Bibliographic records, clippings, correspondence, court records, fliers, government ordinances, guidelines, mass mailings, medical records, notes, pamphlets, press releases, programs, and training records of Richard Davis, 1961-2012. The papers document Rick Davis' gay political activism in Minnesota in the 1970s, including with the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights. The papers also document his work in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s with the Right to Privacy Foundation.

Richard Davis was born on June 8, 1948, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a bachelor's degree in speech communications from Hamline University in 1970 and a J.D. degree from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1975. Davis came out of the closet in the early 1970s and became involved in the local gay movement on a volunteer basis. He convened and chaired the group that mounted the first pride march in Minnesota; helped lobby the Minnesota legislature for anti-discrimination legislation; was an early founder and co-chair of the Minnesota Committee for Gay Rights (later called the Minnesota Committee for Gay and Lesbian Rights); and was a special advisor for the St. Paul gay rights referendum in 1978. In the fall of 1982, Davis moved to Washington, D.C., as the Director of Education and Research for the Right to Privacy Foundation, the 501(c)(3) counterpart to the Gay Rights National Lobby and the Human Rights Campaign Fund. The job ended in 1983, and after a series of temporary jobs, Davis was hired in 1987 by the Bill Digest section of the Congressional Research Service American Law Division, where he worked there until his retirement in 2010. Davis competed in swimming in the first five Gay Games, 1982-1998, and was an early research subject with the Study to Help the AIDS Research Effort (SHARE) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the four clinical sites of the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS).

4 Linear Feet 3 archive boxes + 1 archive binder

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the ONE Archivist. Permission for publication is given on behalf of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC Libraries as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

The collection is open to researchers. There are no access restrictions.