10/22/2026
In September 1923, someone found a baby wrapped in newspaper under an oleander bush in Galveston, Texas. He was about eight months old.
That baby grew up to save every gay newspaper he could get his hands on.
Jim Kepner was adopted, though he didn't find out until he was 19. He said later that he'd known he was different since he was 4. In 1942, he followed his adoptive father to San Francisco and went looking for books about people like him. He combed the city's libraries and came up nearly empty. The little he found was clinical, hostile, or both.
So he started his own library. The first purchase was Radclyffe Hall's le***an novel "The Well of Loneliness." He never really stopped buying.
Kepner clerked for a railroad and wrote for the Communist paper the Daily Worker until the party kicked him out for being gay. In the early 1950s, he landed in Los Angeles. He joined the Mattachine Society and became one of the main writers for ONE magazine, the country's first national gay publication. He wrote about police raids, same-sex marriage, and whether such a thing as a "gay community" even existed. He also kept a copy of everything.
For the next five decades, his collection grew relentlessly. It included books, newsletters, flyers, meeting minutes, clippings, letters, and posters from groups that lasted a year and from groups that lasted a weekend. Most people threw that stuff away. Kepner filed it.
By the early 1970s, the collection filled his apartment, and he started letting researchers in to use it. In 1975, he named it the Western Gay Archives.
The name kept changing as the collection grew. In 1979, it got a board of directors and a storefront office on Hudson Avenue in Hollywood as the National Gay Archives. In 1984, it became the International Gay & Le***an Archives. In 1988, the City of West Hollywood gave it a home on North Robertson Boulevard.
When AIDS hit, Kepner's habit took on new weight. Obituaries, memorial programs, and protest flyers went into the files. He documented how the community fought back and recorded the names of the men it lost.
In 1994, Kepner's archives merged with the library of ONE Institute, the organization that grew out of the magazine he'd written for 40 years earlier. The LA Times reported that the combined collection held about two million items. In 2000, it moved into a building provided by the University of Southern California.
Kepner died in Los Angeles on November 15, 1997. He was 74. Historian William Armstrong Percy later argued that the movement had three great early pioneers. Harry Hay and Dorr Legg got the credit. Kepner got overlooked.
His collection didn't. Today, it's the ONE National Gay & Le***an Archives at the USC Libraries, the world's largest repository of LGBTQ materials. Historians, filmmakers, and students use it every day to tell stories that would otherwise have ended up in the trash.
Someone once wrapped him in a newspaper and left him under a bush. He spent the rest of his life making sure gay newspapers, magazines, and flyers never got thrown away as he did.
