Press posts

In September 2019, the NCSS Board of Directors approved a position statement that was co-authored with Debra Fowler, Co-founder & Executive Director of History UnErased, Inc., and Dr. Steven LaBounty-McNair, Executive Board Chair of History UnErased, Inc. Like History UnErased, we want to make sure that the students and educators who come after us are not just better off, but are better than us, better at understanding, better at empathy, better at creating a world where all people belong.

State directives to teach LGBTQ history are a “great mark of progress” but create “an illusion that the policies have been implemented,” says Debra Fowler, co-author of the NCSS’s position statement on LGBTQ history and the co-founder and Director of Development of History UnErased, offering LGBTQ-inclusive history curriculum. “This is a long game,” says Fowler. “We probably will never live to see our mission truly fulfilled.”

The first three words of the United States Constitution — “We the People” — proclaim who is enacting the nation’s most important document. Yet as I progressed through my education, the “people” read about, the “people” who belonged in society, were lectured upon, revered, and who shaped the nation as I knew it, did not include people like me or Mr. Buttigeig, members of the LGBT+ community.

With LGBTQ people becoming more visible by the day in the Western world, and in the United States of America specifically, its time that we look back at all of the things that they accomplished while hiding in plain sight. That’s a mentality that Deb Fowler and Miriam Morgenstern both agree with. The two co-founded History UnErased (or HUE) in order to address that problem.

In 1986, when Debra Fowler filled out paperwork to join the U.S. Army, she came to a question asking if she was a homosexual. She checked no. I knew it was a lie, she says, but a small lie. Debra became a Korean language specialist. Eventually her orders required top-secret clearance, which involves an in-depth look at someone's background. When it came to light that she dated a woman, Debra ended up with a dishonorable discharge, something which, it bears noting, wouldn't happen today. She never got to that top-secret job.