In Spring 2025 Jay will travel to San Francisco for dissertation research with the support of the Program in American Culture Studies (AMCS) and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE²). During this trip he will study objects at the Legion of Honor, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and San Francisco Public Library. Jay will also visit the site of the former Fairoaks Hotel, a now-defunct gay bathhouse where Frank Melleno produced an extraordinary archive of polaroids that he learned about while working on Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum.