Throughout history, LGBTQ+ people have faced cycles of erasure—our lives omitted from public memory, our contributions to care and healing dismissed, our stories redacted from official records. But each time they tried to erase us, we responded with resistance, remembrance, and reinvention. We built networks of support, shared knowledge through underground channels, and created what we needed with what little we had.

Now, we are being called to do it again.

Across the country, LGBTQ+ recovery materials are being quietly removed from public spaces—government websites, behavioral health trainings, school libraries, and digital archives. Entire communities’ work is disappearing under political pressure and moral panic.

The NALGAP Archive Project is not just a documentation effort—it’s a return to what queer and trans communities have always done: protect each other, preserve what matters, and refuse to let our histories be erased.

We’ve saved ourselves before. We’re doing it again.

Echoes from the Past: Erasure Is Not New

In 1933, one of the Nazi regime’s first acts was the destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a groundbreaking research institute in Berlin that housed one of the world’s first archives of queer and trans knowledge. Its materials—medical records, publications, and community research—were burned in public as part of a broader campaign to eradicate LGBTQ+ existence from cultural and scientific life.

Today, we face a new wave of ideological censorship. Across the U.S., LGBTQ+ books are being banned from school and public libraries. Websites are purging queer and trans health content. State-funded programs are scrubbing inclusive language from behavioral health resources.

What’s at stake isn’t just access to information—it’s the ability for our communities to see ourselves, support one another, and remember how we’ve survived.

The NALGAP Archive Project: A Community Response

In response to this crisis of erasure, NALGAP launched the NALGAP Archive Project—a national initiative to gather, preserve, and protect LGBTQ+ recovery materials before they are lost.

We are actively collecting:
- Newsletters, brochures, and outreach tools
- Training manuals and clinical curricula
- Research reports, evaluations, and policy papers
- Zines, oral histories, and community-generated documents
- Conference programs and recovery artifacts

These are not just documents. They are survival strategies, cultural blueprints, and maps of care created by LGBTQ+ individuals and communities across generations.

Why It Matters

Preserving LGBTQ+ recovery resources is not just a historical task—it’s a moral and political imperative. Archiving this work:
- Resists the ongoing erasure of queer and trans contributions to public health
- Honors the labor, creativity, and brilliance of LGBTQ+ people in recovery
- Offers tools and models for future generations
- Ensures that our stories are not rewritten, buried, or forgotten

As history shows us, bans don’t begin with violence—they begin with silence. And silence is what this project refuses to accept.

Join the Archive, Preserve the Legacy

If you’re holding onto pieces of this history—whether they’re old flyers, training guides, handouts, journals, conference packets, or community memories—we invite you to share them.

Let’s preserve what was never meant to survive. Let’s ensure it thrives.

To submit materials or learn more, contact:
archives@nalgap.org

With Pride and Purpose,
Philip T. McCabe, CSW, CAS, DRCC
President, NALGAP