SASSAFRAS LOWREY: When I was seventeen, the adults I lived with went through my bedroom and found the lesbian books I’d secretly checked out from my county library. I kept them stacked between my high school math and social studies textbooks. Just six months before, I’d run away from my mom’s house and among the items I brought with me were two gay books I’d secretly purchased from the bookstore at the mall. The adults I stayed with found those books, too, and read my journal. They called my school, had me paged to the office, and told me never to come back. I knew then that queer words were powerful.

Three days after I was kicked out, I was crashing on a friend’s couch. I had no idea where to go, or what was going to become of me. I went to my county library looking for answers. I looked at every book shelved under “homosexuality.”  I was searching for answers about what it meant to be young, queer, and on my own.  That day, I didn’t find any books that could help me. Sitting on the floor of that library, I made a promise to myself that if I survived, I would somehow find a way to write the kind of queer books that I was searching for.

Then last summer I got a message on Facebook from a reader and artist named Michelle Brennan. She and I had friends in common but had never met, never spoken. She had heard about my novel Roving Pack and read it after being diagnosed with cancer. While undergoing chemo she began an art project. Taking a shoebox and a little doll, she brought my novel to life, the way that as children in school we did “book in a box” book reports. She mailed it to me as a gift. Opening that box was overwhelming. As an author, I’m living the promise I made to myself as a homeless queer youth that someday I would write the kinds of stories that I needed. That I would write stories that I still need, which bring queer lives to life on the page. Receiving that diorama from Michelle was the ultimate confirmation that I’m doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Queer books aren’t just important for queer youth. Queer adults need queer books. We need to see our lives, desires, bodies, relationships reflected back at us in books.

When I received Michelle’s diorama in the mail, I was in awe and immediately posted pictures of it online. So many people got excited, and began talking about the power of queer books in their own lives, the books that had inspired them to come out, and the books that inspire them today. They talked about wanting to make art in honor of these books.

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HUGH RYAN: When I was nine, a teacher took Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire away from me because it was “inappropriate.” Perhaps so, but it was also the only book I’d ever found with queer characters, even if they were immortal, immoral vampires whose lives bore no resemblance to mine in the suburbs in the early 80s. Without it, I was reduced to looking up “homosexuality” in the card catalog of my small public school library. When all that got me were books on Greco-Roman art, I looked up “sex,” which left me piecing together an understanding of my desires from a book on feline reproduction.

Thankfully, within a few years I started working after school and in the summers, and began to buy, borrow, or steal any queer book I could get my hands on. I was lucky enough to come of age in a time when there were books available. But I’ll never forget that feeling of being alone, not just in my town, but seemingly throughout space and time—so alone that there wasn’t even a book to guide me.

When I founded the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, which is a nonprofit that helps local communities around the country develop art shows to illuminate LGBTQ history, I was primarily concerned with sharing knowledge, spreading those small bits of our history that are hard to find elsewhere. But I quickly came to realize that the act of sharing was, in and of itself, just as important as the information being shared. As adults, we rarely are given the chance to consume, analyze, and give back information on topics we love. That time is relegated (at best) to school, where queer people often don’t feel able to be open and honest. Without having the chance to look at and analyze our own culture, our own history, and the things that matter to us, we are left depending on the analyses of others, which have often portrayed queers and queerness in a negative light.

When Sassafras showed me Michelle’s diorama, I realized this was a powerful way to share important stories that resonated in queer lives, in a format that wouldn’t feel intimidating and was almost endlessly malleable. Together, Sassafras and I wrote a call inviting people to create a diorama based on a book that was meaningful to them in their development of their queer identity. The books could be anything—gay, straight, picture books, math textbooks – so long as the author could explain how it was important to them. After announcing the show, we received nearly 100 proposals from around the world‚—including Canada, South Africa, Ireland, and the Czech Republic—for dioramas that ranged from pocket-sized to life-sized, on everything from picture books to dense philosophy.

