 And this panel is going to be run by Jay Shockley, who's one of the founders of the site project. Also did the New York theme study, was largely written by Jay. And so now that you're all experts on theme studies, so I'm going to turn it over to Jay. Okay, so we're going to try to have to run through this very quickly since we're behind and we have a mandate to get to Earl Hall. This should be a really interesting panel discussion, and I think it will have some parallels in particular to what Matt was discussing happening in England. As other people alluded to, the interpretation or reinterpretation of house museums in the United States to incorporate LGBTQ histories is really pretty recent. All of us, I hope all of you are house museum fans as I have been for lifetime. The typical thing that all of us have experienced over the years is if there's an LGBTQ person that was associated with the property, typically you get, if anything, oh, he was too artistic or too eccentric, he never got married. Oh, she was a spinster. You know, those kinds of things. I've been to museums where they made up really cockamamie stories about the inhabitants. And even here in New York, he just left the room. But Alice Austin, which is now in the process of doing an amazing reinterpretation to incorporate the lesbian and photographic pioneering history of Alice Austin. Mitchell Grubler, who asked a bunch of questions this morning, he was fired by the house, even though it's a city-owned house museum, he was fired because he wanted to incorporate that history. The first house museum I ever went to, and may have been the first one in the United States, our panelists could correct me, but in 2007 the glass house was opened by the National Trust, and they did a very straightforward, very honest presentation that this was the house of David Whitney and Phil Johnson, the designer. So our three panelists are going to quickly touch on sort of provocative issues and questions on a national perspective. Then we're going to go into a regional perspective with specific sites in the New England area, and then we'll finish with a southern museum in North Carolina. Our first speaker is Susan Farentinos, who's a consultant who works in historic preservation and museum practice and historical research, specializing in LGBTQ history, gender history, and the history of sexuality. She's assisted the National Park Service in identifying potential LGBTQ-related national historic landmarks and is currently writing a historic context statement for the State of Maryland on that subject matter. She's the author of the book, Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites, which won in 2006 the Book Award from the National Council on Public History. Well yeah, so this is extremely fun afternoon for me. As Jay mentioned, I work both in museums and in the preservation side of things, historic preservation. And specifically within museums, my area of specialty is interpretation. So for the non-professionals in the room, that is, let's say, the ways that a museum interprets scholarly knowledge for a wide audience. So that's the tours, the exhibits, the walking tour pamphlets, those sorts of things. So the title of my talk was submitted maybe about a month ago, and when I submitted this title, I was expecting to give a pretty standard talk that I give about the joys and challenges of talking about LGBTQ identities at historic sites. But then as I was talking with my panelists and I've been kind of on tour the last couple weeks attending conferences and giving talks and being exposed to all these new ideas, I decided that at this particular moment when we're here on the cusp of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall that maybe I was ready to give a new talk. But had some worries about that, but they were assuaged by Matt because he touched on many of those issues that I traditionally talk about but are not today. But the, as he said, just the cliff notes of that talk are, it's not as easy as you would think to just like for historic sites to be necessarily talking about these identities because even though we as members of the public can visit these sites and just like, you know, the gay aesthetic is like wafting out of the house, like, and it's so obvious or, you know, you see the picture of the lady of the house and you're like, oh, she's family, you know. The practices that museums are bound by are more stringent than that, right? They can't be entirely anecdotal, they need to rely on evidence, evidence is hard to come by like explicit evidence, particularly for pre, say, 1950s historical figures. And then, you know, there were even the very categories of same sex love and desire and gender identity either didn't exist or were very different historically. So that being said, I do know that many people in this room and I certainly have been working for many years to get historic houses to talk about it, to either identify people who they can identify as LGBTQ to their visitors to the museums or to talk about what evidence does exist, what evidence doesn't exist and kind of give some substance to the question. And I don't think we have necessarily, you know, I don't think that work is over by any means, but I do think that really significant progress has been made. Yes. So these are just a few of the historic houses that do acknowledge very specifically their LGBTQ associations at this point. Some of them are very recently doing that and others have been, well I should say that others, two of the ones on this slide, Azores South and the home of Henry Gerber are national, one is National Register, one is National Landmark. In their documentation, they talk very explicitly about LGBTQ associations, neither of those houses is open to the public as a historic house museum. So good progress, I mean, there's still work to be done, but there's good progress here. I just hope that, you know, every year we're going to see more and more houses talking about LGBTQ identities, but in my experience and I spend a good amount of my