The Lavender Ladies Collection was donated to the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid- America by decision of the organization’s board members in June of 2011. It consists of materials collected by club members over time, including local, regional, and national publications; books; sound recordings; audio-visual materials; and t-shirts. While some of the books were added to LaBudde Special Collections (searchable in the Library’s online catalog), the bulk were subsequently donated to the LIKE-Me Lighthouse, an LGBT community center in midtown Kansas City. T-shirts are housed with the Kansas City Museum, the GLAMA collaborating partner responsible for preserving donated artifacts. The collection features material related to the life and work of Jo-Pat Bishop, an early member of the organization, who was also active in Kansas City’s theater community. She mounted theatrical productions at the Lavender Umbrella, located at 308 E. 43rd Street in Kansas City. In the late 1980s, the Lavender Umbrella served as a meeting space for the Lavender Ladies and other groups. Additionally, the collection contains an expansive array of lesbian- and feminist-oriented publications from the late 1950s through early 2000s, including such titles as The Ladder (published by the national lesbian advocacy organization Daughters of Bilitis), Off Our Backs, and Sojourner. Also housed within the collection are video and audio tapes of local programming from the early 1990s through the early 2000s that feature LGBT content, as well as a series of episodes of the nationally-syndicated television program Network Q. The collection contains a small quantity of photographs from the life and career of Jo-Pat Bishop and from various social activities of the organization.
