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October is both LGBTQ History Month and Coming Out Month. The coincidental dual celebrations are intricately interconnected. “Coming Out” is the culmination of the process of LGBTQs accepting their identity. It’s something like a personal debutant moment or Quinceañera. For the neophyte accepting and embracing their identity it is moment of great relief and, hopefully for most, continued growth as an individual. Part of that growth may be in learning their history.
Exploring local LGBTQ history is easier today than it was during the days of the nascent liberation movement of the 1960s. In fact, it would take nearly three decades after the Stonewall Uprising for any concerted effort to preserve our local history to take place. It was in the mid-1990s when both the Milwaukee LGBT History Project and the LGBTQ+ Archive at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s Golda Meier Library were established as resources for the documentation of local LGBTQ history.
Community activist Don Schwamb created the History Project. It began with a display of biographical posters featuring elder LGBTQ leaders. The posters, along with an interactive printed timeline and other material would be displayed each year at PrideFest and at other venues in the city.
Special Collections
Around the same time, the UWM Golda Meier Library LGBTQ+ Archive and Special Collections became a publicly accessible repository for primary source material related to the Milwaukee queer community. It assembled papers, manuscripts files and other documents related to the local liberation and civil rights movements, lesbian feminism, queer culture, community and organizations. These include collections from leading Milwaukee activist Eldon Murray and the Gay People’s Union. The archive continues to collect personal and organizational papers and documents, relying on donations to expand its catalog. The Special Collections section of the archive contains LGBTQ newspapers, newsletters and other print media.
In 2003, Schwamb created a History Project website, wisconsingayhistory.org. The ambitious undertaking divides the historical record into major categories: People, Organizations, Businesses, Media and Events. Each category contains further subsections. Recently, thanks in part to subsidies by Milwaukee Pride, Inc., the History Project updated the website and made Milwaukee’s decades of LGBTQ print media available online.
Established in 2014, an interactive social media page, The History of Gay Wisconsin, encourages its 1400 members to post personal memories, lore and photos. It provides means for participants to share details of the past as well as be reminded of some local history that may otherwise be lost.
Unfortunately, save for these resources, few individual organizations have maintained historical information. The Saturday Softball Beer League’s website does have a history section but it ends in 2002.
Spate of New Books
While the UWM LGBTQ+ Archive holds a large collection of academic papers and articles on a broad range of relevant subjects, there has been a dearth of actual history books. However, in recent years, a spate of them has been published. In 2016, Michail Takach published Images of America: LGBT Milwaukee, an exhaustive look at the city’s bar scene presented in over 150 captioned photos. Madison LGBTQ activist R. Richard Wagner authored a two volume Wisconsin LGBTQ history. The first, We’ve Been Here All Along, chronicles the years 1895-1969; the second, Coming Out, Moving Forward, covers the post-Stonewall era to the present.
The most recent addition to the library, We Will Always Be Here by Jennifer Kalvaitis and Kristen Whitson, appeared this June. It is a unique contribution to our history in print. Designed and written with teen input for a teen demographic, the authors left it to teen review panelists to select the stories included. Many had never heard of even the HIV/AIDS pandemic and barely were aware of Stonewall.
Takach’s book on Milwaukee’s drag scene is anticipated to be published in the near future.
A darker side of Milwaukee’s LGBTQ history is the Jeffrey Dahmer story. While a slew of Dahmer books and documentaries exist, they largely focus on the sensationalism of his crimes. An academic study entitled The Sniper: A Cultural Reading of Jeffrey Dahmer by UW-Parkside Professor Josef Benson, appears next year.
Personal collections still exist but their future is precarious. LGBTQ elders wonder what will become of their memorabilia, papers and photos. Often packed away in basements and attics, they are susceptible to the elements and degrading. Large amounts of material have already been lost. In the worst days of the AIDS pandemic, relatives of those who died of the disease often deliberately destroyed any hints of their sexual orientation. Sometimes the loss is circumstantial. Back in the early 2000s, a disgruntled board member of a major LGBTQ organization took out her frustrations by throwing boxes of the organization’s files and historical memorabilia into a dumpster. Mercifully, it was discovered and rescued by a community member.
The logical recommendation is to donate material to the UWM Archive. However, it only accepts documents. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no repository for objects, so-called material history. It is a need to be address.
Although no history book or archive can be comprehensive, Milwaukee is fortunate to have the foundation for continuing study and documentation of its LGBTQ historical record. While continuing the work to fill in the gaps, we must avoid certain risks: there’s the historian’s bane of “knowing more and more about less and less” that occurs when study is so narrowly focused that while we learn every detail about one subject, we neglect important aspects of the bigger picture. Another consideration is objectivity. Admittedly, even professional historians can let their emotions or political opinions taint the narrative, but hobby historians are especially susceptible to it. Ultimately, facts, not histrionics, must prevail.
History is a tool intended to teach future generations. Its importance for LGBTQ people whose past, as recent as it is, forms their present identity, cannot be underestimated.