time going to historic house museums either to consult with them or to just see what the state of the field is in house interpretation. And I have to say I'm surprised at how unsatisfying after like all, like devoting a significant part of my career to this effort that it can be unsatisfying to be on a historic house tour that have a museum that is acknowledging LGBTQ identities. And so it's like the build up and then it says this person lived here with their same sex partner for 40 years. Let's look at the Damascus wallpaper, you know, and like that is it. So that's something, but I want to talk about like what's the next step, what you know what is coming down the pike or what I personally hope is coming down the pike. So what I would like to see step, step two, you know, if we're in the middle of step one, I would say step two is to I would like to see the interpretation of historic house museums begin to talk more substantively about why how LGBTQ identities impacted this site contributed to the historical significance of this site. It's also relevant for the preservationists in the crowd because within national register documentation or other types of designation, we can just mention that a person had characteristics that are relevant to what we identify now as LGBTQ. Or again, we can really engage with how that affected the fact that this person is now historically significant. So as some examples of what I'm thinking, this is such a great house and it's a great story because from very early on, then the US National Trust who owns this site has been acknowledging that this is the home of a gay couple. Because Phillip Johnson, the architect of this house was a gay man and lived here with his partner. So how are those, how is the fact that this is a beautiful architectural masterpiece connected to the fact that it was designed by a gay man? Is it connected? It might be because as a societal outsider, perhaps many of the great artists, authors, architects that we know who were LGBTQ, maybe that outsider status helped them break through the expectations of their art and move beyond that and create something revolutionary. Another example, this woman's house is not on the national register, but I recently completed a briefing statement arguing for it to become a national historic landmark and that was commissioned by the National Park Service for me to do this. Lucy Diggs-Slow, first Dean of Women of Howard University and the building associated with her is her home that she shared with a female partner again for about 40 years. And perhaps on the surface, her significance seems not directly related to what we see in the past and recognize as something relevant to LGBTQ identities. But she is significant for being a really vocal advocate for African American girls education. That is how she got the job as the first Dean of Women at Howard and she has a lot of other background as an advocate in that area. How does the fact that she remained unmarried her whole life and in fact partnered with a woman, how did that motivate her to want to ensure that young girls could be financially independent in a sustainable way by obtaining education? I do think there's the potential for connection there. And finally, under this question, how does the interplay of second wave feminism, lesbian separatism and the concept of intersectionality, which is the idea that identity is multifaceted and there's not a universal experience of, say, a lesbian or African American, that various facets of identity intersect with each other. How do all those different schools of thought in the 1970s come together and are represented in this, the San Francisco Women's Building? The San Francisco Women's Building recently added to the National Register for, in part, its LGBTQ associations and it is a building that has served as the home of women oriented social change organizations for 40 years now. So that's step, that's definitely step two. How can we actually talk substantively about how sexual or gender transgression impacted the work that these people did in the world? Now I'm getting a little pie in the sky, admittedly, but I do hope that at some point we will also be in a position where we can maybe ask some harder questions. We can maybe consider topics that are relevant, but that our communities have maybe gotten into political hot water in the past before. So there are kind of hot button issues. One such issue would be the idea that people might legitimately choose to live a sexually or gender transgressive life historically rather than kind of the party line of being biologically compelled in this direction. And I'm thinking particularly, I don't mean to be suggesting specifically that Molly Deuce and her partner fell into this category, but I put them up there as representative of early 20th century female couples. And if you were an educated woman in the early 20th century and you had good work to do in the world, there were a lot of good reasons to partner with a woman rather than a man or to remain single, for instance. And we see evidence of that. There's like scads of female couples within the early female professions and early politics as Molly Deuce was. So again, can we talk about that or is it still too politically dangerous to open that door? Likewise, I would love to see us talk about the history of power dynamics within relationships, particularly male-male relationships. There's a lot of historical evidence that that was very common, but I have not seen it talked about very much in the museum world. And finally, just as an example, I mean we can go on and on about tricky topics, but I think that there is something to be learned by thinking about the ways that oppressed groups sometimes are very quick to cling to the aspects of privilege that they do have. And hence, not join in solidarity with other oppressed groups, but instead turn on them. I mean we see this arguably in the current political climate with displaced white laborers signing on to the exclusionary politics of the Trump administration. Those