They are some of the many artifacts in the Lambda Archives, a repository for collecting, storing, and preserving the LGBTQ history of San Diego and northern Baja California.

The images I’m marveling at offer candid glimpses of San Diego gay bar culture from different epochs in modern gay history. A third snapshot: a festive lineup of Halloween-costumed contestants-a drag version of Tippi Hedren (a stuffed crow entangled in her stylish platinum updo), a garish clown, and a butch female cowboy-all vying for prizes awarded long ago in an unidentified San Diego gay bar. Another photo presents a dance floor crowd, beaming faces glistening under a sheen of sweat, big 1980s hair and lip gloss in full effect on the women (and on some men, too). There’s a shirtless, mustachioed blond on roller skates in front of a 1965 red Plymouth Barracuda the position of the Giant Dipper roller coaster and street signage in the background establishes the photo was taken in the vicinity of the Apartment, a women’s gay bar that opened in Mission Beach in 1974.

I’m alone, but surrounded by faces smiling to me across the decades. I’m hunched over a smoky glass table covered with a treasure trove of photographs, shivering from the chilly air conditioning as much as from the excitement of discovering photographic gold nuggets.