Guide to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Records, 1973-2008

C. Beredo, C. Nealon, B. Marstton

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) collection consists of correspondence, press clippings, financial and administrative records, subject files, and photographs that, taken together, provide a broad overview of the U. S. movement for lesbian and gay civil rights in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Subject files in the collection range from the California and Dade County, Florida civil rights battles of the late 1970s to the ongoing political skirmishes around the AIDS epidemic, and comprehend a wide array of legal and cultural issues in between. NGLTF projects included here address workplace discrimination and violence against lesbians and gay men, for instance; and an entire sub-series of subject files preserves materials from more than one hundred lesbian and gay organizations across the U.S. The bulk of the material here covers the mid-1980s, and is thinner around its early history (the organization was smaller in the 1970s) and its contemporary work (active files are being kept at NGLTF offices in Washington, DC.)