Queer Pasts

Curated by Lucas Hilderbrand. At least as early as the 1950s, gay bars were understood as the primary institution for LGBTQ+ public life, and their social, cultural, and political centrality for the queer community sustained for decades. This collection of primary documents from gay bar history spans the 1950s through the 1990s: from the first legal defense of gay bars' right to exist until just before the Internet radically changed queer public cultures. The exhibition takes a capacious approach to understanding bars through a range of documents, including legal rulings, news reporting, advertisements, and ephemera—which collectively represent nightlife's complex history.

Curated by Rachel Trusty. In 1888, James Chesser and Georgeanna Holly legally married in Fort Smith, AR. Chesser was a white man, and Holly was a Black or mixed-race, gender-non-conforming individual. Chesser was arrested in July, and it was at that time that his marriage to Holly was revealed to the court. They were both tried and found guilty of buggary. Chesser was sentenced to six years in the Arkansas Penitentiary, while Holly was sentenced to five. This exhibit examines Fort Smith as a border town to Indian Territory to argue that the city worked as a liminal, local-national space that attracted certain individuals for work and play, and provided an atmosphere where Chesser and Holly could court, legally marry, and cohabitate. Following national cultural and legal trends related to sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws, the couple was caught up in a rapidly changing carceral system. Using this case as a framework, this exhibit explores the construction of sexual and gender norms in a post-civil war America.

Curated by Marc Stein. This exhibit focuses on one of the most active lesbian and Latinx members of one of the most influential LGBT political groups in the United States in the early 1970s. The introductory essay presents an overview of Rivera's life as an activist, including her many direct action protests, her several police arrests, and her most significant carceral experience. The essay also explores the gender politics of media representations and historical narratives about the Gay Activists Alliance of New York City, juxtaposing Rivera's visibility in the former and her invisibility in the latter.

Curated by Tom Hooper. On February 5, 1981, 200 police agents in Toronto stormed four gay bathhouses and arrested 286 men, charging them with criminal code offenses. This event has become entrenched within popular narratives of LGBTQ history in Canada. These narratives have been designed to celebrate progress and they encourage LGBT communities to favorably identify with the Canadian state. Forgotten in these processes are intersections between the policing of gay men and state relationships with multiple struggles, including reproductive justice, Black civil rights, trans activism, disability activism, and sex work activism. This detachment obscures long histories of criminalization and police harassment prior to the raids, but also the ways in which these patterns have endured after 1981. The items showcased in this exhibit contribute to a reclamation of intersectional queer pasts and a radical remembering of resistance struggles.

Curated by Eric Gonzaba. This exhibit examines the role of t-shirts in the post-Stonewall LGBTQ movement as symbols of identity, activism, and community. It argues that these everyday items, often overlooked, provide unique insights into the diverse experiences and narratives within the LGBTQ community. The essay explores how t-shirts have been used to express queer identities, commemorate significant events, and navigate the intersection of commerce and activism. Despite their limitations as historical sources, t-shirts offer a valuable lens to understand the evolution of LGBTQ cultures and the complexities of queer politics over the past five decades.

Curated by Wendy L. Rouse. This source set explores the important role of queerness and queer suffragists in the campaign for the 19th Amendment. The traditional narrative of women's suffrage history sanitized the lives of suffragists contributing to the historical erasure of the queer history of the movement. Yet, it was often their very queerness that helped propel the movement forward. This source set highlights the alliances that queer suffragists built and the innovative strategies they developed to protect and preserve their most intimate relationships as they defied the gender and sexual norms of their day.

Curated by Marc Stein. This exhibit contains documents more than 600 direct action protests in the United States from 1965 to 1975. It is the first comprehensive survey of LGBT demonstrations, marches, protests, rallies, riots, and sit-ins during one of the most influential periods of LGBT activism in U.S. history. For the nine years studied, Stein and his research team identified 646 direct action events, averaging 72 per year. The study cites more than 1,800 media sources from the 1960s and 1970s. According to these sources, more than 200,000 people participated in these protests and nearly 200 were arrested. Protests occurred in 20 states and the District of Columbia, challenging the notion that these only occurred in New York, California, and a few other states. The frequency of protests increased significantly in April 1969, two months before the well-known Stonewall rebellion in New York City.

