Gay Archives Switzerland
The Swiss Gay Archives Association (SAS) in Zurich was founded on July 10, 1993 in an effort to collect documents about gay life and work in Switzerland . The first basis was the archives of regional associations, which were soon supplemented by those of national organizations.
In addition, there were more and more private estates with diaries, photographs, works of art, etc. One of these contains a lot of material from the homosexual association “Der Kreis” that was believed to be lost. Another contains diaries (74 volumes), letters, poems and photos that document life, especially in rural Switzerland.
A second focus is the collection of Swiss magazines, in particular the worldwide publication " Der Kreis / Le Cercle / The Circle " (1943–1967) and its predecessors and successors.
In 1993 a deposit agreement was signed with the Swiss Social Archives in Zurich; this takes over the proper development and storage of the stocks and makes them available to the public. The rough indexing of the archives and the responsibility for their release remains with the SAS.
The Heinrich Hössli Foundation for Homosexuality in Culture and History was founded in 2009 to secure the holdings in the long term; the collected materials were and will be transferred to her in the future.
Documents from the archive are repeatedly used in exhibitions, for example in the big show “Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Years of the Gay Movement ”(1997), in the exhibition“ Outrageous ”in the Stadthaus Zurich (2002) and in the company Mitte (Basel) 2004; they were also used to draft the Internet publication on the gay history of Switzerland.