Madeline D. Davis (July 7, 1940-April 28, 2021) was a noted gay rights activist, author, actor, and musician. For five decades, Madeline was an integral force in the LGBTQ community through her civic engagement, scholarly and artistic activities, and political and social activism. Her efforts earned her national acclaim and recognition.

Her enormous legacy includes the Madeline Davis Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives of Western New York, which she founded to help preserve the history of the region's gay communities. This collection was donated to Buffalo State in 2009, where it remains a treasured resource.

Please join us in honoring her memory with a donation to the Madeline Davis Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives. Funds are designated to provide support to this ever-growing collection of intensively-mined LGBTQ+ resources and to hire and train Buffalo State students to properly curate the collections. You can help us continue Madeline's passion for library, archival, advocacy, and outreach initiatives.

Madeline Davis was a trailblazer for the LGBTQ community in WNY and nationally.

Madeline was a founding member of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, the first gay rights organization in Western New York. In 1972, she became the first openly lesbian delegate at a major political convention, attending the Democratic National Convention in Miami, Florida, where she spoke in support of a gay rights plank. As a member of the Democratic Committee, Madeline worked to foster equal protections and civil liberties for gay and lesbian Americans.

She lectured and wrote extensively on women's history and sex and gender issues. She was a founding member of the HAG Theatre, the first all-lesbian theater company in the United States. She was also a performing musician and composed over 45 songs, most with gay and lesbian themes.

Madeline retired in 1995 as chief conservator and head of preservation in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library System. In 2012, she received the Buffalo History Museum's prestigious Augspurger Award "for outstanding service to the cause of local history." She also received a SUNY Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters during Buffalo State's 144th commencement celebration in 2016.

Madeline married Wendy B. Smiley in 1995, and the two repeated their vows four more times as marriage equality progressed.

About the Archives

In 2001, Madeline Davis founded the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives of Western New York as a way to collect, safeguard, and provide access to materials that document the LGBTQ+ communities of Western New York and Southern Ontario. In 2009, the archives were transferred to SUNY Buffalo State College's E. H. Butler Library, where it has become the region's largest LGBTQ+ collection.

The collection houses tens of thousands of documents and objects dating as far back as the 1920s and contributes to global, local, and digital projects to make this essential historical material available to students, communities, researchers, and other scholars from around the world.

The Madeline Davis Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives is actively soliciting donations of materials and further support. As Madeline herself said,

The presence and continued growth of this and other collections at Buffalo State assures that our shared history will only grow in scope and importance. Any contributions to the collections will help fill in historical gaps, assuring that we have a past, a history, and a future.