Diane F. Germain Collection
Scope and Contents
The collection contains materials related to Diane’s personal and professional life as well as materials representing her communities of artists, lesbians and feminists. The collection contains personal and professional correspondence, artworks by Diane and her community, and other materials Diane collected from people and organizations in her life.
Correspondence in the collection spans Diane’s life from youth to adulthood and includes letters and cards between Diane and family members, friends, lovers, colleagues, political organizations, publications to which Diane submitted cartoons and writings, and more.
Diane’s personal papers include research, notes, and papers from her time in undergraduate and graduate school. Her personal papers also include personal notes, notebooks, calendars, and photographs as well as several home movies.
The collection also includes original and reproduced copies of Diane’s cartoons, publications in which her cartoons were published, and multimedia artworks by Diane such as lyrics and poems, paper collages, floppy disks of lesbian clip art, hand-made stickers and more.
The collection further includes materials Diane collected from and about her lesbian and feminist communities including artworks, political ephemera such as buttons and stamps, and organizational materials such as pamphlets, event programs, and memorials about community members that passed away.
Included in the collection are Diane’s audiocassettes, the bulk of which are recordings of speeches, interviews, and conversations related to feminism and lesbian organizing.
The collection also contains materials from Jan Hines, which were given to Diane. In addition to Jan Hines’ own materials related to lesbian and feminist organizing, materials include organizational records from Califia Community, of which Jan Hines was a part.
Content warning: Some materials in the collection contain transphobic and ableist language and reflect transphobic and ableist attitudes. The processing archivists have chosen to keep this material in the collection to reflect the presence and impact of these ideologies. A content warning has been included in this finding aid in the box content list for items the processing archivists identified as containing this harmful language. The Mazer Archives condemns all forms of transphobia and ableism and we welcome an ongoing dialog with our community about generative ways to process and describe materials that contain or reflect systemic violence. We encourage you to contact the Mazer if other harmful content is found in this collection and/or to further this dialog. You can reach us at contact@mazerlesbianarchives.org.
Dates
- Creation: 1956-2020
Conditions Governing Access
Some material is restricted to protect the subject's privacy. Restricted material is identified in the box contents list of this finding aid.
Conditions Governing Use
Property rights to the physical objects belong to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or heir for permission to publish where the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives do not hold the copyright.
Biographical / Historical
“Diane F. Germain was born January 23, 1942 in Winooski, Vermont, though most of her time living in Vermont was spent in Burlington on lovely Lake Champlain. She attended the University of Vermont, graduating in 1964. In this time, her mother and older sister moved to California, and after graduating from college, Diane followed them out west. She attended graduate school at the University of California Los Angeles, graduating with a master’s degree in psychiatric social work in 1975.
In her master’s thesis, she wrote about the role of the social worker in inpatient psychiatric care at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, California. Looking back, she wishes she had written about a topic related to sexuality; but being a young lesbian who came out slowly rather than all at once, she held back. However, as Diane navigated the lesbian world, she became braver as she saw what other lesbians were doing, eventually leading her to a life dedicated to lesbian activism. In 1978, Diane left Los Angeles for San Diego, excitedly following a group of hip and progressive friends she met at graduate school at UCLA.
Diane is a founding member of Dykes on Hikes, The Lesbian Referral Services, Beautiful Lesbian Thespians, and the California Women’s Art Collective. As a volunteer for the Lambda Archives of San Diego, she noticed a lack of lesbian representation in the archive. To fill this gap, she conducted interviews, oral histories, and collected materials from lesbians in Southern California. Diane was also a member of Las Hermanas, a coffee house and women’s cultural center, and the Califia Community, a feminist educational retreat that held conferences in the woods to discuss topics related to anti-racism, class, and sexism.
Always doodling and searching to express herself as a lesbian through art, Diane was the staff Cartoonist for HotWire: The Journal of Women’s Music, Culture of Chicago, and Lesbian News, though her comics appear to many more publications, including The Lavender, Fuzzy Friends, and Thursday’s Child, to name a few. Whoever had a lesbian publication, Diane would send comics. Her work even appears in a lesbian newspaper in Italy.
Diane has been described as a “Lesbian Encyclopedia” because she writes down and saves everything, remembers everyone’s names, and strives to preserve as much history pertaining to women and lesbians as she can. Diane continues to donate materials to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive with regularity.”
This biographical note was written by Hall Frost in 2021. Hall Frost interviewed Diane F. Germain prior to writing the biography. Hall Frost, “DIANE F. GERMAIN COLLECTION, CIRCA 1970 - 1999,” June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, Spring 2021,
Extent
16.08 Linear Feet (31 boxes)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
Diane F. Germain is a lesbian, a psychiatric social worker, and cartoonist with ties to activist and lesbian separatist communities in Vermont, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Not wanting any pieces of lesbian history to end up in a dumpster, she wrote down everything and saved and cataloged her own documents, as well as those given to her by other lesbians. This bulk of the collection represents an overview of life in the lesbian community in Southern California from the 1980s-1990s as well as Diane’s art and personal and professional relationships.
Other Finding Aids
Another collection of Diane Germain’s materials was processed in 2011 and is located in UCLA's Special Collections as part of their relationship with the Mazer. Read the UCLA Special Collections’ finding aid for the Diane F. Germain papers:
Immediate Source of Acquisition
All items included in this collection were donated by Diane F. Germain, beginning with donations being made in 1989. An ongoing collector of lesbian ephemera, Diane is “dying to give [us] more!”.
Diane F. Germain’s materials accumulated over the years through Correspondence, artwork creation, and magazine publishing. Germain organized her materials meticulously and made numerous donations to the Mazer since 1989.
Processing Information
The processing archivists have attempted to maintain and reflect Diane’s original order and classification of materials as much as possible. A meticulous organizer, Diane donated many of the materials in labeled envelopes or containers. These labels are reflected in the folder names of the bulk of the material. The original envelope/container has been removed except in cases in which Diane wrote additional notes on the envelope/container in which case they are included with the materials. Materials donated without an obvious order as well as non-paper items including textiles, ephemera, AV materials and artworks have been arranged by subject matter, creator, or material type for ease of navigating the collection and to account for preservation concerns.
Correspondence in the collection have been arranged into subseries that represent the multifaceted ways in which Diane organized her letters and cards. Items within each folder have been kept in the original order in which they were donated. The processing archivist imposed a chronological or alphabetical order of folders as made sense. Correspondence folders that include a “circa'' in the date indicate the inclusion of undated materials.
Some materials have been rehoused to mitigate degradation including The Califia Community policies, which were removed from the original binder in which they were donated, and the 8mm reels, which were rehoused in plastic cans from their original metal cans.
To optimize space and materials and address preservation concerns, Box 19 has been removed from the collection. All materials contained within Box 19 have been integrated into other boxes within the collection.
Genre / Form
Geographic
Occupation
Topical
- Title
- Diane F. Germain Collection
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Vera Tykulsker and Casey Winkleman
- Date
- 2023
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives Repository