Ann Giagni

Kymn Goldstein interviews Ann Giagni, president of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. In 1996 her friend Jean Conger connected Giagni with the board. She remembers entering a room of homemade shelves and mismatched file cabinets. At her first board meeting she agreed to serve three months as co-president with another board member, Degania Golov. She is still president of the board. She previously worked for twenty years with the City of Los Angeles, first as a librarian, and then as an administrator.

In the next portion of the interview, she explains why the board did not move into a shared building with ONE Archives at USC. USC replaced the building in the signed agreement with one that needed an expensive retrofit. The board rescinded the agreement.

Later, the Mazer partnered with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women to process five collections using a campus grant. They then received a NEH grant to process many more. While that NEH work was still going, and the archives had run out of room, university librarian Gary Young said the library could preserve the material only if it owned it. The board signed an agreement with the Regents during the grant, keeping the right to reclaim the materials if they were hidden, moved out of greater Los Angeles, or left unprocessed. When the grant ended, the archives deeded the 87 collections it had processed.

Giagni says lesbians need their own archive because women's history gets discarded, particularly the histories of ordinary women’s lives. A few months after she joined the board she met Francesca Taylor, chair of the fundraising committee, and they have been partners for about thirty years. She also describes Southern California Women for Understanding and Connexxus. Asked what June Mazer and Bunny MacCulloch would think, she says they would be thrilled that the material they brought from Oakland is still being collected.