Tretter Collection

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The Tretter Collection is a collection of GLBT historical materials housed in the Special Collections and Rare Books section of the University of Minnesota Libraries, located underground in the Elmer L. Andersen library cavern.

Officially titled "The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies", the collection houses over 40,000 items, making it one of the largest GLBT history collections in the United States.The collection is international in scope and has materials in approximately 56 languages and a wide variety of media. It covers all time periods, from a 4,000-year-old phallic statuette from Egypt, up to current editions of GLBT periodicals.

Although books are the core of the collection (a large portion of these books can be termed 'gay pulp fiction'), substantial sections include textiles, glassware, film, music, art works, and three-dimensional objects such as event buttons and furniture. The collection includes unpublished manuscripts, vertical files, and periodicals from all over the world. Much of the material is from people and organizations in Minnesota during the last third of a century.

Among the significant archival holdings are:

  • the Jim Chalgren Collection
  • the personal papers of:
  • the archives of the National Education Association GLBT Caucus
  • the Lesbian Review of Books Archive
  • Gay/Lesbian Postal Employees Network (PEN) Minneapolis/Saint Paul papers
  • Paper Eagles--the employee group of the Minneapolis Star Tribune
  • the Ramsey County GLBT Employees Network
  • the national Log Cabin Republicans archives
  • the sealed archives of the GLBT Pride/Twin Cities
  • items from the Magnus Hirschfeld estate

The collection was started by Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, a Minnesota-born archivalist in the late 1970's, and later donated to the University of Minnesota Libraries.

Selected items from the collection and timelines are frequently assembled and displayed at various festivals and schools. Recent displays have been at the Motor City Pride in Michigan and the Minnesota Twin Cities Pride Festival in 2007, and the first Moscow, Russia Pride Festival in May, 2006.

In 2005 the collection started its official newsletter, "The Tretter Letter." [1]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://special.lib.umn.edu/rare/tretter/tretterletterjan07.pdf

[edit] External links