Had we not been limited by the space of the gallery, we would have included all of them! In the end, we chose proposals based on a number of criteria: the clarity of the connection between the book and the personal experience; the artistic vision presented (although not the exhibit maker’s artistic training, as we are open to individuals at all levels of skill and experience in art making); and the creation of a well-rounded final show. A few books were proposed so many times that we knew they needed to be included, such as Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde (unfortunately, the artist making this diorama had to drop out of the show at the last minute), Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, and The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Ann Bannon. The resulting exhibits explode what the form is or could be, and range from classic “book in a box” shoebox dioramas to translucent towers built on a lightbox.

It has been amazing to see the outpouring of inspiration expressed in the proposals we received, as well as the crucial institutional support from the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, the Lambda Literary Foundation, MIX NYC, and the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library! In our own small way, this show is a gift to the community and an offering to all other queers who like us stood before a card catalogue or library shelf looking for belonging.

Twenty-five years ago today, transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen died of bladder and lung cancer, which she believed was caused by genetics, not the fuck-ton of hormones that rocketed her to stardom as “America’s first transsexual” in the 1950s. In her honor, I made a pilgrimage to the one place I know that bares her name: the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, an intimate museum experience inside a Brooklyn duplex apartment. What’s a more fitting way to memorialize a transgender person, who always had issues with restrooms, than to give her a personal bathroom?

The facts of the matter: In 1952, a time before ultrasounds and the Polio vaccine, Jorgensen underwent multiple experimental operations to transition her body from male to female, all while under intense public scrutiny. Tons of journalists showed up at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to cover her return from Copenhagen, where the surgeries were performed. On December 1 1952, the cover of the New York Daily News blared, “EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY,” and an icon was born.

“Christine’s celebrity happened at a very particular time in US history,” said David Serlin, a Professor of Communications and Critical Gender Studies at UC San Diego and the creator of the CJMB. He pointed out, “There was this incredible enthusiasm for science,” and Jorgensen’s transformation was seen as a triumph of modern medicine. The public’s initial response, he said, was, “We are building rockets, we can cure illnesses, and we can take a boy from the Bronx and turn him into a glamorous woman!”

Glamorous is the right word. Standing in the CJMB, surrounded by dozens of portraits of Jorgensen, I was struck by the glam and the glitz, the furs and the crystals, the elegant eyebrows and the perfectly curled lips. The CJMB is a tiny space—maybe 80 square feet of sunshine-yellow tile—and every inch is covered in Jorgensen.

Serlin first became enamored with Jorgensen in 1992, while researching her for a grad class at NYU. Years before the days of Google Image Search, he rented photos from the Corbis Bettmann Archive to accompany his article—his first major academic success. He tacked the images he didn’t use to his bulletin board, where they became a personal talisman. (A few of them still grace the walls of the CJMB.) “Then I started to ask friends of mine about items,” he recalled, and eventually he discovered eBay. “Little by little, I amassed this archive.”

In the late 90s, cash-strapped queer community organizations around the country were digitizing their holdings and selling many original archival objects. Serlin told me that he feels complicated about the provenance of some of his items, but he recognizes that the collectibles were going to be sold regardless. Some objects, like a subway poster advertising a series of articles about Jorgensen in American Weekly magazine, are so ephemeral, it’s shocking they survived at all. Serlin estimates he has nearly 150 pieces of Jorgensen memorabilia and that he installed a third of his collection in the CJMB when he moved to Brooklyn in 2002.

It’s only once I was inside the CJMB, standing face-to-face-to-face-to-face with Jorgensen, that I began to understand the magnitude of her fame. Every major magazine, newspaper, and radio show covered her transition. Books were written about her, and she later wrote Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, which was translated into multiple languages and adapted into a movie in 1970. She also released Christine Jorgensen Reveals, an interview album where she discussed her life with Nipsey Russell, who conducted the interview under the name R. Russell. According to Newsday’s obituary, she reportedly made $12,500 a week performing in a stage show in Hollywood. Jorgensen was so famous that a young calypso musician named Louis “Calypso Gene” Wolcott recorded a song about her called “Is She Is or Is She Ain’t?” (Wolcott later changed his last name to Farrakhan and joined the Nation of Islam, but the song is on YouTube.)

