Revisiting 1969, Part Two: The Year of Gay Liberation

1969: The Year of Gay Liberation on view at the New York Public Library between June 1, 2009 – June 30, 2009, Jason Baumann, Curator.

Exhibitions of contemporary history always risk becoming more celebratory than analytical and 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation was no exception. Documenting the year between the messy and misunderstood Stonewall Rebellion and the first New York Gay Pride March in 1970, this small exhibition unabashedly sympathized with its subject matter and screamed – “yeah, we finally fought back!”

And how could it not? Those of us who identify with or care about the struggle for basic civil rights in this culture cannot absorb or discuss this material dispassionately, even if it is now forty years old. The individual and organizational stories chronicled here are dramatic and compelling – drag queens who refused to be passively herded into police vans, scraggly members of the emerging and bold Gay Liberation Front, feminist lesbians proudly naming themselves The Lavender Menace, upending Betty Friedan’s famous disdain.

The objects preserved and presented here, all from the LGBT archives of the NYPL are gritty, scrappy, and fragile. They are mimeographed announcements, grainy photos, staple-pricked fliers, articles torn from magazines and newspapers. But this is potent ephemera, never coolly displayed or distantly interpreted. This is emotional territory, so emotional that many still don’t view it as legitimate history. Why have there been so few projects of LGBT history here in Philly?

Jason Baumann, exhibition curator and Coordinator of LGBT Collections at The New York Public Library claims “The year 1969 marks the first time homosexuals united, demanded, and were willing to fight for full inclusion within American society. As a result of the actions taken during this time gays and lesbians marked a paradigmatic shift not only in the ways that they saw themselves but also in how the world would see them.”

Maybe so. But I would argue that this exhibition is so celebratory that it forgets its context. Stonewall was in many ways a culmination of decades of civil rights work by homosexuals, rather than a catalyst. A rite of passage rather than a birth. On July 4, 1965, a group of gays and lesbians marched in front of Independence Hall at the first national march for homosexual rights (there’s a state historical marker in front of the Hall marking this event – really – go see it). And after World War II, many gay people chose to stay on the West Coast rather than return to their small towns. It was there, in California in the 1950s, that the first large-scale gay rights organizations in the U.S. formed, with hundreds of members (the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis).

This isn’t to deny the importance of documenting the story of Stonewall, or this exhibition and its presentation of these ordinary, extraordinary objects. The celebration is in many ways understandable. Jason Baumann’s appointment as a curator of LGBT collections is in itself a bold act worth celebrating. Pursing a truly inclusive practice of history remains an ongoing, complicated project. Those of us in the public history field know that the presentation of history is contentious, imperfect, fluid, and crucial. That’s why we go to work every day.

Bill Adair is the Director of Heritage Philadelphia Program.

NTHP Grant for African American Historic Places

The National Trust for Historic Preservation's deadline for Partnership-in-Scholarship Grants for African American Historic Places is one month away. This grant (up to $15,000) will provide financial support for African American sites to improve their interpretation.

Visit the NTHP blog for guidelines and applications; deadline is September 30, 2009.

Revisiting 1969, Part One: Woodstock

There are times when I really regret being born a Gen-Xer. Recounting all the incredible events that took place 40 years ago has convinced me that I’m really a hippie at heart who was born a few decades too late.

I may not have had any control over when I was born, but I’m grateful that I can to relive those experiences that I missed (as much as is possible without ingesting illegal substances). I recently decided to take my little hippie heart—clad in my modern-day Birkenstocks (i.e. Chacos) and driving a hybrid car—to the one-year-old museum established at the site of Woodstock.

Part of the fun is actually finding the place: winding around rural New York, through little towns, past expansive farms and grain silos, I came to truly appreciate the hundreds of thousands of people who found the site before the days of Mapquest.

The Museum at Bethel Woods is a museum dedicated to the 1960s in general and Woodstock specifically and is accompanied on the same site by the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts—a performance center where concerts are held regularly, keeping that musical heritage alive. Both are positioned directly on the site where the three-day music festival was held on Max Yasgur’s farm.

The museum’s permanent exhibit begins with a timeline of the 1960s (highlighting both political events from various years as well as songs that were released each year) which set the stage for Woodstock’s birth, 40 years ago this weekend. While I enjoyed progressing through the decade and learning the history of the concert, a few features in particular captured my interested.

Rounding one bend, I found myself face-to-face with a converted school bus with flower power and psychedelic décor all over the outside and bench seats (as expected) inside. Once seated, a short video about how the multitudes were transported to the concert was projected onto the inside of the window shield. I smiled at the 8-tracks stacked at the back of the bus and the copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring next to the driver’s seat; my imagination transported me to what it must have been like to be traveling on the bus en route with hundreds of thousands of others to this unparalleled event.

