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October is LGBTQ+ History Month, and with about ten days left in it, we wanted to tell you where the month came from, and then point you toward the part of that history that happened right here on the South Coast.
In 1994, Rodney Wilson was teaching history at Mehlville High School, outside St. Louis, when a lesson on the badges the Nazis forced prisoners to wear brought him to a decision in front of his own students. He told the class that if he’d been sent to one of those camps, he would have been made to wear the pink triangle, and with that he became the first openly gay K-12 teacher in Missouri.
That same year he finished a months-long push to set aside a whole month for lesbian and gay history. He picked October because it fit the school calendar, because the 1979 and 1987 marches on Washington had both happened in October, and because National Coming Out Day, first held in 1988, lands right in the middle of it. More than thirty years later, according to KCUR in Kansas City, 20 countries have history months modeled on the one he started.
History disappears when nobody writes it down, and for most of the last century LGBTQ+ history was left out on purpose, in court records that treated it as a crime and in family stories that quietly skipped a name. That’s exactly why we built the South Coast LGBTQ+ Museum: so our history gets written down, documented and kept, and lives on long after the people who lived it. A month on the calendar won’t fix that by itself, but it does give a teacher, a librarian or a curious grandkid a reason to ask somebody about it, and asking is usually how this kind of history gets saved before it’s gone.
A lot of the history worth knowing happened within a short drive of wherever you’re reading this, and the Network’s museum has been collecting it in one place, with every claim either sourced or clearly flagged.
There’s 20 Kenyon Street, the story of New Bedford’s longest-running gay bar, forty years of a safe place, the women who built it, and the dances that outlasted the danger. There’s Sent to Washington, about Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, the two openly gay congressmen who between them represented this part of Massachusetts for forty straight years. There’s Seven Couples, which walks through the four-to-three Goodridge ruling that made Massachusetts the first state where same-sex couples could marry, including how our own legislators voted in the fight that followed.
There are harder rooms, too, and they matter just as much. Puzzles, 2006 is a memorial to the people hurt in the February 2006 attack on a gay bar in New Bedford. AIDS on the South Coast tells how this region answered the epidemic, the care people built when help was slow to come, and the people we still can’t name.
The museum pieced all of it together from newspapers, public records and the memories of people who were there, and its own front door says it plainly: the people who lived this history are still here, for now.
For History Month, the museum has a brand-new exhibit, Who Wrote It Down, about how LGBTQ+ history got saved or lost, from a 1649 Plymouth Colony court record to the South Coast records nobody has read yet: sclgbtqnetwork.org/museum/exhibits/who-wrote-it-down.html.
If you’ve got a story, a photo, an old flyer or a matchbook that belongs in that history, we’d love to hear about it, so give us a call or send a text at (774) 775-2656 and tell us what you’ve got.
History Month wraps up on Halloween, but the museum is open every day of the year at sclgbtqnetwork.org/museum, and we’d love for you to take a slow walk through it this weekend, maybe with somebody who remembers a few of these chapters better than you do.