This question of realness would end up being Jorgensen’s undoing, Serlin told me. Part of her celebrity had to with America’s love of science, but the rest had to do with how little anyone knew about sex reassignment surgeries. Her peers, even those in the nascent homophile movements of the 50s, had no context for gender transitioning. There was no T in the vague LGB movement, and the word transgender hadn’t even been coined yet. Of course, people with cross-gender desires have always existed, and a few earlier pioneers had also undergone experimental surgical gender reassignments, but they didn’t have a public face in America until Jorgensen, according to GLAAD.

Serlin speculates that at first most Americans “really thought Christine was menstruating and had eggs in her fallopian tubes.” But after six months, the press began to ask more probing questions about what her surgeries actually entailed. When they didn’t like the answers, the country “went ballistic.” Gender panic took over, said Serlin. “They said, ‘He’s not a woman. He’s just a neutered faggot.’” Reputable magazines like Time stopped using female pronouns for Jorgensen, and coverage of her took on a nasty, speculative air.

America didn’t have a huge problem with someone switching between two discreet and very separate sexes, but the suggestion of some middle ground, of a spectrum between male and female, made people fearful and angry. Jorgensen’s existence and acceptance as a woman implied that gender and the body were not necessarily connected, that gender was something one worked to create. If this were true, the sex-segregated ideals of post-war suburbia would have been out the window. In the eyes of the public, Jorgensen was no longer a man-made woman, but a gender terrorist in a blond bouffant.

Though haircuts have changed, America has viewed transgender people this way ever since. What fascinates me about Jorgensen—and what the CJMB, with its reverent air of mid-century majesty, captures perfectly—is the suggestion that it didn’t have to be this way. For six months, Americans decided not to be assholes about gender. Maybe we were too ignorant to act ignorantly, but for a brief moment we decided that it was possible to become a woman. Perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case if Jorgensen wasn’t pretty (couldn’t pass, as it were), or if she wasn’t white, ladylike, and well spoken—but she was, and America loved her. Sure, we’d set the bar on womanhood almost prohibitively high—expensive experimental surgeries, massive doses of hormones—but Jorgensen proved that the game itself wasn’t rigged the way it is now.

Standing inside the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, I saw America poised on the threshold of acceptance, and then watched us slink away, afraid to take the plunge. We’ve spent the last 60 years trying to paper over the hole Jorgensen smashed in our gender binary system, but inside the CJMB, it’s easy to imagine an America that went in another direction, where Jorgensen taught us that gender is what Americans make of it and that our bodies are not our destinies.

In the end, the CJMB isn’t only a monument to Christine Jorgensen, but also to the world that accepted her as she wanted to be seen. Visiting helps me remember that our awe came first and our hatred came after, that America stumbles towards every new thing like a delighted (but dangerous) toddler, and that our present moment is just another moment waiting to be changed.

As we unwind the bright red packing tape that joins the two coffee cans together, Hunter O’Hanian, the director of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, explains what I’m about to see.

“We think this is his only finished work,” he says, separating the cans to reveal a long scroll made of computer paper taped end to end. Black and white photocopies of twinks—whipped, gagged, crucified, tattooed, and tied—writhe across the pages, filling them almost to the margins. The image has no punctum, white space, or dominant figure to draw in the eye, allowing the viewer’s gaze to rest. Instead the eye skitters across the pages, noting a hard cock here and a flagellate there, without stopping on any particular moment.

Hunter isn’t sure if this is the artist’s only finished work for three reasons: The artist is dead, his partner—who asked that they both remain anonymous—donated the work, and the donation consists of 77 large cardboard boxes filled with gay porn, photomontages, pulp novels, mail-order sex-toy catalogs, books about Dracula, and images of opulent, but empty, rooms lacerated with careful slits to allow for the insertion of pornographic cut-outs.

A number of the boxes contained only carefully washed plastic clamshells (the kind that might hold a salad from a take-out Thai restaurant) filled with individual male figures meticulously excised from six decades of porn—the processed raw materials for the artist’s apocalyptic sex montages. Like the scroll in the can, each piece of paper has been carefully packed, as if the artist feared their rustling might hint at their true nature, their sexual shame. The line between fear and reverence is nonexistent here. These totemic boys are tools of artistic creation, but if discovered would mean destruction. The scroll itself is an act of mediation between these two poles, a spell cast in porn, simultaneously birthing and caging the artist’s secret desires.

