Coll. 029: SpeakOut Records

Coll. 029: SpeakOut Records

1977-2005

SpeakOut’s roots trace back to 1972, when the Daughters of Bilitis and the Homophile Union of Boston joined forces to create the Gay Speakers Bureau. Since then, the organization has evolved and expanded to reflect the rich diversity of the GLBT community, including bisexual, transgender and intersex people. SpeakOut was known as the Gay and Lesbian Speakers Bureau throughout the 1990s. SpeakOut works to create a world free of homo-bi-trans-phobia and other forms of prejudice by telling the truths of people’s lives. Its main activities are training speakers to use public speaking as a means of creating positive cultural change by sharing their lives and experiences and sending those speakers to schools, businesses, churches, and other institutions in order to educate people about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives and issues. (The above adapted from the SpeakOut website, speakoutboston.org)

This collection is primarily comprised of speaker training materials and audience evaluations of speakers. It also contains grant applications, financial information, committee meeting minutes, workshops, resource packets, project planning papers, and the SpeakOut newsletter The Speaker. SpeakOut visited a large number of schools and other institutions in the Boston area throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. These included Brookline High School, Emerson College, Merrimack College, General Electric, Camp Atwater, Berklee College of Music, Lexington High School, Randolph High School, Stonehill College, and dozens of others. The audience was asked to fill out anonymous evaluations each time, and they were painstakingly collected and saved to improve future presentations. Training and evaluation materials which fall under a more specific category are filed with that category; for example, training for the Youth Speak Out project is filed in Series II, Projects. Evaluations of training exercises are filed within Series VI, Training.