The Badge of Pride exhibit, on display at the Irving Archives and Museum through Sept. 28, puts a spotlight on some of Texas’ LGBTQ+ elected officials, from former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez to former Houston Mayor Annise Parker to former Texas state Rep. Glen Maxey. The museum is at 801 W. Irving Blvd. in Irving. Katherine Ott (above), a curator, writer and speaker for the Smithsonian, speaks on LGBTQ+ history at the museum on Saturday, Aug. 30. (David Taffet/Dallas Voice)
DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer
Taffet@DallasVoice.com
“Stonewall is like the Kardashians,” Katherine Ott said. “It’s famous for being famous.”
Ott is a curator, writer, speaker and more at the Smithsonian Institution. She’ll be speaking at the Badge of Pride exhibit at the Irving Museum on Saturday, Aug. 30.
Her area of expertise includes how and why people are labeled “different,” whether it’s because of disease, disability, gender, sexual orientation, race or behaviors of which the mainstream disapproves.
Ott calls herself a “Stonewall skeptic,” describing the Stonewall riots as a small event at the time they happened. She doesn’t deny the riots happened, but local news practically ignored it as the protests were taking place. And she questions how the incident has been used over the years.
Then a year after the riots, gay New Yorkers held a parade. And the myth of Stonewall began to grow.
“There’s nothing like a good parade,” Ott said.
It was visual and visible and was photographed. Rather than battling with police, with that parade, the LGBTQ+ community could set its own agenda and begin demanding equality.
For the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, Ott curated an exhibit at the National Museum of American History entitled Illegal to Be You: Gay History Beyond Stonewall. That exhibit included books such as The Third Sex, a pulp romance the cover of which read, “To fool the world they married. For Joan loved women … and Marc preferred men!” and “Told with unblushing honesty, here is a penetrating study of society’s greatest curse.”
In her museum notes, Ott wrote that at least this one doesn’t end in tragedy.
Other interesting objects included in that exhibit were lobotomy knives used from the 1950s until the early ’70s to “treat” homosexuality, a wedding ring purchased by Matthew Shepard while in college for a future marriage and a Superman cape Shepherd wore as a child.
Expecting some backlash from the public and even from some Smithsonian staff, Ott said she included one object that she could negotiate out of the exhibit: a chainmail harness on a mannequin as the item around which she could deflect other protests against the displays.
To put up a good fight, she did her research and found a number of times similar garb has been used in popular culture — in Game of Thrones, for example — and filed the item under the category “Medicine and Science.”
If those complaints came and were brought to her, she’d valiantly fight to retain the harness, she said, but then she would reluctantly remove it from the exhibit, letting those offended by the item feeling victorious in their battle with debauchery.
But to her surprise, those objections never came, and the harness remained part of the exhibit.
There’s nothing wrong with being prepared for controversy and complaints and being delighted when none came, she explained.
Ott recalled an exhibit she curated for Stonewall’s 25th anniversary, with complaints about it recorded in the exhibit’s guest book: “Disgusting,” “Offensive,” “Garbage” and more wrote people who had come for no other reason than to be offended.
Others responded, “No, I find YOU to be disgusting.”
And now those guest books, which have been archived, are part of the historical record of what people in the 1990s thought of the LGBTQ+ community.
When The Dallas Way began partnering with the University of North Texas more than 10 years ago, few cities had LGBTQ+ archives. Ott said today most research universities have some sort of collection.
Justifying those collections is getting more difficult under Trump’s anti-DEI mandates. But creativity is keeping some archives intact — filed under “HIV” which goes under medical archives.
Ott said collecting and exhibiting artifacts isn’t to learn about the past but rather to learn what worked best so we can plan the future.
LGBTQ+ specific exhibits allow attendees to learn much more about the history of the community than just a brief overview that normally highlights just three events — Stonewall, marriage equality and the AIDS epidemic, Ott said.
By the time of the Stonewall riots, similar events had taken place in other major cities but were simply not reported on by news media. Nonetheless, there was already an established gay rights movement by the time of that summer night in New York City.
The AIDS epidemic, Ott said, hit all parts of the country and was a much more important organizing event for the LGBTQ+ community.
“We learned, in one city after another, that if we didn’t organize, no one else was going to take care of us. So in cities and even rural areas across the country, we organized.
And in less than a generation, from the first time the LGBTQ+ community began demanding equality, same-sex marriage was legalized nationally after 26 states had already allowed same-sex couples to wed. Ott noted the speed at which that right was attained was breathtaking, but many events led up to the Obergefell decision.
Ott will speak at the Irving Archives and Museum, 801 W. Irving Blvd. at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug 30.