Candidate Statements for 2018-2020 DSGS Co-Chair

Candidates are listed in alphabetical order.

Bolton "Bo" Kelly Doub
University of Southern California

I currently work as the Archival Projects Librarian in the University of Southern California (USC) Libraries Special Collections. Prior to USC, I processed collections at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics and the Computer History Museum under two different grant-funded projects.

LGBTQ+ histories, communities, and identities have been an important part of my life, as I have identified as gay from a young age. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I collaborated with another student and a Vietnamese-language radio station in San Jose to facilitate a dialogue about California Proposition 8 (2008) among Vietnamese-American communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Later, while getting my MLIS at UCLA, I volunteered at the Rae Lee Siporin Library at the LGBTQ Campus Resource Center – helping to manage the library’s collections. I also spent a significant amount of time using collections at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives for my coursework at UCLA.

I want to start participating in SAA governance and become more familiar with historians and archivists of diverse sexualities and genders. I admire the outreach achievements made by SAA’s Diverse Sexuality & Gender Section (DSGS), exemplified in their creation of the Lavender Legacies Guide and the Queer History Social Media Project. As a co-chair, I would make use of my communication and organizational skills, my passion for LGBTQ+ histories, and my proximity to collections like the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives to advance DSGS’ outreach efforts and strengthen its community.

David Obermayer
Fort Hays State University

I am currently working as University Archivist at Fort Hays State University and serving as co-chair of the LGBT faculty and staff group on campus. My past research interests have focused on the intersectionality between race and same-sex intimate relationships in New York City’s Chinatown and the recovery and exploration of transgender history prior to the 20th century. My most recent research revolve around navigating collections development for LGBT archival collections in communities where LGBT people have operated, and may still be, largely under the radar.

I believe strongly that as our awareness of diverse sexualities and gender identities throughout history grows we will be faced with greater challenges around preserving these histories as part of our collections. The Diverse Sexuality and Gender Section offers us an nvaluable opportunity to come together and learn from each other as we preserve this history in our individual collections. I would be honored to serve as co-chair for the section.