This is LGBT History Month, and its very name signifies a story worth telling, as this community is still finding itself and still forming. Are we a gay community? An LGBT community? A GLBT community? There’s not just a story to the label we use, but also to how we got to that label.
PGN’s LGBT National History Month Project, undertaken in coordination with local LGBT media like Washington Blade, San Francisco’s Bar Area Reporter and Chicago’s Windy City Times, among others, deals not only with the label we use for a community, but the people who helped create a community where there was none.
This month’s project starts out with the Revolutionary War in 1778, when a man who would be labeled as gay today saved the Continental Army from defeat, helped create West Point and the Naval Academy at Annapolis and started the first U.S. veterans organization — and it could easily be stated he was the first case of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Another piece chronicles the first registered “gay” organization in America, which had its roots in Chicago. We will also learn about the first openly transgender student at Harvard University.
Most people are bored by history, and when we started this project almost nine years ago we thought that it would not be great for circulation, but instead would be a public service for future use — when LGBT history is as popular as black history became in the height of that community’s struggle for civil rights. Unfortunately, I personally feel that we haven’t reached a time yet when our own community cares or relates to our rich history, which gives me great pride in local professional LGBT media who give their time and space in full knowledge that good journalism about our history will find its place. An old adage goes, If we don’t learn from our past, we’re doomed to repeat it.
This project has become a labor of love for me. My piece on Baron von Steuben — without whom there would be no United States of America — was a fantastic voyage and treasure hunt for information. Today that research is becoming a little easier with the digitization of historic papers and artifacts. And yes, we have two features on the subject of digitization as well.
History is still happening every day and, through this project, we hope you’ll want to become a part of our mutual history.
Mark Segal, PGN publisher, is the nation’s most-award-winning commentator in LGBT media. He can be reached at [email protected].