Who Wrote It Down

Chapter 0

Before you enter

Every piece of LGBTQ+ history you have ever read survived because somebody wrote it down and somebody else kept the paper. This exhibit is about those people. Some of them meant to destroy what they were writing about. Some meant to save it. A few tried to erase it afterward. The history reached us through all of them.

Chapter I

Amherst, the early 1850s · Boston, 1911

The name someone erased

The first way history is lost is the quietest. Nobody burns a building. Somebody with a pen goes back through a letter and takes a name out.

Sue was Susan Gilbert, who became Susan Dickinson: an essay on the same scholarly archive calls Austin "her husband." That essay is unsigned, written in the first person by one of the editors of the published Emily and Susan correspondence, and it records that someone cut, erased and inked over Emily's writing to and about Susan, including an attempt "to ink over every line" of the poem that begins "One Sister have I in the house." Corroborated

Who did the erasing, and when, is not established by any source we read. Names have been suggested, and we print none of them, because a suggestion is not a record. Who erased it: unknown

What the letters mean is also argued. Some scholars read a love between the two women; others read a friendship in the language of the time. This museum does not settle that argument. What it can say, from the paper itself, is that somebody thought the name was worth removing.

Fields and Jewett: the letters that were cut

Annie Adams Fields and the writer Sarah Orne Jewett were companions; the archival description of the photograph below calls Jewett Fields's "companion." When they were apart, the Sarah Orne Jewett House says, "Jewett wrote to Fields nearly every day." Corroborated

After Jewett died, Fields edited Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1911. Verified The letters were, in the words of the PBS history series Out of the Past, "full of intimate endearments," and Fields's editor "insisted that readers might 'get the wrong idea.'" Passages were left out. Corroborated

Reference works name that editor as Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe. We have not read that reference ourselves, and we have not found his own words. So the cut is documented, and the reason given for it is documented second-hand, but the conversation itself is not. The editor's exact words: unknown

Sources: Dickinson Electronic Archives, Dickinson Editing Collective (2013), "Do you want to hear from me, Austin" (A 608, JL 128), emilydickinson.org; "Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters," archive.emilydickinson.org, unsigned essay by the editors of Open Me Carefully; Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Annie Fields (Houghton Mifflin, 1911), HathiTrust; PBS, Out of the Past, "Sarah Orne Jewett"; Sarah Orne Jewett House, jewett.house; Robert L. Gale, A Sarah Orne Jewett Companion (1999), p. 98, as cited by others and not read by us; Wikimedia Commons file description for the photograph.

Chapter II

Plymouth Colony, 6 March 1648/9

The court wrote it down

Some of the oldest LGBTQ+ records in this country were written by the people prosecuting them. Those records were written to punish. Some of them are now the only proof that those lives happened.

This is the earliest known prosecution of two women for a same-sex act in what is now the United States. Corroborated The Long Fight tells what happened next: Mary Hammon was fifteen and recently married, and at the General Court of 2 October 1650, Sarah Norman was ordered to make a public acknowledgment of her "vnchast behauior." No whipping, no branding, no death.

Look at the margin of the printed page. The clerk wrote her name twice, once as Hammon and once as Hamon, and beside the entry he recorded the outcome for the younger woman: "Mary Hamon cleared with admonision." The same page, a few lines down, presents the way wardens of Taunton for neglecting to mend the highways. Verified, from the page Taunton and Dartmouth were Plymouth Colony towns, so the court that judged two women from Yarmouth was the South Coast's court too. Corroborated

Follow the paper. A colonial clerk wrote the entry to shame two women. The book survived. It was printed in 1855. The Boston Public Library scanned it and gave the scan to the public. That chain, and no other, is how Sarah Norman and Mary Hammon reached you. Nobody in it was trying to save them.

Sources: Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vol. 2 (Boston, 1855), pp. 137 and 163, Internet Archive item recordsofcolonyo0102newp, contributed by the Boston Public Library; the museum's exhibit No. XVIII, The Long Fight, "1649: Yarmouth, and the first two women," for the 1650 sentence, Mary Hammon's age, and the "earliest known" description, with that exhibit's sources.

Chapter III

New York, 1974 · Boston, 1980

The first community archives

In the 1970s, LGBTQ+ people stopped waiting for courts and families to decide what would be kept, and started keeping it themselves, sometimes in their own homes.

The Boston name change is the part of this story we did not expect. The organization says its founders were advised that the words "Gay and Lesbian" in its title "could jeopardize our nonprofit status," "so the safer, quieter choice was made." Verified

So for forty-five years, the archive that kept Boston's LGBTQ+ history kept it under a name that did not say so. That is not the eraser of Chapter I, but it is a quieter relative of it, at work on the very people trying to save the record.

How much it holds depends on who is counting. Its own site says "over 200 archival collections." Its executive director told The Progressive in June 2026 that it holds "more than 250 collections." We print both. Collection count: two figures

The History Project also mounted an exhibition at the Boston Public Library, Public Faces/Private Lives, which Mass History Commons says "drew tens of thousands of visitors." Corroborated We could not find the year on any page we opened. Year: unknown

Sources: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, "Lesbian Herstory Archives," nyclgbtsites.org; OutHistory, "Fifty Years of Jonathan Ned Katz," on Gay American History (1976); Queer History Boston, "About" and "Queer History Boston" (news, September 9); Mass History Commons, entry on The History Project; Improper Bostonians (Beacon Press, 1998), library catalog records; Michaela Brant, The Progressive, June 25, 2026.

