The library burned to the ground. Try to imagine the Vatican Library burning to the ground, and the fire's impact on the Catholic Church. Try to imagine the Library of Congress being destroyed, and the impact on Americans. Then try to imagine the loss of Morris Kight's archive, or the archive at One Institute in L.A., or the Homosexual Information Center in Louisiana, or Joan Nestle's Herstory archives in New York. We already suffered the loss of the immense Berlin archive of gay and lesbian history, including manuscripts of Socrates and Sappho, that was burned by the Nazis.
Homosexual history is even more vulnerable than heterosexual history.
For most of our thousands of years in the West, we HAVE lived underground. The persecution of newly conquered native peoples, the threats to the survival and integrity of their histories, has been our daily fact for generations. Today our U.S. archives are few, and most of them limp along on tiny budgets, in locations that are often far from adequate. Our library collections are few in number. The Bible itself was rewritten by different church councils, who took things out and put things in.