The Kameny Papers

At the 2009 annual conference of the Special Libraries Association in Washington DC, the GLBT caucus brought in Charles Francis, a Washingtonian who is a friend of Frank Kameny, a founder of the modern gay movement for civil equality. Francis, apparently single-handedly, arranged to have Kameny's amazing collection of historical material and artifacts appraised, arranged for donors to pay Kameny for the collection (Kameny spent most of his adult life advocating for gay rights... not a lucrative career), and getting the material accepted by the Library of Congress. This project, the Kameny Papers is an amazing effort, even more so because it was spearheaded by one man who knew Kameny.

When the Library of Contress said they'd be interested in this amazing collection of historical material and artifacts from the early gay rights movement of the 1950s, they wrote to Francis:

Accurate history requires primary material created contemporaneously with the events under question. [...] Abstraction is often the enemy of historical understanding.  A comprehensive understanding of history requires that historians, and those who read history, see how government policies and public attitudes affected real individuals and how individuals reacted, adjusted, and grappled with their position. 

Check out the web site to see some of the correspondence Kameny had with various government agencies.