The Radical Possibilities of Queer History
Welcome to LGBTQ History Month, a commemoration that began in 1994 thanks in large part to the efforts of a 29-year-old Missouri high school teacher named Rodney Wilson. (Wilson remains a prolific writer about queer history; you’ll find in the bibliography below an article he published just today about the origins of LGBTQ+ History Month.) October is also the month for National Coming Out Day, an overlap that is somewhat coincidental, giving the timing of other history months, but also a reflection of the connection between coming out and preserving LGBTQ+ history. (National Coming Out Day started several years before LGBTQ+ history month, in 1988.)
Supporters explain that acknowledging the existence of queer people in the past can help young people learn about differences and, for some, find role models for their own coming out journeys. Opponents meanwhile warn that the simple presence of openly gay or lesbian teachers in classrooms or of LGBTQ-themed books in libraries are like queer Kryptonite, the mere presence of which disables the hetero powers of the super straight. These debates pivot on two fundamentally different understandings of human sexuality: one that views sexuality as a core component of human identity, a distinct and uniquely significant aspect of what makes a person who they are; and the other that argues that sexual behaviors are choices that can and should reflect moral (religious) teachings. Adherents to this latter view, which insists that sexuality is a learned behavior, are therefore susceptible to worrying that queer people can easily “recruit” or teach others to follow their supposedly deviant ways.
[Note on language: in 1995, supporters announced the celebration of Gay and Lesbian History Month. Within a few years, they renamed it LGBT History Month. Today, in line with a more expansive understanding of queer identity, many supporters call it LGBTQ+ History Month.]
Missouri’s First Openly Gay Public School Teacher
The idea for LGBTQ+ History Month emerged from Wilson’s experiences as a teacher. Earlier that year, he had visited the recently opened United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he purchased a poster that displayed the symbols that the Nazis had made certain groups wear on their sleeves—including both the yellow star for Jews and the pink triangle for homosexuals. Wilson explained to his students at Mehlville High School, in the St. Louis suburbs, that had he lived in Germany at the time, he would have had to wear the pink triangle because he is a gay person. With those words, he became the first openly gay teacher in the state.
Wilson knew that he had taken a professional risk. Just the year before, about 15 parents gathered in front of the Kansas City School District offices and burned a copy of Annie on My Mind, a book by Nancy Garden with a lesbian main character, to protest the presence of gay- and lesbian-themed books in local high school libraries. Regina Dinwiddie, one of the protestors, shouted into a bullhorn, “They [homosexuals] are here to seduce your son and recruit young men and women into the the gay and lesbian lifestyle.” A parent explained that she and her husband objected to “teaching homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.” {It’s probably obvious but might bear mentioning: none of these books tried to recruit anyone or “teach” homosexuality. It’s a sexual identity, not algebra.]
The school district administration initially told Wilson that he had displayed “inappropriate classroom conduct” when he told his students he was gay. Wilson sent back 28 pages of questions: If he’d said he was Polish or Jewish, would that have been inappropriate conduct too? District administrators backed off, but outrage continued that summer at school board meetings, where parents used the public comment time to demand that teachers avoid any discussion of LGBTQ+ topics in their classrooms.
Wilson’s coming out made local and national news; Dateline did a story about him and his students. Like the parents and activists who complained about Annie on My Mind, others now warned that Wilson would “recruit” his students into a gay “lifestyle.” “We have nothing against him being gay,” one parent, Debbie Povich, said. “We just don’t want him to teach it to our kids.” Other sorts of teachable moments were at stake, though. Wilson later said that he had worried that if he’d been fired students would have learned “this is what happens to gay people who tell the truth.” But Wilson’s job remained secure. In April 1995, the school board granted him tenure.
