Evans.
“We designed this project to highlight just the tip of the iceberg of all of the content that’s related to Jewish queer history in the archives,” Evans said.
Some items, like the Cora Latz and Etta Perkins materials, had been digitized previously. But most of the documents and images unearthed had not.
Reference archivist Isaac Fellman was surprised by what he found in the holdings. “It was a really remarkable experience,” he said, citing one such piece, a 1980 birthday card and love letter to Silvia Kohan from her partner. Kohan was an Argentine-Jewish singer songwriter who died in 2003 and left her papers to the historical society.
“Being a Jew and a gentile didn’t stop us from loving each other fully,” the card reads. “I have loved you with my total being.”
Fellman, Evans and library student Sy Auerbach were responsible for much of the work on the collection. For Fellman and Auerbach, both Jewish, the project was especially personal.
“There is something special and unusual about looking at not just the history of queer people, but the history of queer Jewish people,” Fellman told J. last year.
One poignant artifact in the collection is a 1978 recording of a journalist interviewing people who had gathered the night of Nov. 27, hours after Harvey Milk was killed at City Hall. Milk, who was Jewish, became the first openly gay politician in California when he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was assassinated the following year, along with LGBTQ ally Mayor George Moscone. Tens of thousands convened on Market Street for a candlelit march.
“How do you feel marching here tonight?” the journalist asks.
“Like a community,” a man responds.
Articles from the Bay Area Reporter, an LGBTQ publication founded in 1971 and still being published today, highlight issues queer Jews faced in the 1980s, during a time when President Ronald Reagan refused to publicly acknowledge the existence of AIDS and sodomy laws were still in effect in a majority of states.
In 1983, a headline reads, “Gay Jewish Coalition Blasts Establishment.” The article details how the Jewish Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights ran an advertisement in the Jewish Bulletin (now J.) lambasting the San Francisco Board of Rabbis for opposing a city ordinance to legalize domestic partnerships for same-sex couples.
An article in 1985 announces that the Union of American Hebrew Congregations had passed a resolution opposing discrimination against people with AIDS and calling for increased government spending on research.
Other materials are more personal. A 1993 Hanukkah card addressed to a lesbian couple shows a friend apologizing for falling out of touch. A zine written in 2003 titled “A Children’s Garden of Gender” describes the writer’s experience questioning their gender identity.
We designed this project to highlight just the tip of the iceberg of all of the content that’s related to Jewish queer history in the archives
For volunteer-turned-intern Auerbach, finding these pieces was the highlight of their work on the project.
“I love archival materials that have to do with queer daily life,” Auerbach said. “It wasn’t always just the big, huge moments of their life.”
In addition to curating its own collection of historical materials on the LGBTQ community, the organization is also helping to preserve outside collections. As part of the grant from the Jewish Pride Fund, the historical society has supported a related archival project to digitize materials recently discovered at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, San Francisco’s first queer synagogue, founded in 1977.
In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, dozens of forgotten boxes were found in the congregation’s attic. They held hundreds of back issues of “the Jewish Gaily Forward,” Sha’ar Zahav’s longtime newsletter that still publishes quarterly. The historical society called the find a “treasure trove.”
Soon these papers will be available to the public. Ron Lezell, a founding member of Sha’ar Zahav and chair of the archives committee, said the entire collection will be hosted by the California Digital Newspaper Collection, a free archive of hundreds of publications (including J.).
Lezell hopes Sha’ar Zahav’s materials will help queer and Jewish historians alike in their work.
“Our history, our evolution and development, really mirrors the LGBT world locally, nationally, internationally,” he said. “We think it’s going to be a great resource.”
The first-ever issue of the newsletter from September 1977 is included in Jewish LGBTQ Voices and Activism. In 20 typewritten pages, full of hand-drawn illustrations and last-minute scrawls, it offers a recipe for honey cake, event listings and a reflection on Rosh Hashanah.
“As gay Jews, we are uniquely sensitive to the need for human rights, and at this Rosh Hashanah, we renew our dedication to the long and difficult struggle ahead; as we demand justice,” the newsletter reads.
For historical society archives director Evans, making all of the collections accessible is a primary goal. As nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in legislatures across the country, it supports the group’s mission to provide resources that tell the true story of queer history, she said.
“I think we really see our project at the historical society as combating some of that misinformation,” Evans said. “[We want to make] our material available to students in Florida, or in Texas, or in places where there’s an active state endeavor to limit those resources.”
The collection on Jewish life is completed by a group of photographs of Sadie, Sadie the Rabbi Lady. Also known as Gilbert Block, Sadie was a gay Jewish drag queen and an early member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group that engages in guerrilla theater and activism using humor. Sadie participated in dozens of political demonstrations with the Sisters, notably a 1987 performance on the Golden Gate Bridge to protest Pope John Paul II’s visit to San Francisco, ending in her arrest. Sadie remains one of the Sisters’ few Jewish members; her 1999 memoir was titled “Confessions of a Jewish Nun.”
In these portraits, Sadie can be seen doing her makeup, speaking with fans outside the Castro Theater and riding on the back of a motorcycle during a parade. In one photo, she poses in front of the former Congregation B’nai David on 19th Street in the Mission. In the next, she is sticking her tongue out at a passing child.
Fellman sees Sadie’s drag as an expression of her faith, he said, and her Jewishness integral to her drag. Many of her outfits include a Star of David, or a miniature Torah or a mezuzah stuck to her signature hat, the “synagogo.”
“She was imagining how to be a Jewish nun from the ground up,” Fellman said. “She’s someone who had a very strong sense of exactly what she was doing.”