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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.

In 1948, the United States Congress passed an act “for the treatment of sexual psychopaths.” That law combined with an executive order from President Eisenhower began a systematic and legal purge of gays and lesbians from government employment.

It is events like this that many people have forgotten—and it is also events like this that have been “erased from our history.” Preventing that erasure is one of many goals for teachers Deb Fowler and Miriam Morgenstern, the co-founders of History UnErased. ( HUE )...