Sheila Kuehl
Kuehl was elected to the California State Assembly in 1994, becoming the first openly gay person elected to the California legislature. While running for office Kuehl found she was able to offset some negative stereotypes people had about lesbians thanks to their familiarity with her role as Zelda. She told an interviewer "When people know gay people personally, they tend to feel differently about the whole community. And all of a sudden, here's a person that they knew very well that they found out was lesbian."
Ron Heisler
Heisler describes himself as "becoming politicised" during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and became involved in the Young Socialists in Hackney Central in London where he was influenced by Robin Jamieson. He began to seriously collect political literature when he was 18 and says that he became obsessive about it, visiting all the left wing political bookshops of London. His collection relates to all forms of radical politics but is mainly related to left wing thought. It also is devoted at least 20% to socialism and the arts which Heisler says is poorly represented in other political collections, for instance he collected over 2,000 works of fiction related to politics and has also tried to collect works of working class poetry. He accumulated over 2,000 items about anarchism. His collecting expanded rapidly after he dropped out of active politics in the 1980s after he became disillusioned with the Labour Party politics of the time.