To date, the museum has cataloged approximately two-thirds of this collection. Despite the detailed sheath of notebook pages that list the contents of each box, it’s a slow process because the closer you look the more you see. For instance, the centerfold of a 1950s physique magazine might hide a cut-out of a Saint Sebastian-esque ephebe in bondage. If you look closely at the image, you will notice that the figure’s tiny handcuffs have been transposed from another image and that his pentagram tattoo was added by hand. As the magnitude of detail hits you, you realize these 77 boxes contain a man’s lifework, his world, his everything—the story of an anonymous artist told through grainy reproductions of sexual torture.

Call it outsider art, intuitive art, art brut, or neuve invention; it is work made precisely at this intersection of art and obsession, pride and shame, sex and death, that has me scavenging through the museum’s archives. Jean Dubuffet, the 20th century painter and impresario of the insane who coined the term art brut, famously said, “Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it; it would sooner run away than say its own name.” How apropos to go looking for it amongst the love that dares not speak its name.

Intuitive artists tend to share traits from a grab bag of commonalities: obsessive tendencies, mental illness, repression, confinement, isolation, a lack of formal training, sexual hang-ups, a sense of persecution, religious or visionary zeal, a focus on the process of art-making rather than its outcome, a disconnect from cultural centers of power, and a belief in the importance of their own work that is separate from its salability or critical appreciation. The original outsider artist, in an American context, is Henry Darger, the orphaned, occasionally institutionalized recluse who spent more than sixty years creating his 15,000-page masterpiece The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is an ideal place to search for such artists. For the last 40 years, the museum and its founders, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman, have been dedicated to rescuing and preserving gay art. They’ve created a haven for art makers whose work was unappreciated during their time, whether because of their identity, the frankness of their homosexual work, or their mental instability.

I am fascinated by the delicate interplay between pride and shame in the lives of these men—their desire to be anonymous while simultaneously believing their art is important enough to dedicate their lives to it and ensure its preservation. (And so far all the intuitive artists I’ve found there are men. The museum now has a broader mission, but it began primarily as a collection of erotic male art, and the majority of its collection is focused on males.)

Much of the work could be considered survival art, rough pieces created in a hostile environment to make sense of the artists’ conflicting desires and unstable worldviews. Even when these men had formal training, they wanted to explore themes removed from what was speakable during their lifetimes. The insider art status was never available to them. Instead their art was an act of pure creation and dedicated to their own vision. Aside from the work that now sits in storage, little is known about most of these men.

Take, for example, Edward Hochschild. In 1995 three of Edward’s friends walked into the museum to see if someone could rescue Edward’s art shortly after he had died of AIDS-related causes. Wayne Snellen, the museum’s Deputy Director for Collections, recalled that his apartment was “trashed” when they arrived, but they were able to save three pieces: The Vial Cross, an approximately 5′ tall wooden cross studded with vials of hair, blood, pills, sand, and all kinds of ephemera and effluvia; a shirt made from Edward’s hair; and a large dildo studded with acupuncture needles, placed under a bell jar, and affixed to a smoke-detector base. Crudely made but powerfully evocative, the three pieces present an inarticulate meditation on sex, religion, illness, penance, and identity.

Then there is Joseph Friscia, a self-taught sculptor who lived with his mother. In the museum’s files, he has but a six-sentence biography, which notes “his sculpture was the result of a severe Catholic upbringing.” His first donation to the museum was The Church Has Its Way, which consisted of clay figurines of men in various states of religious torture. (One man pleasures himself with a crucifix, which is a sight I will never forget.) After disappearing for years, Joseph reappeared and told Wayne that his mother had died and he was “now free.” He gave the gallery new sculptures, man-beasts molded from the peach pink bodies of fetal mice, and never returned.

Joseph and Edward are emblematic of the outsider artist who is a reclusive creative working out personal anguish through art. The museum’s collection also includes Hokey Mokey, who has anonymously mailed art to the gallery every month for the past 15 years.

