VHS Activism Archive: NEW SITE!

VHS Activism Archives considers how to store, transfer, share, research, and reactivate media collections facing obsolescence. It is a database of one VHS collection with information, citation, and in some case digitization that can lead to more.

This is a new website built when the previous one was defunded by the Brooklyn College Library.

The permanent home for the VHSAA collection is the National History Archive at the LGBT Community Center in New York City (GayCenter.org/archives) where the yapes were re-gifted in 2026 after being deinstitutionalized from the Brooklyn College Library.

The videos are now freely accessible on the Internet Archive: open to researchers, students, organizers, and anyone else who wants to resist, remember, or repeat VHS activism! archive.org/details/vhs-activism-archive

The VHS Collection held here, 184 items strong, first sat on my office shelves, commencing in the 1980s in NYC, moving to Philadelphia in the 1990s, to Claremont CA from 1995-2016, and then back to NYC, growing in number and interests over the years. In that final return, I wondered what to do with all those tapes, now in a format that was nearly impossible to use, as well as becoming every more fragile.

For twenty or so years, I had used these workhorses to teach and for my research in queer feminist media praxis, with core attention to AIDS, feminism, experimental and activist media, anti-racism, queer, lesbian, gay and trans media, and documentary. The collection looks like me, these areas of activism and culture over those years, and also like my extended community of fellow teachers, scholars, artists, and activists from around 1980-2000 when VHS stopped being a well-supported medium for production, collection, or exhibition.

Go to VHS Activism Archive