Queer History Project: “Beyond the Brick”

This is a collaborative community art project to highlight all the queer history beyond Stonewall, and to highlight how it isn’t taught in schools. A lot of queer people don’t know anything about queer life and queer rights before they personally came out. By not watering the roots, the tree dies. We have a duty to educate our own community as well as cishet people in the absence of institutional acknowledgement. We will showcase both our tragedies and our triumphs, and highlight our resilience and ingenuity, as well as stress that we have always been here, and always will be.

Each piece will be presented as a diorama, to play off the idea of a school project and further highlight how this information is absent from most lesson plans nationwide. Each project should also include a short statement as well as a few sources for further information. In other words, cite your sources just like you would with a school project.

Topics will be assigned in the order they are requested so as not to get repeated. Some of these topics may end up being more popular than others, but the unpopular ones might just be the ones most needing some attention. If you have no preference for what project you do, one may be assigned to you (just like school!)

Each diorama should be at least 10” in at least one dimension, up to 18” in all dimensions. There is plenty of wiggle room here, but please let me know if you plan to take up more space than 18”. Medium is up to you, but it should invoke “diorama” in some way. Interactivity is great, but make sure it’s sturdy enough to withstand hundreds of people interacting with it.

The exhibit will be open to all, with parental discretion advised. Many important moments from queer history deal with adult stuff, like sex, drugs, and violence. Rather than sanitizing it to be safe for children, it will be for parents to decide what their children can handle. If you want to cover such a topic, you are welcome to provide a guide for how parents can discuss it with their kids.

This is a free exhibit, and participation is voluntary. This is a community service for the betterment of queer people.

Any disparagement of oppressed people, including intra-community biphobia, transphobia etc., will not be accepted. This exhibit will be intersectional or it will be worthless.

Due date is June 14, 2025. Specific location is pending, but it will be based in Lansing, Michigan. (I am looking into exhibiting it in other Michigan cities during different Pride event dates.) For those outside the central Michigan area, and address will be provided after acceptance for projects that need to be shipped.

Go to https://forms.gle/jEJxXa92HZxZDhuh6 to apply.

Who is behind this

I am Ro Salarian (they/them), a middle aged trans, nonbinary, disabled artist and activist currently residing in Michigan. I have written and illustrated over two dozen queer stories and books for a range of ages, as well as many essays on social justice and queer liberation. I am also a performance artist and producer of many events.

When I was in American history class in high school (waaaaay back in ‘02), we were given an assignment to do a project on a topic that wasn’t in our history book. I chose queer history. It was difficult to research, due to the dearth of widely available books as well as the censorship of all queer content from the school computers (I couldn’t even view my own website!) But I did manage to dig up a lot of information, and I learned so much. Despite the advancement of queer rights, our history is still absent from schools, and many queer people today have no idea of queer life outside of their own lifetimes and experiences.

I have continued to research queer history, and have been thinking about this exhibition for many years. Due to the current political climate and the regression of the rights we fought for, it has become clear to me that we must educate ourselves and each other while we still can. With our books being banned and our work being censored on the internet, we must commit to both preserving and sharing our stories and history.

I can be reached at rosalarian@gmail.com

Topics I for sure want to be covered (in no particular order):