Creating Gay and Lesbian (later, LGBT and LGBTQ+) History Month
Eager to reach more teachers and students, Wilson created an advisory committee of scholars and activists who proposed the designation of an LGBT History Month. Wilson explained that “the idea of the month is to eliminate censorship of the contributions that gays and lesbians have made to history.” He wanted his students to know that the Nazis targeted homosexuals along with other minorities, that the 1960s social revolutions included the gay liberation movement, and that famous Americans like Audre Lorde, Bayard Rustin, Martina Navratilova, and Tennessee Williams were gay. Gay and lesbian organizations soon endorsed the idea—as many as 100 of them within a year. Wilson’s group also took the idea to the National Education Association (NEA), a teachers’ union, which passed a resolution in the summer of 1995 supporting it.
The prospect of teaching high school students about the existence of lesbian and gay people struck some conservatives as terrifying stuff. On the House floor, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) shouted that “parents should scream bloody murder at the first sign of a school in their district” adopting LGBT history into their curricula.
Concerned Women for America, a large membership organization founded in 1979 by an evangelical Christian conservative named Beverly LaHaye (whose husband was the conservative evangelical activist and apocalyptic novelist Tim LaHaye), also opposed Wilson’s idea. By the mid-1990s, CWA had moved on from battling the by-then defunct Equal Rights Amendment to focus on opposing abortion and gay rights. For these women, feminism was the tip of the spear in what they viewed as a dangerous assault on the “traditional family.” According to the organization’s website, Beverly LaHaye had decided to start an organization for conservative Christian women after watching a Barbara Walters interview with Betty Friedan, the founder of the feminist National Organization for Women. The explanation continues:
While watching, Mrs. LaHaye was convicted that she must speak on behalf of millions of women who were not being represented by the radical feminist philosophy. Friedan’s purpose, according to LaHaye, was to promote homosexuality, abortion on demand, and thoroughly “undermine the core of American culture: the family.”
[Another note on language: many evangelical Christians use “convicted” to mean “convinced” but with an added connotation of spiritual assurance.]
Religious conservatives like Burton and LaHaye were LGBT History Month’s fiercest antagonists. LaHaye warned that “this official observance of homosexuality” constituted a “direct assault on innocent, unsuspecting children.” Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition in Anaheim, California insisted that there was no historical basis for identifying any of these people as gay. “But true or false is not the issue,” he continued. “The issue is the rights of parents not to have this information shoved down their (children’s) throats without the parents’ knowledge.” Images of abuse—things shoved down throats, malicious seduction, duplicitous recruitment—animated these conservative religious messages.
Many school districts still refused to give students access to LGBTQ-themed books. In the fall of 1995, the St. Louis chapter of Gay, Lesbian and Straight Teachers Network (in which Wilson was active) sent a copy of Becoming Visible, an overview of gay history since premodern times, to all but two of Missouri’s school districts. (In response to an initial letter from the teachers’ group, those two districts declined the offer.) But none of the other schools put the book on their shelves. Supporters of LGBTQ+ rights countered that these books offered a lifeline to queer teens. Adam Rosen was a 17-year-old high school student at Parkway high school, who had come out as gay the year before. He and his father, Dean Rosen, spoke about the importance of making books like Becoming Visible available to teens. Dean Rosen credited the books at the St. Louis County Library for helping his son come out.
St. Louis mayor Freeman Bosley signed a proclamation recognizing LGBT History Month in 1995. Within a few years, groups like the Equality Forum, based in Philadelphia, had assumed the responsibility of promoting LGBT History Month. (Equality Forum hosts a website that features a different “LGBT History Month Icon” each day in October.) Other cities soon followed, and today it is celebrated in countries around the world.
LGBTQ+ History in American High Schools Today
Inclusion of LGBTQ+ history remains fraught in Missouri. The state has a record of opposing gay rights. More than 70% of Missouri voters approved a 2004 state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. According to the local PBS affiliate, in 2021, a teacher named John Wallis resigned from Neosho Junior High School, near the state’s western border, when school administrators asked him to remove a pride flag from his classroom. Also that year, employees at the Missouri State Museum removed a display from their exhibit hall about Kansas City’s LGBT History amid an outcry from conservatives who complained that the exhibit was “pushing the LGBT agenda.”
