About

Welcome to Queer Silicon Valley. This website is an effort by the BAYMEC Community Foundation to celebrate the people and leaders and document the milestones and accomplishments of the LGBTQ+ community in Santa Clara County. This project is made possible by a generous grant from the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors and community support.

In the five decades since the Stonewall Riots thrust the modern queer rights movement into the national spotlight, our local community has seen many triumphs and tribulations. The goal of this website is to preserve the history of our community and present it in a way that is easily accessible to everyone. You will find original documents, photos, recordings, and memorabilia that provide a window to the past. You will also find historical research paired with essays and interviews with the people who lived through extraordinary times.

Bits and pieces of this important history have been preserved by members of our community, but there are many gaps in our collective memory. Some information has been lost to ravages of AIDS, and some stories have never been told because they happened to members of our community largely unseen by the mainstream. This project is an attempt to fill in as many gaps in our knowledge as we can.

Although we have strived to make our initial offering as complete as possible, no one group can completely tell the story of this diverse and special community. Our hope is that this website will be ever expanding. Going forward, we need help from all corners of the community to make sure that we accurately tell as many stories as possible.

Lastly, it is exciting to see so many young queer professionals begin to advance in their careers, be it government, community service, the arts, or tech. Many have little or no opportunities to learn about local queer history. How could they when there is no place to find it? It is the hope that through this virtual exhibit they will learn from the history makers who went before them and take inspiration from them to reach higher in their own ambitions and careers to make history themselves.

If you have a question, correction, story, or items to share, please contact us using the link from any part of this site. Help us create a comprehensive repository of historical knowledge that can be shared with generations to come.

–Ken Yeager, Exhibition Director &
BAYMEC Community Foundation Executive Director