Cheshire, founded to improve the lives of Colorado’s children and youth, highlight the contributions of GLBT people, create partnerships between GLBT people and children and youth servicing agencies and to increase services provided to GLBT youth.
Ground Zero, founded to fight the passage of Amendment 2 in 1992. Amendment 2 was historical initiative passed by a narrow margin of Colorado voters that prevented any city, town, or county in the Colorado from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to recognize homosexuals or bisexuals as a protected class. In simple terms, it made it acceptable to discriminate against gay, lesbian or bisexual individuals. This led to the case of Romer v. Evans, found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1996. This decision helped lay the groundwork for later important Supreme Court cases, Lawrence v. Texas, 2003 (overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986), United States v. Windsor, 2013 and Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015.
Both organizations received funding through the Gay and Lesbian Fund and The Gill Foundation, started by Tim Gill after the passage of Amendment 2 for support and advocacy to the LGBTQ+ community. Ground Zero was started in Colorado Springs after the passage of Amendment 2, hence the name “Ground Zero” in response to Colorado Springs being the location of Colorado for Family Values, an organization created to specifically to counter the objective of the Colorado Human Relations Commission to introduce legislation to add homosexuality to the list of protected class status.
Thanks to the generosity of the Gill Foundation, in October 2019 History Colorado hired the Gill Foundation Associate Curator of LGBTQ+ History to manage and expand History Colorado’s LGBTQ+ holdings and to develop the Gill Foundation LGBTQ Archive in recognition of the significant contributions of Tim Gill to the state of Colorado. All LGBTQ+ acquisitions from 2019 through 2021 reflect the support of the Gill Foundation.
Dedicated to documenting the varied experiences of all Coloradans, History Colorado and the Gill Foundation initiated the LGBTQ Collecting Initiative to proactively build a research archive that preserves and promotes the contributions, history, and voices of Colorado’s LGBTQ+ community.