Queer print media in the 1900s, especially self-published magazines/zines like Vice Versa, Friendship & Freedom, The Mattachine Review, etc. With our culture and history hidden away from traditional media outlets, how did queer people tell their stories and connect with each other?
Queer TV and film before the recent queer media boom. Once upon a time, we only had a small handful of indie films, and subtext. What was it like to live in a world without seeing yourself reflected in the mainstream world?
Magnus Hirchfield, his research and the destruction of it. What strides did he make in normalizing queerness and advancing queer medicine? What happens when such knowledge is targeted for destruction?
Alfred Kinsey. How did his work contribute to destigmatize and depathologize sex in general, and queer sex specifically? What was the Kinsey Scale, and is it still useful today?
Gay panic laws. “Gay panic” is not the same as having anxiety while being gay. This was a law that let people off the hook for assaulting and killing queer people, like Matthew Shepard and Brandon Teena. This law was still on the books in MI until 2024!
The Holocaust. Queer people were put in concentration camps, and were the last to be freed. What were the conditions that allowed this to happen? Why were we left behind when the camps were liberated?
The Lavender Scare. While the Red Scare was hunting for communists in the 1950s, they were also trying to purge queer people from public life. What were we up against, and how did we get around it to thrive in secret?
AIDS Epidemic. This is a big topic, so there may be multiple pieces about it.
- How the Reagan administration purposely let it get so bad, and how American culture fed into it.
- How the community fought back through organizations like ACT UP and safe sex campaigns.
- Development of PrEP and PEP
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A terrible law that was actually progressive for its time. What was queer military life like before and after DADT, and how did we get to the point where queer people could openly serve in the military?
Lawrence V Texas. This landmark court case struck down laws that made gay sex illegal. Who was John Geddes Lawrence, and how did anti-sodomy laws work before the Supreme Court struck them down for good?
Queer liberation in the South. Speaking of Lawrence V Texas, queer rights movements have never been exclusive to the coastal cities. What was happening in the American South, and how did they influence nationwide queer liberation? What are we missing when we dismiss the South as a lost cause?
From DOMA to Obergefell. The Defense of Marriage Act banned same-sex marriage, and Obergefell legalized it. How did we get from one to the other?
Confirmed bachelors and Boston marriages How did we hide in plain sight? How did we form families? Discuss lavender marriage, adult adoption of partners, and other secret methods of skirting around the law.
Homelessness. It’s not just history, but current as well. Queer and especially trans people experience homelessness at a higher rate than our cishet counterparts, yet are often barred from shelters. How can we highlight some of the most vulnerable members of our community, and how can we help?
Sex work. Same with homelessness, it’s historical and current, and queer people are more likely to be involved than cishet people. Many contributors to queer liberation have had this part of their lives hidden away. Let’s bring it into the light, to show everyone just how important sex workers are within our community, and how we can show up for them.
Kinksters have been a major part of queer life, liberation, and freedom. The Folsom Street Fair, Tom of Finland, etc. How has kink shaped our community, and who were the major players? Stress why we must defend kinky queers just as much as vanilla ones.
Queer codes and sanctuaries Gay bars, bath houses, the hankey code, flower language, cruising. How did we find each other before Grinder and Tinder made it easy to connect, when we couldn’t openly connect? How did we carve out these spaces when they were criminalized? Who was Dorothy, and why did she have so many friends?
The Harlem Renaissance. It’s said that the Harlem Renaissance was as gay as it was Black. Who in the HR was queer, and what was queer black life like in this time? How does Black liberation help queer liberation?
The Compton Cafeteria Riot. Pre-Stonewall, this is often referred to as the first militant response from queer people against their subjugation. It was primarily an attack of trans and GNC people, as well as sex workers. What happened here, and how did sex workers contribute to queer liberation?
Dora Richter and Christine Jorgensen. Dora the first person to receive gender affirming surgery ever, and Christine shot to fame as the first widely-known trans woman to receive affirming surgery. Who were these women, and how were they received at the time?
Karl M Baer, an intersex trans man and the first person to receive gender affirming surgery EVER in 1906! Who was he, how did this groundbreaking surgery happen, and how do we discuss historical trans people who lived before modern language to describe them?
The history of HRT. How was it created, and who was it created for originally? MUST include both feminizing and masculinizing HRT. You have to go beyond titty skittles.
Homophobia and colonialism. Many cultures around the world affirmed and celebrated queerness until western colonialism brought homophobia with them. What was queer life like around the world before colonization? How is it now?
Inter-community biphobia, transphobia, misogyny and misandry. How did a once united community splinter off into separate categories? When did this happen, and how can we come back together again?
The third sex. Sex and gender categories were more blurred together once upon a time. Even cis gays were often not considered “real” men and women, and were often banned from cis male and female spaces. How did cis gay people become “real” men and women, and what was life like before that happened? What is the legacy of that, and how does it affect modern identity?
Community protection Whisper networks, secret codes, and queer safety patrols are among the ways we kept each other safe. How did we do it then, and how can we apply it now?

The planned display for Stonewall will simply be a brick. Stonewall is the one piece of queer history that most people know about, and I believe that the laser focus on this one event means we often ignore everything else.

I will also accept any project about a person, place, event, whatever from queer history that you want people to learn about, general or specific. I recognize that I am white and from a very “standard American” background, so despite all of my own research, there are for sure many important things outside my scope that I have missed. I welcome intersectionality. We are nothing without the wisdom that diverse perspectives can bring.

Queer people aged 50+ are welcome to share their own personal experiences of queer life pre-2000s.

I will be doing supplemental graphics for the less visual information, such as timelines of queer rights gains and losses, shifts in language, and resources. I welcome help in this area. I will also have zines available for people to take home. If you want to contribute a zine, let me know.