The Fourth Annual Shepherd Express LGBTQ Progress Awards presentation ceremony takes place this week. Founded to recognize our community’s pioneers and early activists, the award’s significance is in part that it is conferred by a non-LGBTQ entity. The Shepherd Express has always been a media voice for social justice. But, by instituting this award, it took an additional step in bringing greater public awareness and recognition to those who influenced Milwaukee’s progress towards LGBTQ equality.
I am honored to be a part of the process of nominating and selecting the awardees. The criteria of each award may include long-term, selfless dedication to the cause of LGBTQ rights and personal actions that have added to the momentum of LGBTQ progress. Many past recipients are unsung heroes and heroines whose contributions have not been previously acknowledged. These individuals tenaciously pursued their activism, usually as volunteers, simply as a matter of a deeply held moral principle. For these men, women and organizations, fighting for our collective rights was an instinctive response to social injustice. All had their particular role. Some were engaged in the struggle politically or through their philanthropy, others through the arts, health services and education, while still others, some almost inadvertently, through sports and entertainment. However they manifested their activism, they made an impact, inspiring others to overcome fear, accept themselves and believe in their own inalienable rights.
Two years before Stonewall, in 1967, NAACP leader and Milwaukee state Rep. Lloyd Barbee introduced legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in Wisconsin. While unsuccessful, he cracked the glass ceiling of discrimination that, years later, others would successfully shatter. In 1971, nearly half a century before marriage equality, Donna Burkett and her partner, Manonia Evans, shocked city hall when they applied to the Milwaukee county clerk for a marriage license. As a board member of Milwaukee’s only official LGBTQ organization at the time, the Gay People’s Union, Si Smits publicly outed himself in 1973 on local TV, appearing in a segment called “Some Call Them Gay.” Among other accomplishments, he would go on to create a philanthropic foundation, the G/L Community Fund.
Business owners are also among those feted. These are not simply LGBTQ people who happened to operate a successful commercial enterprise. Rather they focused on serving their community. Bob Schmidt opened the famous M&M Club in 1976. It served not only as a popular bar but also as a veritable community center. Even more importantly, Schmidt’s removal of the wooden shutters from the bar’s floor-to-ceiling windows helped remove the stigma of being gay and hidden. Carl Szatmary, owner of Outwords Books (it just celebrated its silver anniversary), remains one of the few remaining private purveyors of LGBTQ literature. He also created the Milwaukee LGBT Film/Video Festival.
Joe Pabst and Jack Smith received their awards for philanthropy. Without their financial support the city would have no LGBTQ infrastructure. Tina Owen-Moore established the Alliance School as an MPS charter school for bullied LGBTQ-identified kids.
The other winners are too numerous to mention here. All of them, along with this year’s slate of eight awardees that includes veterans and, for the first time, younger activists, deserve our thanks and appreciation for their service in achieving the fragile rights we enjoy, and often take for granted, today.
