Arizona Queer Archives

The Arizona Queer Archives (AQA) centers community participation in the building and collecting of LGBTQI histories throughout the state of Arizona and the US-Mexico borderlands. It collects manuscripts and organizational records, ephemera, oral histories and other records that tell the stories of what it means to be LGBTQI in the region.

The Arizona Queer Archives was founded in 2011 by Professor Jamie A. Lee as Arizona’s first LGBTQI archives and exists today as a decentralized and distributed archives with archival research at UAL Special Collections, and hands-on archival laboratory spaces at the Institute for LGBT Studies and the Blacklidge Community Collective. As a community-focused archive, AQA considers queer as much more than an identity marker or umbrella term: drawing the word queer – as theory and practice – into the ways AQA collects, preserves, and makes collections accessible. 

In partnership with AQA, Special Collections added LGBTQI as an area of emphasis in 2022 with nearly thirty collections including those transferred from AQA.