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” she founded had on a burgeoning 1970s LGBTQ+ community in St. Louis. Editor Martha Kohl delicately shepherded the article forward amid uncertainty that it would even appear in the Fall 1994 issue– a concern that remained until the moment ink was pressed into paper.
The article began as a research project in a graduate class at the University of Missouri-St. Louis called Social Movements of the 1960s. Professor Gerda Ray championed the topic and the research – and when concerns were raised about publishing the paper in Gateway Heritage she even promised to bring two new members to the Missouri Historical Society for each cancelled membership that cited the article as the reason. When the issue came off the press and arrived in mailboxes across Missouri, it proved some MHS leadership had been overly concerned. There were only a couple of membership cancellations. (Martha Kohl recalls at least one, perhaps as
many as three).
The absence of negative fallout thirty years ago was a tiny nudge along MHS’s path to the present, and these days the Missouri Historical Society warmly and enthusiastically embraces all of St. Louis – and all its subdivisional communities, including LGBTQ+. The 6,000 square feet of precious gallery space designated for the current Gateway to Pride exhibit is proof. So, too, the Steven Louis Brawley Endowment Fund, for collecting and preserving LGBTQ+ history. A Fall 2024 Gateway article about the St. Louis homophile movement post-WW2 to 1969, written by Saint Louis University graduate student Joe Lampe, is further corroboration of support for our community’s history. And if all of this weren’t evidence enough, the Spring 2025 Gateway
includes two LGBTQ-specific essays.
The first article (“’Above Reproach Morally’: A Trans St. Louisan in the Early 1900s”) is a twelve-page account of a person assigned female at birth in the 1880s who lived and worked and dated and dressed and wrestled according to early twentieth-century gender expectations for those at birth assigned male. His arrest by the St. Louis police brought discovery, followed by a media frenzy, including a full front-page story in the Sunday, February, 21, 1909, Post-Dispatch. With the Gateway article, Willie Winters’ story is fleshed out through the interpretive lens of 2025, and this important piece about him will forever preserve the 115-year-old example of a heroic fight for the inalienable human right to live authentically.
After reading the article about Mr. Winters, I continued flipping pages until – utterly surprised, for I had no idea the article was being written – I saw my own 29-year-old face in an eight-page spread of primary documents and analysis about the founding of LGBTQ+ History Month in 1994 (“‘History Is on Our Side’: Rodney Wilson’s Fight for LGBT History Month”). A second surprise was the name of the writer, Gateway editor Kristie Lein. Surprising because I knew Kristie Lein as Kristie McClanahan when she was a fourteen-year-old first-year Mehlville High School student in my 1993-94 civics class, which happens to be the precise timeframe the earlier Gateway editor was preparing to publish the first article on LGBTQ+ history ever to appear in a
periodical of the Missouri Historical Society.
This was more than a full-circle moment for me. It was a visible culmination of the inspiring process MHS long ago completed, from gingerly touching LGBTQ+ history in 1994 to today’s stalwart embrace of LGBTQ+ history and people, as full members of the St. Louis community, with compelling stories to tell. There is no doubt that MHS supports the LGBTQ+ community. We, members of that community, especially now, must return that support, so…
If anyone reading this essay is not a member of the Missouri Historical Society, please click on this link and join (I just renewed my own $75 Historian-level membership.) Among the benefits of membership is a subscription to the next four quarterly issues of Gateway magazine. The current issue – with two LGBTQ articles! – is available for sale at the Sold on St. Louis Missouri History Museum gift shop – so buy it there, visit a few exhibits, including Gateway to Pride (which closes on July 6), the magnificent 1904 World’s Fair exhibit, and the new gallery space called Collected. And if a reader of this essay hasn’t yet given to the Steven Louis Brawley Endowment Fund, please do. (I just gave another $50 the morning I wrote this essay).
It was a herculean struggle in 1994 to see the first LGBTQ+ history published in Gateway Heritage. It’s no longer a struggle. It’s the norm. History, however, reminds us that every win can be lost, backsliding can happen, socio-political environments do go rancid, and authoritarians are always at the door. We sustain and advance our gains by actively supporting our supporters. Unquestionably, this includes the Missouri Historical Society. Not a member? Please join. Right here.
Rodney Wilson has been an educator since 1990; he founded LGBTQ+ History Month in 1994 and co-founded the International Committee on LGBTQ+ History Months (ICoHM) in 2021. He is the subject of the documentary short Taboo Teaching, available here.
