Photo credit: Benson Kua
Every year, Black History Month presents an opportunity for the LGBTQ community to recognize a slate of African American personalities, gay and straight, who have contributed to the advancement of our civil rights. There are many in all professions whose names should be familiar and whose legacies should be part of our general education.
To name just a few, there’s Bayard Rustin, advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. and chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and blues singer Bessie Smith. There is also artist Jean-Michel Basquiat: In 2017, one of his paintings set a record for the highest price paid ($110 million) for a work by an American artist. And there are the many living individuals in all walks of public life whose declarations of their LGBTQ identity add to the pantheon of inspiration for all of us, especially our youth struggling with coming out and acceptance.
Of course, locally, we have Wisconsin lawmaker and leading civil rights activist Lloyd Barbee. Barbee is often overshadowed by the successful lobbying by state Assembly member David Clarenbach, whose efforts managed to pass the nation’s first gay rights law in 1982, but it was Lloyd Barbee who, well over a decade prior, laid the groundwork for that historic legislation. Over the course of his tenure as a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly, he proposed numerous civil rights-related bills, including one to decriminalize homosexuality and, in 1969 (!), one to legalize same-sex marriage. Although his efforts were not always successful, they brought LGBTQ rights to the forefront of the greater discussion of civil rights.
Interestingly, while a proposal to have Clarenbach’s Madison home designated as a state landmark garnered press and community buzz, last year in May, without any fanfare at all, Lloyd Barbee’s Milwaukee house on East Meinecke Avenue was added to the National Register of Historic Places. I only stumbled on the fact while recently researching Barbee. I thought I must have missed the news at the time, but try as I might, my online searches regarding that honorable designation produced no local media coverage. An inadvertent sin of omission, perhaps, or maybe our local news outlets simply did not find the story newsworthy.
Expanding the Educational Landscape
Hopefully, the Barbee House will become part of the educational landscape for Milwaukee’s black, LGBTQ and general populations. Its location in relative proximity to the Black Holocaust Museum would make it a perfect satellite location for meetings and other learning projects.
Elsewhere, Milwaukee’s LGBTQ Black History is barely documented. Many of those people of color who were active in Milwaukee’s nascent gay scene are gone, and their stories have been lost. The city’s black-owned gay and lesbian bars are now fading memories. There were few to begin with.
Then, there’s the matter of actually teaching black LGBTQ history to the current Millennial generation that is otherwise busy with negotiating its daily lives. In a recent conversation I had with Diverse & Resilient’s executive director Gerry Coon, he admitted watching young people’s eyes “glaze over” whenever the subject of history arose. Still, while that task may seem daunting, if the attendance of younger participants at the recent 2020 Healthy Families Healthy Communities Conference is any indication, engaged young people are themselves making their own history, and, one day, we’ll be writing about it.
