Twenty-five years ago, a San Francisco Public Library commissioner named Steve Coulter came up with an idea that was so far ahead of its time that he was afraid to let it out of the house. So he invited six friends over to try it out in the safety of his living room.

The radical notion was to establish “an archive that would actively seek out the history of gays and lesbians before it is all lost,” recalls Coulter, who was not yet thinking as big as his idea would become. But when the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center opened in the New Main Library five years later, on April 18, 1996, it was the first permanent gay and lesbian center in any municipal building in America.

“This was unheard of at the time,” says state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco. “The fact of it in the public library communicated to the LGBT community that we were now officially part of the civic fabric of San Francisco.”

A different era

The circular reading room, in a quiet corner of the third floor, has not changed since its opening. But the collection in the stacks, 13,000 books and 5,000 films, is ever-expanding, as is the title of the place. For its 20th anniversary, it has been renamed the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, to include “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning, Intersex, Allies, Advocates and Asexual.”

That’s about 25 syllables, and the acronym isn’t any easier to handle. But it can all be summed up in the center’s easy-to-remember motto: “Queerest. Library. Ever.”

“Right now we are pretty trendy,” Coulter says. “I would say in 1991 we were not.”

It all seems so long ago now, but in 1991 Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., was still using his congressional bully pulpit to chase gays back into the closet. The radical gay action force Stop AIDS Now or Else had recently stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, and ACT UP was staging other disruptive protests. Lesbians were just establishing their right to be a category apart from gays. Any money that could be raised in the gay community went directly to the fight against the pandemic.

In the face of this, it was difficult timing to begin a campaign to raise money for a gay library collection. But the campaign to build a New Main Library was already under way, and Coulter saw that the time was nigh.

An external affairs executive for Pacific Bell, Coulter had been appointed to the San Francisco Public Library Commission by Mayor Art Agnos. So Coulter took it upon himself to see what the library already had, which amounted to a few boxes of the Bay Area Reporter, a gay newspaper, stacked high on a shelf at the Eureka Valley branch.

“I thought, ‘This is really nice, but sad compared to what we could be doing,’” he says.

Going local, then national

That is how he came to invite his friends and neighbors over for a chat, in his flat on the first block of Divisadero Street, in the same room with the mix of traditional furnishings and antiques where he now sits relating the story.

He cannot remember who sat where, but he can definitely remember who was in the room — most prominently his neighbor just up the hill, meatpacking heir Jim Hormel. Also in attendance were Coulter’s partner, Greg McIntyre, city planner Chuck Forester, radio station owner Gary Gielow, and Sherry Thomas and Bob Sass, who both worked in book publishing.

“This was not the gay political leadership,” Coulter says. “These were people with a long-term view for preserving gay history.”

The strategy they cooked up that night was that they would tell donors that if they only had one dollar to give, to give it to the fight against AIDS. But if they had a dollar plus change, give the change to the gay archive. They set a fundraising goal of $1.6 million, and Coulter set out to find an archive.

This search only had to go six doors down Divisadero, to the home of Larry Bush, an Agnos aide and friend of Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts, considered to be the first openly gay reporter to cover the gay beat at any major newspaper in America. By then Shilts was a national name, having published “The Mayor of Castro Street” about Harvey Milk, followed by “And the Band Played On,” an award-winning history of the AIDS crisis.

Coulter met Shilts for dinner at Bush’s home on Divisadero, and that was all it took.

“He gave us all of his back papers, his notes, his first drafts,” Coulter says. “Once we got Randy, then we could start building it.” Outreach went nationwide, and included two lesbians in Florida who had two houses. One was just for their books and magazines, thousands of them on the lesbian experience, all of which were shipped west.

“What else were they going to do with it? Some university might be interested in it, but you’d have to be a student to get in to see it,” Coulter says. “We were going to make our collection open to everyone. That was the excitement of it.”

To bottle this excitement, a fundraising dinner was set at the Hyatt Regency, and Leno, a sign company owner who was still getting his name out there, was assigned to serve as co-chair, along with Jan Zivic.

Message multiplies

When Hormel arrived at the dinner, he looked out on the room and saw a sparse crowd and thought the event was a failure. But he was looking at the overflow seating. The main room had sold out, but Leno persuaded his own constituency to suffer the indignity of sitting in the anteroom.

“We filled the entire Hyatt Regency ballroom; I think there were 1,000 people in attendance,” Leno says. “Relative to LGBT community fundraisers, it set the bar for all that followed.”

The dinner raised $800,000, halfway to the goal, and the gay center at the New Main “became a cause celebre within the gay and lesbian community,” Coulter says.

It took four years, but the results more than doubled the initial goal of $1.6 millionen route to a final tally of $3.5 million. The extra $2 million allows for an endowment, so that it can compete for collections.

Those first seven who met in Coulter’s living room were joined by some 1,500 other names on the donor wall, at a minimum contribution of $1,000, payable in $50 monthly installments.

“This had an impact that was unexpected,” recalls Hormel, who gave $500,000 and was arm-twisted into putting his name on the door. “I see it as an example of how a group of citizens can get its message out to the general public.”

When the New Main opened, the Hormel Center was one of four designated cultural collections, including Chinese, African American and Filipino, on the third floor. But only the gay and lesbian center has its own director, Karen Sundheim, and its own archivist, Tim Wilson.

Over the years the center has accumulated what might be the most concentrated and comprehensive collection of gay-related papers and film at any library anywhere, public or private.

“I just spent about two weeks there doing research. They have materials that are invaluable to LGBT researchers that you cannot find anywhere else,” says Lillian Faderman, a nationally recognized historian at work on a biography of Harvey Milk for Yale University Press.

Faderman came up from San Diego to do her research, but other researchers come from farther than that.

“I get visitors from all over the world,” Sundheim says. “Just recently a Chinese filmmaker came in because he’d learned that we have the only copy of a film he made that was banned in his own country.”

Gay heroes in history

The Main Library is celebrating its 20th anniversary, but only the Hormel Center gets a historic exhibition at the Jewett Gallery, on the lower level, with ancillary exhibits in the center itself and at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library.

Hormel is also the only collection in the library with its own overhead mural, painted in trompe l’oeil depicting gay heroes, though some never confirmed their sexuality. These include Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Milk and Shilts, who never lived to see the center open.

The one identifiable likeness in the mural is Hormel, who later became the country’s first openly gay ambassador, posted to Luxembourg under President Bill Clinton.

When Hormel was asked, in a 20th anniversary film tribute, where he would place the Hormel Center among his top-10 philanthropic gifts, he rated it No. 1. Also No. 2 and so on through No. 10.

Reached at home in San Francisco, Hormel hedges that claim, slightly. “I would put it at or very near the top of the list,” he says.

Coulter, 68, has long since retired from both Pacific Bell and the Library Commission. He is a full-time writer and has published his first novel, “The Chronicles of Spartak — Rising Son” with the main character an LGBTQI action hero. Last month he made his debut reading at the Hormel Center before an audience of 40 under the mural.

“It was an emotional experience,” he says. “My voice choked up a couple of times as I looked at the crowd and thought about all it took to make that center happen.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf Instagram: @sfchronicle_art

Learn more

Video: Steve Coulter shows off the living room where the Hormel Center started: http://bit.ly/1Ukdhzd

The exhibition

‘Queerest. Library. Ever.’: Runs through Aug. 7 in the Jewett Gallery, Hormel LGBTQIA Center, and the Sixth Floor Bridge, at the Main Library, 100 Larkin St., S.F. An ancillary exhibit is at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Branch Library, 1 Jose Sarria Court, S.F. www.sfpl.org. (415) 557-4400.