Talya Sokoll, a high school librarian in Massachusetts, is now a proud adoptive caretaker of the José Sarria Papers archival collection maintained by the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
She hopes to see the archive in person this summer when she vacations in the city."To see archives associated with our queer ancestors is really valuable.
There is so much we don't know about because we don't learn about it," said Sokoll, 36, a queer Boston resident who works at a private school. "If you ask students about LGBT history, they know about Stonewall and that is it until we talk about other stuff."In the fall Sokoll taught for the first time a queer history elective to eight students at her school.
One of the people she discussed happened to be Sarria, a Latino Army veteran who died in 2013 at the age of 90 and was a legendary San Francisco-based drag queen.Sarria founded the Imperial Court in 1965 and grew it into an international philanthropic organization that crowns drag royals and others to carry on its mission.