Curated by Tim Retzloff. “‘Striking Out Against the Conspiracy of Silence’: 1970s LGBTQ Campus Organizing in the Michigan Student Press” offers a selection of fifty texts drawn from student-run newspapers at ten public universities and one private college in Michigan from 1960 to 1986. These unmined materials provide a distinctive student lens on key developments of gay liberation, lesbian-feminism, emerging queer visibility, uneven progress, and persistent backlash as they made their mark on the Midwest. Together these sources welcome new interrogations of student history, Michigan history, the histories of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and queer pasts.

Curated by Lisa Arellano. “Are They Really?” Queer Life at Mills College, 1900-1980 contains documents about the diverse history of queerness at a women’s college in California. The exhibit’s thirty-three primary documents include archival photographs, student scrapbooks, campus ephemera, and student yearbooks. The introductory essay considers the challenges of detecting both queerness and normativity in college archival collections. The project was created during a semester-long undergraduate practicum course and is Queer Pasts’ first collaboratively produced exhibit.

Curated by Marc Stein. This exhibit examines newspaper reports about Sodom, sodomy, sodomites, and gender transgressors in 1840s New York. The introductory essay addresses questions about whether these sources, most of which condemned the city’s sodomites, provide strong evidence of early same-sex sexual subcultures in the United States. The essay also examines references to age, class, gender, nationality, race, and religion in press reports about sodomites and compares the media coverage of sodomites to contemporary media reports about gender transgressors.

Curated by Laura Sachiko Fugikawa.This collection focuses on the creation of queer Asian organizations in Chicago during the 1980s and 1990s. A series of articles in Chicago’s LGBTQ newspaper, Outlines: The Voice of the Gay and Lesbian Community, and self-published organizational newsletters were important tools to increase queer Asian visibility, address the issues queer Asians felt were most critical, and serve as outreach for newly formed organizations. Items in this collection provide insight into why queer Asian groups formed during this time period and how individuals came together to create multi-ethnic, queer Asian organizations.

Curated by Emily Skidmore. This exhibit explores eleven cases of individuals who were assigned female at birth and who lived as men in the United States between 1878 and 1914. With an emphasis on newspaper stories, this exhibit is a rich resource to understand the ways in which Americans thought about gender, sexuality, the characteristics of men and women, and the permeability of gender boundaries around the turn of the twentieth century. These stories provide ample evidence of the long history of gender transgression in the United States—a history which, as this exhibit points out, took place in both large cities and rural outposts.

Curated by Karma R. Chávez. This exhibit features ephemera related to two instances of transnational organizing in which AIDS activists in New York and San Francisco played significant roles: (1) the boycott and protests against the 1990 and 1992 International AIDS Conferences, and (2) activism for Haitian refugees detained on Guantánamo Bay from 1991 to 1993 because the US government claimed they had HIV. These materials help us to understand the strategies that groups of AIDS activists who were largely accustomed to addressing their own life and death concerns in a domestic context used to activate audiences in defense of people who lived or originated outside of US national borders.

Curated by Pablo Mitchell. This collection takes an expansive view of the history of queer Latinidad in the United States, drawing on a wide array of archival sources ranging from legal records and census documents to personal letters and newspaper articles. The documents assembled here reflect the considerable diversity of the U.S. Latinx community in the 19th and early 20th centuries as Latin American and Caribbean immigrants to the East Coast and Florida joined the country's long-standing Mexican-descent population in the United States.

Curated by Marc Stein. This exhibit focuses on a groundbreaking 1968 study of same-sex sexual violence in Philadelphia’s male prisons. The explosive report addressed racial dynamics, situational homosexuality, masculinity crises, and the causes of sexual violence. The exhibit’s primary sources include the 1968 Davis study, mainstream and LGBT media articles, and transcripts of U.S. Senate hearings. The introductory essay situates the Davis study in its time and place, discusses the media coverage, describes the responses of government officials and social scientists, and provides suggestions about how to interpret the primary sources.