Other states have gone further. Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law forbidding the discussion of anything related to LGBTQ+ people provoked a national outcry, but similar laws passed in Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, and North Carolina. (A court settlement in March of this year allows Florida public school teachers to discuss gender identity and sexual orientation in their classrooms provided it is not part of the formal curriculum. I think this means that a teacher like Wilson might be able to tell his students that he is gay but not to teach them about the Nazis’ treatment of homosexuals.)
Seven other states—California, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, Nevada, New Jersey, and Washington—meanwhile require that K-12 curricula include LGBTQ-related instruction. In Delaware, the legislature in 2022 passed HCR 90, a concurrent resolution “encouraging the Department of Education to Identify Age-Appropriate Lessons for Students in Grades 7–12 Relating to LGBTQ+ History.” (Delaware similarly suggests, but does not require, that educators in the state incorporate Asian American history.)
Efforts to remove books from school and public libraries also continue. And this is where I think we need to pay attention: to deny LGBTQ+ history is to deny the existence of queer people today. The founding organizers of LGBTQ+ history month were glad that October didn’t conflict with Black or Women’s History months (or with late-spring curricular exhaustion), and they also appreciated the significance of overlapping with National Coming Out Day, which occurs on October 11. The idea of “coming out” originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a response to the profoundly antigay climate of the post-World War II United States, but it was always about more than self-identification or recognition. Coming out signified an opportunity to reveal the extent, diversity, and beauty of LGBTQ+ people. Activists created National Coming Out Day in 1988 as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis: perhaps if more straight Americans recognized how many of their own family members, friends, and coworkers were gay, more of them would agree that the government needed to devote significant resources to preventing the disease’s spread and treating people with AIDS.
History and recognition: these are political ideas. Someone who feels threatened by teachers who acknowledge the existence of a queer past or by books that honor the queer longings already present in many young people is acting upon an ideological, religious understanding of human nature. It is a worldview of people who perceive themselves as chronically under threat, battling a coercive brainwashing machine intent on turning their children into queer feminists who read critical race theory. They espouse a theology rooted in fear and animated by force. I agree wholeheartedly with Rodney Wilson about the importance of teaching LGBTQ+ history. It is not only more accurate than a history that omits queer people and their creations; it recognizes and affirms the existence of LGBTQ+ people today.
Sources
Butler, Brooke. “The St. Louis Teacher Who Founded LGBTQ+ History Month.” Living St. Louis. October 3, 2022. ninepbs.org/living-st-louis/.
Denny. “Meet Rodney Wilson, the gay teacher who championed National LGBTQ History Month.” Reckon. October 2, 2023. reckon.news.
Hart, Molly. “How One Missouri Teacher Founded LGBTQ+ History Month.” Nine PBS (St. Louis). October 4, 2023.
Kuang, Jeanne, Jonathan Shorman, and Daniel Desrochers. “Backlash to exhibit shows homophobia persists in MO politics.” Kansas City Star. September 2021.
Little, Joan. “Gay Teacher Wins Tenure: Had Support of Students, Principal, Mehlville School Board.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. April 19, 1995, B1.
Little, Joan. “Gay History Month Divides NEA, Women’s Group.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. September 22, 1995, B1, 4.
Little, Joan. “New Book On History of Gays Left Unshelved at Most Schools.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. November 23, 1995, D2.
Little, Joan and Phyllis Brasch Librach. “Homosexual Teacher Here is ‘Out,’ but Scores Stay Closeted.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. August 16, 1994, 1, 7.
Sanchez, Mary. “Books’ gay theme protested.” Kansas City Star. October 8, 1993, C1, 3.
Sanchez, Mary. “Gay history drive evokes pride, protest.” Kansas City Star. October 16, 1995, B1, 2.
Suntrup, Jack. “Exhibit removed from capitol: Display detailing gay history draws ire of GOP officials.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. September 3, 2021, A1, 3.
Taboo History: A Profile of Missouri Teacher Rodney Wilson (founder of LGBTQ History Month). Dir. by Dan Steadman. YouTube.
Wilson, Rodney. “LGBTQ+ History Month is celebrated around the world. It all started with one man and a dream.” LGBTQNation. October 1, 2024. lgbtqnation.com