Swimming with Lesbians follows Madeline Davis as she struggles to breathe life into an historical Archive of the LGBT community in her home town of Buffalo, New York. She describes the building of Western New York’s LGBT Archive as “the last big project of my life.” It already overflows two rooms of her suburban Buffalo home.

This Archive is more than just documentary proof that the raw material of history exists. It is for many, an important acknowledgement of a struggle to be seen; acknowledged, known. For Madeline, it is a story of passion and power, for out of the individual stories found in the Archive, the past takes shape and forms the history of gay life in the United States and the fight for LGBT civil rights.

Buffalo, New York is a conservative blue collar city, and perhaps for some, an unlikely and surprising home for an Archive of this scope. The last half century has not been kind to Buffalo. As in many declining cities the social changes that made gay rights possible were not always welcomed in Buffalo. Swimming with Lesbians asks the viewer to consider that much credit is due to people like Madeline and others in the film -- people in places like Buffalo, New York -- who moved Gay rights out of the Castro and the Village and onto the Main Street of mid-sized American cities and small towns. Without them, today might look much different. Swimming with Lesbians observes Madeline and others grapple with passing on their legacy – not only the logistics of gathering the records and creating the Archive, but their struggle to define to others why it is important. How do we look back on the last half century, make sense of it, order, and understand it? Like everything else in her life, Madeline is powerfully motivated to hold on to the memories of lives lived bravely against a backdrop of dramatic societal change…documentary evidence that others would, and many have, overlooked and discarded.