Following that was the video recreating the concert itself. Not only was it showing actual footage from the concert, but in order to transport the viewer to the concert as much as possible, the set-up around the screen was made to imitate a stage, complete with stage scaffolding, lights, and enormous speakers. When the video described the helicopters transporting the performers from the hotel to the stage (the only option since the roads were all clogged with concert-goers), the sound of a helicopter descending roared and lights, made to look like propellers, spun on the ground in front of us. Rain, which plagued the crowd throughout the weekend, was simulated with thunder booming and lights flashing as the sound of rain “poured down” on us. And for that moment, though comfortably dry, I was transported back to 1969.

If all one gauges a history museum on is how accurately it is able to help a viewer live or re-live an experience, The Bethel Woods Museum would receive high marks from me. I was placed directly in the middle of the 1960s and grew to understand the need for and significance of Woodstock. And, judging on others’ reactions in the recording booth in which people can share their experiences—those who attended Woodstock, those who wanted to attend but couldn’t, and those of us who would have attended had we been around—other viewers were successfully transplanted back 40 years as well.

And this hippie left experiencing her own little high.

Mary Gen Davies is the gardening, protesting, recycling, all-around green-lovin’ Program Associate at HPP.

HPP Announces a New Professional Development Opportunity:

We’re pleased to announce a new professional development program from Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP). The HPP Scholars program will award small grants to support individual practitioners in the development of imaginative interpretive projects. Applications for the first round of awards are due August 31.

Want to know more? Follow this link to our website for application information, and feel free to contact Laura Koloski with any questions you may have (lkoloski@pcah.us).

From the Field: HPP Travels Lincoln’s Commute—From the White House to the Cottage

We were lost. Though signs pointed to a nearby entrance to Lincoln’s Cottage, we drove the perimeter of a cemetery once, and again. I peered at rows of similar tombstones: thin, white, standing close in the grass. This was not a Victorian cemetery of eclectic monuments, not The Woodlands of my West Philadelphia neighborhood, a cemetery I wander to see competing obelisks and ornate crypts of prominent Philadelphians. Our tour group was driving the bounds of a burial ground for military comrades, the Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery, adjacent to Lincoln’s Cottage. Our tour guide described a Lincoln who wandered among these tombstones while reciting poetry.

This cemetery detour was actually a most appropriate, though dour, “pre-trip experience” that informed my visit to Lincoln’s Cottage. On the way to an historic site, a traveler often finds clues that illuminate and juxtapose present and past. In a more light-hearted example, the pilgrim seeking Walt Whitman’s Birthplace on Long Island will first pass the bustle of cars entering the Walt Whitman Mall, before arriving at the quiet of the Whitman family farmhouse. These reminders of the past orient and disorient a visitor before a traveller arrives at an historic site.

Our path to Lincoln’s Cottage, beginning in downtown Washington, was similar in direction and even length to the route Lincoln took to arrive at the Cottage in Northwest D.C. In 2009, Washington traffic slows a bus to the speed of a horse. During warm months of 1862 through 1864, Lincoln commuted about four miles to the White House and returned to the Cottage at night. The Cottage provided a respite in which he could work with full concentration, and relax in moments.

Lincoln needed to get away. At that most famous home-office on Pennsylvania Avenue, Lincoln received delegations of visitors and worked in a house of possessions and pomp. Additionally, the Capital was a busy center of war preparations; caravans of artillery and militia passed through the streets. Present too, were the consequences of war: hospitals full of wounded men. This is the Washington of Lincoln and also of Whitman as nurse, who wrote of his tending to soldiers in The Wound-Dresser, “Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals....”

Lincoln’s path to respite at the Cottage was inherently dangerous, and Lincoln preferred to ride alone, leaving in advance of his cavalry. A sniper shot at Lincoln on his path to the White House in August of 1864. After the attack, Lincoln’s Secretary of War implored him to ride with guards. Once at the Cottage, Lincoln did not escape the Civil War. In this retreat, Lincoln wrote much of the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1863. The Cottage is on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home; veterans sometimes joined Lincoln for breakfast.

Lincoln’s Cottage has been restored by the National Trust, who chose to keep furnishings spare and supplement architecture with sound installations and video. The bare wall of the study reveals horizontal marks of light wood where the President’s bookshelves once stood. From these bookshelves, the President pulled Shakespeare, which Lincoln read to Secretary John Hay until “...my heavy eyelids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.”

Lincoln’s nights at the Cottage were also full of uncertainty. “I couldn’t rest and thought I’d take a walk,” said the brooding Lincoln to Lieutenant Ashmun, an officer who saw the President wandering beyond the guarded grounds of the Cottage and encouraged him to return to the house. These anecdotes about Lincoln, revealed by the interpretation at Lincoln’s Cottage, describe a human president at his most restless, diligent, and even relaxed, a range of states that may be familiar to many of us who have faced personal and professional challenges.

Christy Schneider works in museum education and administration in Philadelphia.

From the Field: The District's Many Interpretations of Lincoln

As newcomer to the museum field, I was not sure what to expect when HPP invited a group of local museum professionals on an overnight study trip to Washington, D. C. The opportunity to see museums selected by the HPP staff—from well-established institutions to the brand-new—was enticing, as was the chance to meet some of my colleagues.

