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Descriptive Summary
Title:
William P. Gaddis, Jr. Papers,
1939-1981
Accession number:
2002-32
Creator:
Gaddis, William P. (1920-)
Extent:
6 Boxes
Repository:
The
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.
San Francisco, California.
Abstract:
This collection documents the underground gay life of William P. Gaddis, Jr. during his military service in the United States Navy at the time of World War II and contains letters from his travels in the late 1950s, as a civilian, to major cities around the world seeking to connect with gay life across the globe. The correspondence begins in 1939 with letters received from a gay lover stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It contains significant holdings relating to the lives of gays and lesbians during this time, recorded as personal correspondence in diary-like form. Much of the writing describes underground gay life in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1939 onward, as Mr. Gaddis was born in Berkeley and was stationed in this area during part of his naval career. The collection also contains a small number of photographs from this time, a larger number of negatives, a flyer produced in 1970 by the Society for Individual Rights as a warning to gay men about plainclothes police arrests at gunpoint at various San Francisco locations, and phonograph records with underground/coded gay content dating back as far as 1939.
Language:
English.
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