Here, the same dynamic of pride and shame is worked out in a more playful manner. Hokey’s work primarily consists of flat erotic montages placed inside envelopes. The art dares viewers to both open the envelopes and destroy their contents. Each packet is themed around some aspect of the month, like a holiday or a turn of season, and suggests an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world through pornographic art. Over the years, Hokey’s work has developed three-dimensional aspects, layering of colors and materials, and suggestions of an awareness of other collage makers, like artist Barbara Kruger. When finally tracked down, Hokey expressed no interest in having a show of his work or coming to the gallery. He had sent art to a few other people, but said the overwhelming majority of his work (nearly 200 packages to date) has gone to the museum.

Ted Titolo is another artist who has given all, or nearly all, of his work to the collection—a vast and stunning collection of art in a dozen mediums and a hundred styles. Of all the outsiders in the collection, Ted’s work is the most powerful. Deemed too gay for art school and too crazy for the army, he worked on Wall Street and dreamed of being a “fat lesbian,” according to Wayne. Ted’s compulsion to create is cataloged in reams of notebooks, sheaths of drawings, boxes of VHS tapes, and untold scores of photos.

Ted is often the subject of his own work, although his self-portraits tend to obscure or remove his face. Occasionally, the portraits go so far, they call for Ted’s own annihilation. (In their context, these self-destructive scratches might have more to do with Ted’s desire to obliterate his maleness than his self-hatred.) Much of his art is divided up into “projects,” such as Rasa, an epic collection of writing, drawing, and photography that nearly fills a dozen three-ring binders. Perhaps his most interesting work is American Kouros, an illustrated book created in the late 1960s, which details the “War Between the Monosexes and the Herms.” In this epic battle for humanity’s sexual and emotional future, Ted posits hermaphroditism as our only hope.

All but two of these men are dead or missing, and of those two, only one is in contact with the museum. They have left their work to say what they never could. For artists who made art outside the broader context of gay life in the 20th century, these outsiders speak powerfully to the experiences of gay men in their time and place. The fact that these artifacts remain—and were created in the first place—is a testament to the ability of pride to occasionally mediate shame in private, on paper, on canvas, or in the bodies of dead mice.

First published in Slate, October 18, 2013. Read the original here.

Someday, somewhere in Washington, D.C.—perhaps on the National Mall, kitty-corner across Maryland Avenue from the sinuous, sandy-colored Museum of the American Indian, or tucked behind the sprawling complex of the Natural History Museum—there may sit a National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Museum. That might sound surprising, considering that sodomy was illegal in the District until 1993, but Tim Gold, CEO of the Velvet Foundation, is convinced the time is right.

“On the (Queer) Waterfront: Brooklyn Histories” kicked off this weekend, a unique and collaborative art and performance show curated by The Pop-Up Museum Of Queer History. A multifaceted intersection of history lab, art space and teach-in workshops, the show sought to provide visibility, education and celebration surrounding queer identity in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Huffington Post caught up with Hugh Ryan, Founding Director of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, to discuss the show’s Oct. 5 kick-off, the history of the Pop-Up Museum Of Queer History, and Brooklyn’s legacy of queer identity.

The Huffington Post: What does “On the (Queer) Waterfront: Brooklyn Histories” as a project stem from? What are you trying to provide visibility to in regards to queer identity?
Hugh Ryan: “On the (Queer) Waterfront: Brooklyn Histories” was a show long in the making. We knew we wanted to return to Brooklyn –- Pop-Up began in 2011 as a one-night-only event in my loft in Bushwick, and although I’ve since left the borough, almost all of our core committee live in various Brooklyn neighborhoods. More than that, though, we felt that Brooklyn has a long and illustrious queer history all its own, which is too often lumped into New York City’s queer history. We wanted to look at Brooklyn as a place with its own specific queer history –- in part because it has such a thriving queer present.

Can you explain what The Pop-Up Museum Of Queer History is? What kind of work does this organization do?
The idea for the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History came to me shortly after the conservative attack on the “Hide/Seek” exhibit [at the National Portrait Gallery] forced them to remove David Wojnarowicz’ piece “A Fire in my Belly” from the show. I was frustrated that the Republican establishment and the whims of governmental funding could so easily play political football with both art and history. I wanted some way to both protest the removal, and provide an alternative venue for queer histories.

