STAR's work addressed a wide range of needs. The group focused on survival -- offering shelter, free food, and collective space at STAR House and the Gay Community Center on 3rd Street. STAR also developed a powerful platform to address institutional violence. Members organized for incarcerated queer people, advocated for GAA's gay rights bill, worked with the Young Lords, and published articles for the gay liberation press
Journals, zines, and chapbooks were critical sites for conversation in the Gay Liberation Front. Learn how STAR fit into it all and find original articles and interviews from STAR members by requesting these journals through Pratt's Interlibrary Loan Service
Independent Voices is an open-access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
The purpose of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) is to provide an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Their collections is text searchable and yields results if you search STAR.
As a central party in the Stonewall Rebellion and the Gay Liberation Front, STARs work has been reported on by local news. Both these titles have searchable archives that may reveal useful material in researching STAR. Trigger Warning: In some articles, journalists misgender members of S.T.A.R and use language that is violent, antiquated and offensive
Many scholars in this area make the important point, that although Stonewall was a pivotal point in LGBTQ history, there were significant LGBTQ movements leading up to this event, as well as afterwards. If you are interested in researching LGBTQ history, The New York Public Library provides excellent electronic resources to expand your knowledge.
The Archives of Sexuality and Gender database contains exceptional historical records of LGBTQ political and social organizations, including publications from over 35 countries. What makes this database a real standout is the 51 digitized archival collections, for example, the International Vertical Files from the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, the ACT UP: The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power collection, the LGBTQ Newspapers and Periodicals Collection from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and The Mattachine Society of New York Records, 1951-1976. The collections in this digital archive are gathered from the most important LGBTQ archives from major research institutions such as, The New York Public Library , the GLBT Historical Society, Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Inc, Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and the National Library of Medicine.
Take some time to explore the stellar collection of over 140 full text journals, magazines and regional newspapers, including The Advocate and Lesbian Tide. This database also holds over 160 full text books, as well as reference materials and monographs. In addition to full text materials, there are over 600 indexed items, as well as an LGBT thesaurus.
The Alternative Press Index and The Alternative Press Archive are indexes that contain over 400,000 records of radical, alternative and left periodicals, including magazine articles, journals, and newspapers from 1969 to the present day.
STAR books @ Pratt Libraries