What did your LGBTQ+ community — or your local or state government — do to recognize our community as part of America’s 250th birthday?
That 250th birthday belongs to us as much as it belongs to anyone else.
After all, one of the men who helped lead this fledgling nation to victory over the British was Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian military officer who became George Washington’s inspector general and transformed a struggling Continental Army into a disciplined fighting force.
And how did von Steuben get to Washington?
Benjamin Franklin helped send him.
As I’ve been saying for about 15 years, ever since I began researching the good Baron, that makes Ben Franklin the father of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Humor aside, there’s a serious point here. LGBTQ+ people did not suddenly appear at Stonewall in 1969. We have been part of the American story from its earliest chapters. The question is whether America tells that story.
For the nation’s 250th, some cities and institutions are making sure it does.
In New York and Philadelphia, the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center and the Philly Pride Visitor Center created a Pride Passport program. Visitors can pick up a free LGBTQ+ passport at either center, have it stamped at both locations and receive a commemorative Baron von Steuben tote bag. It’s a wonderful way of connecting the birthplace of American independence with the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.
Philadelphia went even further.
With support from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and PA Tourism’s Anne Ryan, the Philly Pride Visitor Center opened as the first publicly funded visitor center of its kind in the nation — part LGBTQ+ history museum and part welcoming center for LGBTQ+ visitors to the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
In Fort Lauderdale, the Stonewall National Museum Archives & Library has also highlighted von Steuben and his place in our history.
And at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, its major America 250 exhibition, “The Declaration’s Journey,” demonstrates how the words written in 1776 continued to inspire generations of Americans demanding that the promise of equality apply to them.
The exhibition contains extraordinary objects, from Thomas Jefferson’s Windsor chair to a stool associated with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s imprisonment in Birmingham. But then you turn a corner and encounter something else: a large rainbow flag and the story of how LGBTQ+ Americans have drawn upon the Declaration of Independence in our own struggle for equality.
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That rainbow flag belongs there.
Elsewhere around the country, communities are finding their own ways to make LGBTQ+ history part of America’s 250th.
Boston has developed LGBTQ+ history programming tied to the anniversary, including special history tours in Boston and Salem and programming highlighting Massachusetts LGBTQ+ history.
In Aurora, Colorado, the Aurora History Museum presented an America 250 LGBTQ history program exploring Colorado’s LGBTQ past, Denver’s early activism and lesbian civil rights history in Aurora.
These programs are important, but there should be many more.
America’s 250th is an extraordinary opportunity to ask a simple question: Who gets included in the American story?
Our historians, academics, museums and public institutions need to do a better job of answering that question. Because if we don’t document our history, preserve it and insist that it be included in the larger American narrative, our visibility can disappear.
Many years ago, I was on a television program debating LGBTQ+ equality with a conservative opponent. At one point he leaned over to me and said:
“This country was not founded for people like you.”
I knew my history.
So I looked back at him and replied:
“People like me helped create this nation.”
Two hundred and fifty years later, that’s something worth celebrating — and something America should never forget.