Around the same time, a group in New York City called Queers Organizing for Radical Unity and Mobilization (QuORUM) put out a call for events. They were organizing a week of queer workshops in queer homes, and they were looking for a space big enough to hold the kick-off. At the time, I lived in a large industrial loft in Bushwick, and I proposed a one-night only museum show. I put a call out for exhibits over Facebook, not really knowing what kind of response I would get.

I was floored when more than 30 people – many whom I didn’t even know – wanted to create exhibits and performances. They ranged from the whimsical (ex. a gingerbread scale replica of Stonewall) to the meticulously researched (ex. a talk about and performance of the works of composer Jean-Baptiste Lully). A curator and artist named Buzz Slutzky stepped up to co-curate the show, and dozens of other people volunteered to help install the works.

Our one-night engagement was scheduled for the evening of Jan. 14, 2011. It was freezing cold that evening, but more than 300 people showed up for the show –- including 14 police offers, who shut us down for fire concerns shortly after midnight. They also gave me a ticket for disturbing the peace when I refused to let them into the apartment without a warrant. I guess it wouldn’t be a real queer historical event without a police raid…

Even as the cops were forcing us out of the building, people were asking when the next museum would pop-up. Queer people were hungry for our history, told by our community and to our community. Buzz and I quickly realized that this wasn’t a one-time event, but rather the beginning of an organization. Creating a nonprofit was different from creating a one-night show, however, and we needed help. Graham Bridgeman joined us as our development expert, and the three of us formed the nucleus of the organizing group that has created the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History as it exists now -– along with dozens upon dozens of volunteers, artists, historians, archivists, and committed community members, without whom we could not exist.

What different components does the show incorporate?
“On the (Queer) Waterfront: Brooklyn Histories” is a scatter-site-specific investigation of the queer histories of the beloved borough where the museum got its start. Our kick-off event, on Oct. 5, was a queer history block party, which had music, performances, tabling by queer community organizations and archives, walking tours of the queer history of Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights, and workshops on how to archive your things at home, and how to make queer art out of queer history.

Throughout the rest of the month, we will also offer a night of experimental films produced in or about Brooklyn (co-hosted by MIX NYC and Union Docs), a panel discussion on queer communities and gentrification (co-hosted by the Brooklyn Community Pride Center), an open discussion between Circus Amok founder Jennifer Miller and queer sideshow impresario Ward Hall, and the premier of a new work by playwright and nightlife star Justin Sayre, based on the life of Hart Crane.

October is LGBT and Queer History month — what do you hope this show contributes to the way we know and understand LGBT history?
It is our hope that this show will contribute to an understanding of Brooklyn as a place with a queer past. We are not merely interlopers newly washed up on Park Slope’s shores, but queer communities and people have flourished in these neighborhoods for as long as queer identities have existed.

But more than that, our goal for every Pop-Up is threefold: To show queer people as a valid public, worthy of speaking to; a valid subject, worthy of speaking about; and a valid authority, worthy of speaking on our own terms. What makes Pop-Up unique among the many fantastic queer history projects that have sprung up in the last few years is that we put a focus on our community teaching each other, which is why we offer workshops on how to “do” queer history on your own. We believe that when and where queer history has been preserved, it has been preserved by queer people ourselves, and this is a strength to be celebrated. Instead of one dominant, top-down narrative of our history, which would leave out the things that are awkward or hard or just simply commonplace. We have a million strains of history passed down from queer elders – and we celebrate that.

Where does the inspiration and overarching philosophy for the show come from? Is it a collaborative effort? Who all is involved?
Pop-Up is a volunteer, collaborative, non-hierarchical labor of queer love. Our organizing committee is permeable, but has a core of five members who have all been working on Pop-Up for at least a year. We dream of some day being able to pay our staff. After our first two shows, we set an organizational priority of always “stipending” our artists, even if only a little bit, as part of our commitment to strengthening the community of people interested in queer history. We use an intersectional model of queer history that is deeply indebted to and concerned with feminist studies, anti-colonial studies, critical race theory, without going to a purely theoretical and academic place that could turn off many viewers. We believe that history is exciting and beautiful and liberatory.