There’s been something troubling me for the last couple of years about what the Trump administration has been doing. It affects me personally, but I’ve mostly kept it in the back of my mind. After all, there are so many larger and more immediate issues facing our country that demand attention.
But this one has become impossible for me to ignore.
One of the many ways the Trump administration is hurting this country is by attempting to rewrite — or simply erase — parts of our history that it finds uncomfortable. And Trump has now attacked my history.
Around the nation, we’ve watched displays dealing with slavery and our Founding Fathers come under attack. We’ve seen the history of Japanese American internment diminished or politicized, military bases renamed, and symbols representing Indigenous people and the LGBTQ+ community targeted.
History, apparently, is acceptable only when it tells the story this administration wants Americans to hear.
And now that effort has reached my own history.
Several years ago, I donated my papers and artifacts to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. It was one of the greatest honors of my life. Those papers and objects weren’t simply about me. They documented a movement and a generation of people who stood up, fought back and demanded a place in the American story.
As the Trump administration has increasingly targeted the Smithsonian and questioned how our national museums tell that story, I became concerned enough to speak with Katherine Ott and Franklin Robinson, the two Smithsonian curators with whom I worked regarding my collection.
Then last week I read a profile of my friend Katherine in LGBTQ Nation, and one passage immediately caught my attention.
It noted that Katherine had been called out by name in a White House report, “Saving America’s Story,” in part for work on racism as a public health crisis and the Smithsonian exhibition “Illegal to Be You: Gay History Beyond Stonewall.”
Guess whose artifacts were included in that exhibit?
Mine.
Having your personal belongings displayed at the Smithsonian is difficult to describe. For me, it helped put into perspective the history I had been fortunate enough to witness and participate in. More importantly, it told Americans that our struggle for equality belongs in the American story just as surely as the struggles of those who came before us.
So what did the Smithsonian display from my collection?
A donation can from the first Gay Pride march in 1970. A few of the buttons I wore at demonstrations over the years. A letter threatening my life that appeared to come from the Ku Klux Klan. And a sticker declaring, “We support Anita Bryant and Save Our Children.”
Some of those objects represent pride. Others represent hate.
Together, they represent history.
They show what we were fighting for and what we were fighting against. They remind people that the rights many LGBTQ+ Americans enjoy today did not simply appear. People marched for them. People demonstrated for them. People were arrested for them. People lost jobs, families, and friends for them.
That is why attempts to sanitize our museums and institutions are so dangerous. History is not supposed to make us comfortable. Its job is to tell us what happened.
I have marched in too many Pride marches and stood in too many demonstrations to allow those stories to simply be erased.
Because if you erase the demonstrations, you erase why we demonstrated. If you erase the hatred, you erase what we had to overcome. And if you erase Stonewall, Gay Liberation and the first Pride marches, future generations might believe the rights they have today were simply given to them.
They weren’t.
We fought for them.
Those artifacts in the Smithsonian are not just objects. They are witnesses.
They say: We were here. This happened. We fought back.
Donald Trump can try to rewrite America’s history. But he cannot change one essential fact:
We lived that history.
We saved the evidence.
And we are still here to tell the story.
You cannot erase people who refuse to disappear.
Originally published by our partners at the Philadelphia Gay News on September 1, 2026.