A Newsweek cover forty years ago declared a “video generation,” with young and old and black and white Americans eager to record birthdays, weddings, and other significant events in their lives. There is no identifiable LGBTQ person included on that cover, but queer people in the 1980s were as eager as everyone else to document…
Precious Names and Places: The Central West End and LGBTQ+ St. Louis
For as long as I can remember, grounding myself in history has provided steady footing. Even an evening at a new restaurant requires a quick Google search to learn the who, what, when, where, and why of the establishment’s history. In the period between 1990 and 1997 when I lived in St. Louis (South County,…
Flowing: “A Kick-Ass Activist”
I met Flowing Johnson in 1994 through the St. Louis chapter of the (then-called) Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network (GLSTN), which I started that summer. She and I were teachers – community college math for her and high school social studies for me. In her mid-50s at the time, Flowing had long ago developed…
Thirty Years Ago: AMC’s Michael Delaney Pointed to a Pink Triangle
When my mother worked at the hometown Walmart when I was a boy in the 1970s, one rule was chiseled in granite: “Do not call me at work, ever — unless the house is on fire or somebody’s dying!” Mom practiced what she preached, so it was a shock thirty years ago this month when…
Coming to Left Bank Books: Poet and Activist Steven Reigns
Former St. Louisan Steven Reigns (he graduated from Parkway South in 1994), now an LA-based poet and activist, is not afraid of spending time with life’s unavoidable finale – death. He founded the Gay Rub Project in 2011, a collection of rubbings of LGBTQ+ historical markers and monuments, including many gravestones. The Gay Rub Project…
A “Quieter History”: Katie Batza’s AIDS in the Heartland
University of Kansas women’s, gender, and sexuality studies professor Katie Batza claimed some of the terrain of research into LGBTQ healthcare infrastructures and socio-medical responses to LGBTQ patients with her 2018 book Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She’s annexed more of the territory of health…
Supporting Our Supporters: The Missouri Historical Society and LGBTQ+ History
In 1994, the editor of the quarterly magazine of the Missouri Historical Society (MHS), then called Gateway Heritage, had to push hard to bring to publication an article I had written about Rev. Carol Cureton, the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis, and the impact the twenty-seven-year-old out lesbian and the nascent “homosexual church”…
St. Louis LGBTQ History: MCC, Our World Too, Magnolia’s, and John D’Emilio
By Rodney Wilson I live in the past as much as I live in the present, and often I’m more comfortable in an imaginary conversation with the dead than when engaging with the living. In visiting the physical spaces that once sheltered people, dreams, movements, and institutions, I exchange the imagined, or the only read…
Laurence Luckinbill Is a Straight Man Who Helped Make Gay History
The first series of events organized in October 1994 for the inaugural LGBTQ+ History Month was a film festival on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where I was completing a graduate degree in history. Ten films were screened on four successive Monday nights: October 3, 10, 17 and 24. Among the selections…