In the 1970s, coalitions of Bay Area women started the first feminist credit unions, domestic violence shelters and holistic health centers. Some of these pioneering women’s stories — and the role they played in shaping the Bay Area’s progressive identity — are household tales. But an equal number of them are stuck in boxes that have yet to be dusted off.

That mission is at the core of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, a project founded by Lenn Keller, a photographer and filmmaker who moved to Oakland in 1975. As women of her generation grew older, Keller saw that the history of Bay Area lesbians of the 1970s and ’80s was in danger of being lost. In 2014, she and several other women took on the task of saving it.

“Marginalized histories are often not documented,” Keller said. “This means that all of us have a distorted sense of who we are and our history as a country. This history is very important, not just for posterity, but it’s important for us now. It helps us understand how we got to where we are, and helps us understand how to deal with the challenges.”

In December, the Bay Area Lesbian Archives was granted nonprofit status. That put Keller and her fellow archivists, Rebecca Silverstein and Sharon Davenport, in a better position to raise money through grants and other sources. They’ve already begun digitizing their collections, and want the archives to be available online for anyone to use.

With limited resources, the group has focused on “emergency collections,” consisting of material from women who contributed to the Bay Area’s lesbian renaissance and are near the end of their lives, as well as contributions from women now deceased.

The Bay Area already has the GLBT Historical Society, which began in 1985 in San Francisco and grew in part out of the desire to preserve gay men’s history as AIDS devastated the community. Like the lesbian archives, the GLBT Historical Society had humble beginnings: Its first collections were stored in the living room of co-founder Willie Walker’s Castro apartment.

Now, the GLBT Historical Society archive holds 800 collections of photographs, audiovisual recordings, photographs and personal papers. The San Francisco Public Library has an LGBT archival collection as well.

The Lesbian Archives’ collection ranges from the personal to the culturally eclectic, and it’s already outgrowing its storage space in Oakland. Keller and her colleagues hope to open a public space for their archives this year.

Among the items awaiting digitization are a large number of flyers, a medium lesbian activists used to scare up a crowd in the pre-internet days. One, from 1978, promotes an event against Proposition 6, a state initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California public schools.

Another, from 1979, advertises a consciousness-raising group called the 3rd World Lesbian Feminist Support Alliance. Such groups were informal gatherings for women to connect their personal experiences — anything from displays of femininity to the battle against sexual assault — to broader political systems they felt were oppressing them.

There are unearthed photographs of lesbian and feminist activists in all kinds of scenes — at protests, in the arms of lovers. There are “art postcards” that were sent to and from lesbians throughout the world, and diaries that detail the musings and plans of the era’s activists.

Posters make up a large portion of the archives. Many were staples of communal homes back in the day — there’s a promotional poster for “High Risk,” a 7-inch disc issued in 1974 by Sister Love Productions, a lesbian record label inspired by the poetry of black lesbian poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker. The single, long out of press, is a mix of cosmic jazz with the spoken word of Judy Grahn, a prolific Bay Area lesbian poet.

Lorde and Parker are not alive to tell the tale, but Grahn is. Now in her late 70s and a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Grahn lives on a quiet street in Palo Alto, miles from her original post of literary activism: In 1969, she co-founded the Women’s Press Collective on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Many consider it to be one of the first feminist presses in the world.

Eight years into its existence, after it moved to Oakland and evolved into Diana Press, someone broke into the collective’s building, vandalized 5,000 unbound copies of a Rita Mae Brown book and wrecked several machines. The culprit was never found.

“There was no capacity to recover,” Grahn said, and the collective closed in 1978. “I’m still waiting for somebody’s deathbed confession.”

In the meantime, she plans to donate some of her press collective writings to the Lesbian Archives, including “Woman to Woman,” an early collection of feminist poems and drawings.

When the press was in its heyday, its members taught offset printing classes to other feminists and lesbians. Silverstein, who moved to San Francisco in 1976 from Brooklyn, took a class herself. Self-reliance was something she’d never felt before coming to the Bay Area.

She was still calling herself bisexual when she moved to San Francisco at age 27, but soon came out as a lesbian. She craved a context for her newfound identity.

“We were hungry for history,” Silverstein said. “We were hungry for knowing what — and who — came before us. Because if you just think you’re this weird anomaly, you’ve got no roots under you.”

She added, “We were coming out of a time where women were trapped. We couldn’t get our own bank accounts or cars — you had to be married. Now these things are taken for granted. We were the people who were bringing all this stuff in.”

The archive is a way to add more voices to the lesbian legacy in the Bay Area and capture a comprehensive history of the Bay Area’s radical roots. It is also, in some ways, a chance for the women of Silverstein and Keller and Grahn’s generation to reconnect with one another.

The lesbian community, Grahn said, has become more segmented, and most of the places where her generation gathered — the bookstores, bars and cafes — no longer exist. Some lost their specialness, as lesbianism merged with San Francisco’s mainstream.

“I think there needs to be pressing social reasons why people congregate together in a particular group,” Grahn said. “To just get together because you’re lesbians is not a compelling reason. There is no overarching social imperative.”

The social imperative her generation put in place has faded in intensity. Many older lesbians are also reluctant to revisit the past, Grahn said. Some are still dealing with the emotions spun out of that era. Others have simply moved on to the next stage.

“I think we were still absorbing it,” Grahn said. “There was so much conflict. It’s like going through a forest fire; you’re setting the forest fire, but you’re also in it.

“It was a grand adventure, I’ll say. It really was.”

Annie Vainshtein is a producer at SFGate.com. Email: AVainshtein@sfchronicle.com

Saving history

The Bay Area Lesbian Archives hosts regular events featuring authors, filmmakers and other central figures of the lesbian community. More information is available on its website: www.bayarealesbianarchives.org