Chapter IV

Mehlville High School, Missouri, 1994

One teacher, 1994

LGBTQ+ History Month exists because one history teacher decided that his own subject had left people out, and said so in front of his class.

In 1994, Rodney Wilson was teaching history at Mehlville High School, outside St. Louis. During a lesson on the badges the Nazis forced camp prisoners to wear, he told his students that he would have been made to wear the pink triangle, and he became the first openly gay K-12 teacher in Missouri. That same year he proposed a month for lesbian and gay history. Verified

He chose October because it fit the school calendar, because the 1979 and 1987 marches on Washington had both been held in October, and because National Coming Out Day, first held in 1988, falls in it. According to KCUR in Kansas City, 20 countries now have similar months. Verified

The Missouri Historical Society holds his Mehlville High School name tag. Its record says he wore it from 1995 to 1997, so it is a tag from the years after he came out, not the day itself. Verified Dated with care

Notice what kind of act this was. Wilson did not find a lost document. He added a page to the calendar, so that every October a teacher, a librarian or a student has a reason to ask what was left out. The South Coast LGBTQ+ Network's History Month blog post tells his story for the Network's readers: History Month started with one teacher.

Sources: Miya Norfleet, "A Missouri teacher founded LGBT History Month 30 years ago. It's now in 20 countries," KCUR, October 9, 2024; Missouri Historical Society, object 2022-093-0002, via the Digital Public Library of America; PBS NewsHour, October 2024, as a second account, not opened by us.

Chapter V

New Bedford · Fall River · Taunton

The South Coast: what survived, and how

This museum's South Coast exhibits rest on a handful of surviving records, and on people. Here is each one, and the thing it rests on.

Lay those four rows beside the first four chapters and the same pattern shows. A newspaper story kept one bar's history. A filmmaker kept the record of an attack. The Commonwealth kept its own votes. And where nobody wrote anything down, as with the people this region lost to AIDS, nothing survived but memory.

Sources: this museum's exhibits 20 Kenyon Street, Puzzles, 2006, AIDS on the South Coast and Seven Couples, each read October 16, 2026, and the sources listed in each.

Chapter VI

Why this museum exists

Every chapter before this one comes down to the same question: who had the pen. This museum is the South Coast LGBTQ+ Network picking it up.

The rest of this exhibit is about strangers: a clerk in 1649, an unknown person with an eraser, a cautious editor, volunteers in Boston. The South Coast's chapter is still being written, and much of it is in people's closets, drawers and photo albums.

Chapter VII

How we know, and what is missing

An exhibit about who wrote history down has to show its own paper. Here is what we could not settle, and where our record is thin.

Care we took with the popular record

• Rodney Wilson's museum name tag is not from 1994 Dated with care

  The Missouri Historical Society dates it 1995 to 1997, so it should not be shown as an object from the year he came out.

• We do not name who erased Sue's name Held back

  Suspicion is not evidence, and no source we read establishes it.

• The 1649 record spells Mary Hammon two ways From the page

  Hammon in the entry, Hamon in the margin. We use the entry's spelling, as The Long Fight does.

Facts we did not resolve, and did not hide

• Who erased Sue's name from Emily Dickinson's letter, and when Unknown

  The erasure is documented. The person is not.

• What Annie Fields's editor actually said Unknown

  Reported second-hand by PBS. The editor is named as M. A. DeWolfe Howe in a 1999 reference work we have not read.

• The year of Public Faces/Private Lives at the Boston Public Library Unknown

  Another exhibit in this museum, PRISM, used to give 1996 and "over 50,000 visitors." We found no page that supports either, so PRISM now says "tens of thousands," as Mass History Commons does, and gives no year until we find one.

• How many collections Queer History Boston holds Two figures

  "Over 200" on its own site; "more than 250" in The Progressive, June 2026.

• Whether the City of Boston gave The History Project an early grant Not confirmed

  A 2010 Boston Globe story is cited elsewhere for a small city grant. We have not read it, so the grant is not in this exhibit.

• The South Coast's first marriage licenses, May 2004 Unread

  On microfilm in New Bedford, Fall River and Taunton. Someone has to go and read them.

• The South Coast's AIDS dead, by name and number Unknown

  No record we have found holds them.

• 20 Kenyon Street's founding date and the fire Thin

  Both rest on one newspaper feature and on the memory of a living co-founder.

Where our own record is thin

Three trips would improve this exhibit. The microfilm reading rooms of the New Bedford, Fall River and Taunton public libraries, for the licenses of May 2004. Queer History Boston's collections, which may hold South Coast newsletters and flyers that nobody has looked for. And the published correspondence of Emily and Susan Dickinson, for the editors' full account of the erasures, which we read only in summary.

This exhibit holds three images, and each carries a license we read on its source page. The 1855 court record is a public domain scan from the Boston Public Library, cropped and toned for the hero and Chapter II in Krita. The photograph of Fields and Jewett is from a 1922 book and is in the public domain. The photograph of Rodney Wilson is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0, with credit to its photographer. The timeline in Chapter 0 was drawn for this exhibit in Inkscape and keeps every word as real text.

Method: research on October 16, 2026, reading primary pages wherever they could be opened, quoting verbatim, and tagging each fact as verified, corroborated, or unknown. Facts already established in this museum's own exhibits were taken from those exhibits and linked rather than researched again. Every unresolved question is listed above so that someone can resolve it.