Although the itinerary included museums of varying sizes and missions, the general theme of the trip was Abraham Lincoln. Of the five institutions we toured, four featured a Lincoln exhibit, which allowed an opportunity to see how different museums handled the subject in their own fashion.

Our first stop was the National Portrait Gallery, which staged a show called “One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.” The exhibit presented photographs and artistic renderings illustrating how the trials of Lincoln’s presidency changed him physically and discussed Lincoln’s canny understanding of his public image. The exhibit also offered commentary by the curator, available via cell phone (though the subsequent text message urging me to “Save 20% in our Museum Stores” did not add much to my visitor experience.).

We then viewed the National Museum of American History’s new Star Spangled Banner gallery and “Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life.” It offered a standard narrative of the Lincoln story from beginning to end, with a liberal use of objects from the Smithsonian’s exceptional collection. Lincoln’s famous hat, for example, greeted visitors as they entered. The presentation of the hanged assassins’ hoods and manacles as we exited was a striking way to address Lincoln’s story after his “extraordinary life” ended and provided a standout feature in an exhibit crowded with information.

After spending a comfortable night at the eclectic Hotel Helix, we visited the Newseum. Their exhibit “Manhunt: Chasing Lincoln’s Killer,” delivered exactly what it advertised. It dealt very little with Lincoln himself— except in the manner of his death—and instead tracked the motives and methods of John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices. Since the Newseum specializes in the history of journalism, they told much of the story through newspaper accounts and photographs. Media-centric in its mission, the Newseum also highlighted the importance of Alexander Gardner, often referred to as “Lincoln’s Photographer,” who was featured to varying degrees in all of the Lincoln exhibits.

From the Newseum we traveled to our last stop, Lincoln’s Cottage. After all of the exhibits we visited, stuffed with mementos of Lincoln’s remarkable life and tragic death, the sparseness of the Cottage was refreshing. The museum staff made the conscious decision not to display any furniture or belongings, and yet successfully overcame the lack of interpretive material by synthesizing audiovisual technology and seamless old-fashioned tour guiding. The guide kept us in situ with expert efficiency, rarely mentioning Lincoln’s life before becoming president, and never mentioning his death, thus bucking the trend set by the other exhibits.

This trip gave us all ideas about the different ways that a specific subject might be presented, and will hopefully provide food for thought when planning our own exhibits.

Jennifer Green is the Visitor Experience Coordinator at The Mill at Anselma Preservation and Educational Trust.

From the Field: What’s more Fun than a Bus-full of Museum Professionals?

I have worked in many parts of the country during my museum career, but nowhere have I had the marvelous professional development opportunities offered in Philadelphia, thanks in large part to the Heritage Philadelphia Program. On Wednesday, May 13, I had the good fortune to join an HPP-assembled group of about 20 regional colleagues for a trip to New York City. The purpose of the trip was to visit the newly-renovated and opened Museum at Eldridge Street and Potion Design Studios, the developers of one of the museum’s main interpretive tools.

One of the great benefits about traveling with HPP groups is that you not only get to see other museums, but you get to meet the site’s staff members and ask them all those process questions we wish we could ask when we visit cultural institutions with family and friends. At the Museum at Eldridge Street we were able to meet with Hanna Griff-Sleven and Amy Stein Milford, who generously took time out of their work day to answer “why” and “how” questions from our inquisitive group.

Our visit to the Museum at Eldridge Street began with a tour by Miriam, one of their fabulous docents. The tour started in the lower level of the building, which includes a still-used small synagogue space for the Orthodox congregation, the museum’s gift shop, and the interpretive/exhibit space. The most attention-grabbing part of the space was definitely the interactive “tables” designed by Potion. These high-tech tables are actually surfaces onto which an interactive computer program is projected. With these tables, visitors are able to see 3D maps of the historic neighborhood, create, view and e-mail community newspaper pages based on actual newspaper stories, and simulate the painstaking restoration of the main synagogue.

From the exhibit area, we moved upstairs into the beautifully restored synagogue. As in all restored spaces, it was difficult to imagine what it looked like before the renovation, but thankfully the museum left some visual clues, including a section of a balcony wall not restored. Our group also got to vote on a real preservation issue facing the museum staff: what to do with the main window in the synagogue, where original stained glass was replaced by glass block at some point in the synagogue’s history.

After a hectic but very filling lunch, our group traveled to Potion Design Studios where we learned more about the design and development of the interactive exhibits at the Museum at Eldridge Street. We also learned about some of Potion’s other projects, and even got to see some of their work-in-progress.

Everything we saw throughout the day made for great informal discussions on the bus ride home: what is the role of technology in interpreting historic spaces and collections? Does technology necessarily enhance learning and visitors’ experiences? How can institutions with modest budgets implement cutting-edge technology? And while we didn’t arrive at any definitive answers (I think we would have needed a longer bus ride for that!) the discussions were very engaging and thought-provoking.

Andrea (Ang) Reidell is the Education Specialist at National Archives, Mid-Atlantic Region.