PROJECT ORIGINS
From a personal archive to a shared history
The project began after Sean G. Massey and his husband, Loren Couch, both former GMHC volunteers and staff members, rediscovered boxes of documents and memorabilia they had saved from their years at the agency. Many other former staff members and volunteers later contributed materials as the research expanded.
Massey is a faculty member in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University, a social psychologist, and a scholar of LGBTQ+ psychology and life-story research. In 2021, he began working with historian Julia B. Haager, whose training in oral history, public history, women’s and gender history, and the history of public health helped shape the project’s direction and scope.
GMHC Stories gratefully acknowledges the narrators and the former staff members and volunteers who donated documents, photographs, memorabilia, and other personal materials.
TWO CONNECTED COLLECTIONS
Voices and records in conversation
The oral-history collection presents 101 interviews with former volunteers, staff, board members, clients, donors, and community members. Narrators describe organizational life, workplace culture, volunteer labor, client services, prevention and education, advocacy, fundraising, grief, activism, and community care.
The timeline organizes 4,765 documented events drawn from board minutes, periodicals, archival records, and other sources. It allows readers to follow chronology, examine individual evidence, and compare developments across programs, people, communities, and themes.
The oral history files and archival materials were acquired by The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, where they are preserved in perpetuity and accessible to the public.
Read together, personal testimony and documentary evidence reveal different dimensions of GMHC’s history and make it possible to move between lived experience and the institutional record.
COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH
Built across generations
Sean G. Massey and Julia B. Haager led the project with faculty collaborator Sarah R. Young and graduate and undergraduate researchers affiliated with Binghamton University’s Human Sexualities Research Lab.
Casey W. Adrian and Eden Lowinger served as lead student researchers, making sustained contributions across the interview and archival work and helping guide the wider student team. Student researchers reviewed archival materials, developed interview questions, conducted interviews, processed recordings and transcripts, extracted and verified timeline events, and organized both collections.
Lead student researchers Casey W. Adrian and Eden Lowinger worked alongside Shermont Bradwell, Kaya Foster, Claire Goldstein, Alaina Gumble, Nashaan Howard, Keonna Hyacinth, Briana Lopez-Patino, Sarah Morea, Dan Pergel, Yi Qian, Adam Zhao, and other members of the research team.
