Press

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 )...

Walt Whitman never publicly addressed his sexual orientation in his poems, essays or lectures. He lived from 1819 to 1892, a time when "gay" meant little more than happy. Biographical materials, however, note he was involved for decades with a man named Peter Doyle. And in works like the Calamus poems in his Leaves of Grass collection, Whitman discusses romantic and sexual relationships between men.

Teachers sit at square tables in a college classroom here poring over primary and secondary sources about the civil rights icon Bayard Rustin. There’s his 1987 obituary in The New York Times, which avoids any mention of his sexual orientation. There are copies of FBI documents from the mid-20th century, which, in coded language, talk about his male companions.

There’s a piece about an interview with Rustin’s longtime partner, Walter Naegle, detailing how, in the absence of any other way to secure legal protection for their relationship in the 1970s, Rustin adopted him.