are not powerful people. However, there's something involved in the current political climate that is appealing to that group even though it is hurting other disenfranchised groups. Likewise, within the LGBTQ community, you often see different parts of those letters or different other identities within the LGBTQ umbrella fighting with each other and failing to acknowledge privilege within that community. And I think that could lead to, well, certainly a lot of great conversations and also some historical insight if we were willing to engage in those questions. And just as an aside, also let's break down the very concept of the Historic House Museum. I mean Matt was touching on that a little bit and some of the other panelists in this panel will be talking about it. But the very historical basis of that type of museum is an effort of the elite to preserve beautiful homes and decorative arts. And so is that even a viable vehicle for the future and particularly if we're trying to engage substantively with LGBTQ experiences. Another pie in the sky part of my personal agenda is that I would like to see all of the House museums or all the historic properties on the National Register engaging with the idea that normalised identities as well as transgressive identities are socially constructed, historically contingent and require analysis, right, heteronormativity, the nuclear family, you know, cisgender experiences and how that's rewarded in a way that transgressive gender is punished. Like that, I mean that's a topic for all rich, rich topic and I would love to, for the museums that are tackling LGBTQ identities to then challenge their peer institutions to also interrogate some of these characteristics. And so just to quickly sum up, if you're really sad that I didn't give my standards spiel, it's basically a condensation of this book, so you know. But also I think, I mean we're going into a momentous anniversary and I think the aftermath of that is going to really shake up our professions, both of museums and preservation. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens when we like clear it up, you know, bring what we bring to these professions and really engage with the professional questions substantively. So thank you. The next speaker will be Ken Torino, who's the manager of community engagement and exhibitions at Historic New England, which is the oldest, largest and most comprehensive regional heritage organisation in the country. He oversees projects throughout New England, including an ongoing partnership with the History Project in Boston that documents and preserves that city's LGBTQ history. He regularly lectures on the topic of interpretation of LGBTQ history at museums and historic sites and has contributed to numerous publications on this subject. I'm going to see if I can talk faster than Matt. That's my goal because I have a lot to cover this afternoon and I'm going to fill in some of those gaps because I've been working with Sue for a number of years. You heard I work at Historic New England. These are 37 of our 38 historic properties. More are coming online. We have another house that will come online in the next few years of an LGBT gay couple in Maine, so that's kind of breaking news. These houses are basically the houses of dead rich white guys, occasionally a dead rich white woman, but we are, and I'm going to talk a little bit in my talk today about what's happening in the field of historic houses in general. I teach a course on that and lecture on that too. I'm going to give you a number of mini case studies, what's happening at some of our properties, but also at some of other properties in the region of New England. I just picked New England because I live there. A lot of what I'm going to be talking about is happening at houses around the country. First, I really have to say that the work really in interpreting and promoting LGBTQ history has been that of preservationists and the archives more than the museum field. These are just some markers and we heard about markers mentioned earlier today in Ohio, Philadelphia. Kansas City is probably the newest one on the bottom right. Really, really interesting work that's gone on there and the archives they have at the university in Kansas City are just amazing. So queer people have been making contributions to our society ever since we've been a society and it's about time they're getting recognized. I'm just going to put up a couple of exhibitions because I think it's important to talk about history museums too. These are some that some may be known to you. This was a landmark exhibition in 2012 in a great publication in the Chicago History Museum. Are some of you familiar with Hide and Seek? Okay, great. So you know the story about that. The curator said that he was trying to break, quote, a blacklist on queer representation in the U.S. museum world. And that was something, if you know that there was the Republican House speaker attacked it, as did the Catholic League piece by a New Yorker. David Wozhenowicz's piece was withdrawn from that exhibition. Many of you are familiar with this traveling exhibition, but these exhibitions are really important and they're going on. So what's going on in New York? I went to the New York Public Library yesterday and I think these are all great. But what really excites me is when this is incorporated into the overall history of our country. And I'm seeing that more and more. This is one site in part of the permanent exhibition in California, but I could go on. My partner is from Seattle, so we visit this site a lot. He tells me all about the Lusty Lady bar that he used to go to and Shelly's Leg. Ask me at the bar about Shelly's Leg, and I'll tell you all about it. But also, you know, the Museum of the City of New York. It's incorporated into their permanent exhibitions. I personally want to see more and more of that happen. And I do appreciate the temporary exhibitions. This was also in Seattle, and this was a community-generated exhibition. It wasn't just the museum professionals doing this. It was the LGBT community curating this exhibition. And I think that that's also really, really important. We at Historic Sites have been suffering for many years for a number of reasons. Part of that has to do with declining attendance, part of that has to do with sustainability, and part of that has to do with preservation. So we've been looking at new ways to engage our visitors. This is based on a study that we did at Historic New England about what our audiences want. And I want you to look at the relevant to them. You can combine these all together, as these guys are. And that was backed up by, this was just in the latest issue of Museum, put out by the American Alliance of Museums. Culture Track did a study of more than 4,000 demographically diverse people from across the nation, asking them why do they see cultural experiences? And part of that is learning something new or feeling inspired. I think we can build on these to one thing that we want in our museums is to attract younger audience who are more open. So the relevancy, I think, is what is really important here. And just to put it in perspective of what's happening in museums in general, Historic Sites, 10 years ago you would not hear the story of enslaved people at Monticello. It might be mentioned, but very, very little of it. That whole thing has changed now. It's a big part, oops, I just shut it off. The interpretation, The New York Times wrote about this, last June it opened a newly opened space which presents the living quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore the founding fathers' children. This is new. This is big. This is important stories for us to tell. Not far from here in Hartford. I love the mission of this museum. The mission of this museum is to inspire you to change your world. That's some mission. I was just there last week, I think Sue was too, and they have conversations. It's not just a tour talking about the wallpaper. It's a tour where they have original documents that you get to hand, well, copies, you handle, you discuss as you go through the house, and it talks about the impact of the anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and how it's relevant today, and it leaves you inspired to change, to create positive change. I'm on the board of the house of Seven Gables. That was a settlement house, and that's still part of our mission today. Social service, and what we do, copied from the Stowe House and many other house museums do it, is have these community conversations, and some of the topics can be on LGBTQ. You can see one that has to do with immigration here. Now, in the terms of LBTG, LB, you know what I'm trying to say, history, it's not all success stories. This is not, the next two are not our houses, and this is the house of F. Holland Day, and it's on the National Register. Who knows who F. Holland Day is? Okay, okay. Who was he? Photographer. Okay, let's look at a couple of his. At the turn of the century, his influence and reputation as a photographer rivaled that of Alfred Stieglitz. Fortunately, most of his work was destroyed. The rest is actually, the majority is in Britain, the Royal Photography Society. And many of his works were considered homoerotic. The photograph on the left is actually him with one of his male models. He also photographed the English socialist poet and English gay activist, philosopher, and one of the founders of the Fabian Society, Edward Carpenter, and that's another one of his models. But look what the website says. We know that he had same-sex relationships, but the house does not want to talk about that, and they actually have this up, a disclaimer on their website, which they are in the process, I hope, of changing. Another quick example is this house, the Emily Dickinson house. And they have been struggling with how to discuss with visitors Dickinson's life and poetry and her relationship with her sister-in-law who live next door. Many historians believe that the relationship between the two was a love relationship. If you've heard of the movie Wild Nights with Emily with Molly Shannon, it's not what you're thinking. It shows this as a lifelong love relationship. The New York Times in 1998 revealed that many edits were made to Dickinson's work taking out Susan's name deliberately. At least 11 of Dickinson's poems were also dedicated to her sister-in-law, Susan Hamilton Gilbert. So this is one of my former staff works there, and they're really struggling with that. But there are success stories, and this is one. Sue and I, several years ago, wrote an article entering the mainstream interpreting LGBT history at historic sites. So I'm going to put in some of your lecture. And one of the reasons that we found that sites don't tell the history is because family members are still involved, and donors don't want the story to be told. Well, that was the case of this museum in the back bay in Boston. Charlie Gibson, it was his home, he lived there first. It was the family home. He lived there with his mother later on, and then separately. He was 1874 to 1954. He wanted to preserve the family's heritage. And we do know from correspondents, not necessarily between him, more about his sexuality than we did in the past. But they also had a staff person, a curator of 30 years, who did not want this story told. Progress has been made. This is Hannah Barrett, a New York artist in recent years, and they've started to change. Why? Family members have left the board. The curator of 30 years has left. She interpreted some of her feelings about the house and what we know about Charlie, and they did a show in the house, which actually got a lot of press. The good part about this is it's more than just saying that Charlie was gay. Now they're doing unveiling in June specialty tour that will be run periodically, not just on Pride Month. And they're going to talk about the key themes that Charlie Gibson was part of a thriving gay cell culture in late 19th century Boston, although this contributed to the conflict between Charlie and his family. And also, by preserving his family home, he was part of a growing movement to preserve historic houses led by women and gay men. So that's a story to be told, and I'm advisory on the interpretive plan for that. This is one of our historic New England houses. This may predate the glass house in talking about a gay man. But for many years, when people went through this house, this is Charlie Gibson. He was an interior designer. His house was an inspiration to Henry David Sleeper. No, excuse me, Henry Francis Dupont for winter tour. This house is 40 rooms. Each has a different theme of a historical or literary figure. It's all about color, shape, designs, and objects. And for this reason alone, it's one of our most popular houses. We could just leave it as one of our most popular houses. And it really is stunning on Gloucester Harbor. For years, we just interpreted he never married, right? But what we found was proof. And this is what we were talking about. Matt was talking about this. What constitutes proof? And in this case, it was in oral history with his nephew, who talked about going there for the parties that were had there with his lover, not Sleepers. So you get an idea of how stunning this house is. So that's Sleeper. The woman in the veil is Isabelle. Sleeper on the right is Isabelle Stewart Gardner. The man at the top right is his next door neighbor, a Pied Andrew, who was a professor at Harvard, one of their youngest. He became a Massachusetts state senator. He was a gay man. We know from his diaries, which are still in the family's possession. Sleeper, and this is one of the things that Sue and I talked about in our article, his papers were destroyed by the family. So how do you know? We know now because of the oral history. The letters between him and a Pied Andrew show a strong friendship. That's the only correspondence that does survive. So we made the decision once we had the proof that we were going to interpret this as the home of a gay man. We are and have been doing that for over a decade. And we had to do, you were talking about guides, you know, volunteers at the sites. How do you train them? Well, a lot of the guides were older and we gave them, they were paid. You know, this is what we're paying you to do. You do it or you leave. And some left because they couldn't do it. And that to me was fine. I've subsequently done some training and we gave them some talking points. They have to tell this story and they can tell more or less of it. But we give them some things. This is if you can see the Chase Sanborn ad for surprisingly domestic well-known bachelors. There is Sleeper. I gave you a blow up on the right. But if you notice Gary Cooper is also there who is known to have same sex relationships. So how do we do more to add on to this? Oh, we found new evidence. This is about a bachelor house. Henry Sleeper's house was a bachelor house. And one of his friends wrote far from the Maddening Girls about bachelor's houses. And he dedicated it to Sleeper. So with digging we've been able to find more evidence. And we've been starting to offer work with the history project to offer special programs and tours. And we've been doing this now for also over a decade. And we've been doing things like walking tours that we had today of the neighborhood. That group photograph I showed you with Isabelle Stewart Gardner. Many of those people lived in the neighborhood. It's on a neck in Gloucester Harbor so it was isolated. It was a safe space for gay people and for people to come and spend the weekend and for parties. So we talk about that. This is Tripp Evans who is a historian who is working on a book called Bachelor Houses. And we're doing programs like this to talk about more and more that we've discovered. So it's not one shot deals. We want to make it a welcoming place too. So we advertise in LGBTQ publications. We make it a welcoming place for weddings and so on. And that's not supposed to be there. And right now to add up as we found more information we're ramping up and we're doing these special pride tours. They're not just a pride month. They're regular tours but we now include excerpts from letters and other things that we've been able to piece together to tell a more complete story. So we piloted that last year and it's happening. So we have events like this and then you can just kick back on the terrace and enjoy the beautiful view of the harbor. I want to talk about another one of our properties very quickly and this one's more of a problem. And this was family members have been still involved with this. Ogden Codman's family built this house in 1740 and used it as a country estate. But it reflects the taste of its most famous resident, Ogden Codman Jr., who is known today for his and co-author Edith Wharton's highly influential publication, The Decoration of Houses. So this is the estate. This is his aesthetic, what he did. The idea here is the family is still involved and our organization has had a really hard time with this because they said, well, this is the house, this is the story of all the people that live there, not just Ogden Codman, but he is the most significant figure there. And the thing about it is we do have the documentation. People were talking today about how difficult it is to have things before the 50s. Well, we have this material that's going back to the late 19th century, early 20th century. So after we got the house, we found hidden in a bookcase his erotica collection. And it was perfect. I can't show you it, but I mean it's really wonderful. But we have all the letters too. So his best friend was Arthur Little of Little and Brown. And he's writing to Arthur Little, who was in Italy. Please bring me back these pictures of Italian boys. Guess what we found? Italian boy pictures. And his correspondence is amazing. So Arthur Little designed this book plate for Ogden Codman. What does that tell you? It's not the Florida League. And here we have one of part of Ogden Codman's collection came up for auction recently. What does this tell you? We partner with the History Project again to do specialty program here. And that's basically all we've been doing. So it's ripe for more interpretation. And I know I'm running out of time, so I'm going to focus on the new interpretation at this site. Sarah Orange-Jewitt, in South Burwick. Sarah Orange-Jewitt was an author. And she was partnered in 1870. She was 21 and met, lived in South Burwick and Boston. And she met 36-year-old Annie Adams Field, wife of publisher James T. Fields of the Atlantic Monthly, who published some of Sarah's poems. And over the many subsequent summers, the women established a friendship. And then her biographer, Sarah Sherman, wrote, sometime in the winter of 1881 in the wake of James Field's death, Annie Fields and Sarah Jewitt fell in love. And Judith Roman, Field's biography, concurs noting, Annie and Sarah's relationship was more reciprocal than Annie's marriage had been. So just to show you what we're doing now is, this is a period image that shows you her bedroom. Here it is today, not much changed at all over the period. But what we have done is really analyze the use of the space. So the first or last thing that Sarah Orange-Jewitt saw in this very private space was the photograph on the mantle of her partner, Annie Fields. And also next to her bed was a mirror. And if you look at that mirror, what's it reflecting? That very photograph that's in the mantle. So if she turned one way she would see it, if she looked straight ahead she would see it. That really tells you a lot. So last year we incorporated a tour using their love letters but those also survived. So we are trying to tell more of the story through that and fortunately in our case we have some of those documents. This was a long, you know, before we used to call this a Boston marriage. And someone asked about the term on the tour today. And that was coined by Henry James in his novel The Bostonian to talk about two women who cohabitated in a long-term relationship. Well, you know, yes. But we know more about the two women who were here and we're trying to tell a more truthful story. So I'm going to just end with saying, I'm going to talk about this, there's more still happening. This house that we hope will be coming online belongs to Connecticut Landmarks and it was lived in by a gay couple, Frederick Palmer and Howard Metzger. And Sue and I are going to be working at a workshop to discuss some of these questions because this house goes back to the 18th century but the real period of significance is that long-term relationship and they do have the diaries which they didn't know they had. The house had been sealed for 10 years. It even talks about the day they met in a gay bar in New York City. Everything is there. So this is all breaking news. We're going to be working on this and I hope that we can tell a much more inclusive story. So I just want to say we have to, we are responsible for telling more inclusive stories. We have to tell stories about gay people of color. We have to find sites to do that. Sue's mentioned some. We have to talk about trans people. We have to do more in this field and have sites that represent all the different aspects that make our country so great. Thank you. Our final speaker of the day will be Barbara Lau who's the executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice which is a national historic landmark site in Durham, North Carolina. Anchored by Murray's childhood home, the Center honors the legacy of this African-American LGBTQ gender non-conforming activist, lawyer, poet, and priest. Lau's credits include producing an original play and curating an exhibition about Murray and teaching undergraduate courses about LGBTQ history and culture. I always love seeing pictures of Pauli so big on the screen. So let me, when we were preparing for this, one of the questions that came up was how many people here might have even ever heard of Pauli Murray? So just, oh that's fantastic. So I'm going to share a little bit with you about Pauli and about our efforts to bring her childhood home online as part of a larger Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. So when we think about who Pauli was, we can think about the ways that many historians are now acknowledging her work in many, many public spheres which we'll talk about really briefly. But you could also think about her in the way that Brittany Cooper, who is a professor at Rutgers University, recently referred to her in Ancelon.com as the black queer feminist erased from history meet the most important legal scholar you've likely never heard of. And I think we can just even see from these photographs and Pauli was an avid photographic collector that she shares a lot with us in many, many ways. There are 900 photographs in her archival collection at Schlesinger Library and 2,500 folders of materials. She was sort of famous for her carbon copies. But part of the reason that the site in Durham is so important is because of these people, the people that helped to raise Pauli. On your right are her grandparents, Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald. Both mixed race people, one from a consensual relationship, one from a non-consensual relationship. Very strong personalities. Robert was an educator, a Civil War veteran, someone who came south after the Civil War to fight what he called the Second Great War, the war against ignorance. Cornelia was a strong Episcopalian who had a very complicated relationship with her racial identity, was very proud of her white father, who in fact fathered her because he raped her mother, but also really was in some sense a bit of the moral center of this family. And the woman on your right, the woman for whom Pauli is named Mary Pauline, Fitzgerald Dame, who after her sister Agnes, who had six children very quickly, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1914, took on taking care of Pauli. The other five children stayed in Baltimore where they were born. Pauli was from a young age, seen as someone who was maybe not going to be like everyone else, and Agnes even asked her sister, if there were to happen to me, will you please take care of Pauli? And she grew up in this house, which is built in 1898 in Durham, considered a relatively large house for this era in a part of Durham that was an African American working class neighborhood. Robert's brother Richard became one of the richest African American men in the state of North Carolina because he was a astute businessman and a very good brick maker. And as Durham grew right after the Civil War, because of the tobacco industry, there was a great need for buildings built of brick and other structures, and he quickly diversified into residential development and so created this neighborhood, the West End neighborhood, which is where the house still is. It continues to be primarily an African American neighborhood, although it's been really impacted by gentrification for five to ten years. So Pauli actually has a really interesting relationship here with Columbia and Barnard, because after she graduated from high school, and despite getting a full scholarship to Wilberforce, she decided she wanted to go out of the South into a big city, into an integrated environment, and many of her teachers had attended summer school here at Columbia, so she decided she was going to come here to Columbia, and this was 1926. She was not admitted to Columbia. They centered at Barnard. They suggested at Barnard. She really didn't have the resources to attend Barnard. They centered at Hunter, where she discovered that her 11 grades was not enough to even apply. So she actually had to get another high school degree here in New York before she could attend Hunter, which she did, and she graduated into the middle of the Depression. Now it was at this point that Pauli began acting more on a lot of experiences she even had as a child, where she did many things that at the time were not considered consistent with her gender. She had a paper route. She was very forthright about her own activism, even as a child refusing to ride segregated buses to take her to the high school across town. But she made this series of amazing photographs. We think of them as early selfies that depicted these ways that she was thinking about herself. So in these, you see the dude and the imp. There was the acrobat and the poet and the vagabond and the crusader. These photographs are very small. They're like an inch and a half by three inches. Of course, when we did our exhibit, we made them three feet by six feet so that you could get a sense of Pauli really sort of living large into these. But it's this point that Pauli born and a Pauline decides to be Pauli. And she actually experiments at this time with several names, Pete. She was sort of interested in Peter Pan. She had a very hard time after graduation supporting herself. She was actually hospitalized for an amount of nutrition at times. She was going back and forth with jobs. She dressed as a boy and with a friend jumped boxcars and went to California. Very transgressive as you might think. But also in the midst of what was happening here in New York at that time, there was a very fervent conversation about capitalism, socialism, economies, politics, arts in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. She was associated with a lot of these folks. Our tour today made me want to go back and look at the files again to look at every person she corresponded with and to think about people that I may not be aware of that might have had interesting influences on her. She was the only daughter of two single aunts. She was called back to North Carolina to help take care of them. Aunt Pauline was 40 when young Pauly came to live with her. And so she decided maybe she'd kill two birds with one stone and she would go back to graduate school. So in 1938, she applied to graduate school in a new program in sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Which, by the way, her great-grandfather's family had helped to endow. So she was not admitted. She was rejected because people of her race were not admitted to UNC at that time. It wouldn't be until 1953 that African-Americans were admitted to graduate programs at UNC. But she was very incensed because President Roosevelt visited the school right around the same time she got the rejection letter and talked about how progressive the school was. So this started what would become a huge pattern in Pauly Murray's life. She fired off this letter to the president about how wrong he was and copied it to his wife with notes about what Eleanor needed to tell Franklin to be doing. Now, she got a form letter back from Franklin but Eleanor wrote back a personal note and it began a correspondence that lasted until Eleanor's death and has recently been written about so beautifully by Patricia Bell Scott in a book called The Firebrand and the First Lady. But it was through this particular experience when Pauly tried to get the NAACP to take her case which they initially did and then they realized she was not the model defendant. You know, a lot of this material she'd already published under the name Pauly. She had already was already someone who was known in the community for a more male presenting presentation and so they in the end didn't take her case. Of course they had to be very careful. They didn't have unlimited resources but it was at this moment when she decided and she said one woman plus a typewriter equals a movement. That she could take that on herself. She was gonna mount her own media campaign. She was gonna visit the campus. All those kind of things and these kinds of activities, direct action and use of words is very powerful sort of went throughout her life. She worked about labor. She worked on some sharecropping issues in 1940. She was arrested for not sitting in the right seats on a bus but she ended up meeting a bunch of lawyers who were out there fundraising with her while she was trying to raise money to represent a sharecropper from Virginia who convinced her that maybe the law was the way. She really had aspired to having a career as a writer but she was accepted to Howard Law School. She graduated at the top of her class despite professors asking why she was taking up a seat that should belong to a man and it was during this time that she began to understand that the oppression she was experiencing was not just because of her race but also because of her gender so she coined the term Jane Crow which we might think of as a precursor to Kimberly Crenshaw's work around intersectionality. Now the person who graduates at the top of their class receives a scholarship which they usually take to Harvard to get another law degree and come back and teach which was Polly's intention so of course she applied to Harvard and she was denied of course because they didn't admit women at this time despite having these amazing recommendation letters from people like Franklin Roosevelt. She went to California she got that LLM degree at the University of California at the Bolt School of Law where she became the first African American woman to be named an assistant attorney general in the state and she represented Japanese families after World War II who were trying to reclaim property that had been taken from them when they were forced into the relocation camps. So we can see that Polly was a firebrand, right? I don't even have time to tell you all of the things that Polly did. This is just a list of some of those things some of the ways that she was challenging the system some of the ways that she was making up language to describe her experience when the language she had access to didn't work some of the ways that the doors were closed in her face and other times when the doors finally opened. On the back table is a more complete timeline for Polly's life if you're interested please pick one up. So interestingly about her same-sex relationship she was actually arrested in the 1920s dressed as a boy in Connecticut taken to Bellevue Hospital talking about hormone treatment. So she had been doing research about what was happening in Europe around issues of sexuality and seeing the doctors there were using hormones to treat effeminate men and she was like, well how come that can't work for me? Why she actually asked her doctors in the United States to give her hormones to help her be more male. She felt that there was a man really trapped inside of her she found herself attracted to very feminine heterosexual women trying to make sense of her own experience trying to live within the politics of respectability surrounding her family this was some of the ways that she thought about herself. In the 1950s when she comes back to New York again because the aunts need to retire and they want to move up here with her and she's been working on a she couldn't open a practice she had a very hard time opening a practice and instept the Methodist women who commissioned her to create a book create a pamphlet outlining all the laws in the United States related to race and color. Four years later she delivered a 900 page document which became what Thurgood Marshall referred to as the Bible for civil rights litigators because it compiled all of this information that they didn't always have access to. She had also started work on a memoir which was called Proud Shoes an incredible book about her grandparents and the family and her life growing up in Durham and the source, the primary source material that we have about her childhood home and about the site. Unfortunately neither of the aunts, Sally and Pauline that had come to live with her in New York were able to see the publication of that even though they had contributed and it was very hard in 1956 when that book came out to celebrate that without them but it was at the same period that she was hired at Paul Weiss a very prestigious law firm here in New York she was the only female associate of course by this time she was much older this was in the 1950s so she's in her 40s most of the other associates are much younger but it's here that she meets Irene Barlow Pauline had a series of relationships throughout her life but Irene was a fellow Episcopalian someone who believed in the rights of women and with whom she would be in a relationship although not able to live together for the next almost 20 years so we can also see that Paulie was a great achiever in addition to that two high school degrees there's three law degrees two divinity degrees she publishes several books she spends a little time in the late 1950s early 1960s in Ghana teaching constitutional law when they don't have a textbook she writes one she comes back and she goes to Yale Law School to get her JSD degree where she also mentors young women that we know today Marion Wright Edelman, Eleanor Holmes Norton Catherine Roberts Harris many people are influenced by Paulie who we hear from stories used to bake them cakes on their birthdays but it's when Irene dies that we see one of the major shifts in Paulie's life Irene has cancer she dies in 1973 together they had really worked on challenging the gender limitations in the Episcopal Church and so despite having finally some real stability in her life as a tenured professor at Brandeis University she makes the decision at this point to leave and go back to divinity school so this is she's in her 60s at this point I think about this because I'm 61 and I think what would it be like for me to leave my career or my security and decide to go back to school or a third of my age she hopes that in a year after attending school the Episcopal Church will make the smart decision to allow women to be ordained as ministers but no, she has to wait three more years and so in 1977 she is ordained the first African-American woman as an Episcopal priest but I want to just go back because one of the things when we talk about evidence Paulie left amazing records again did not use the word lesbian we might think about her these days as having a gender non-conforming or a gender fluid identity or identifying herself as trans but one of the things that I use as evidence is this picture from Brooklyn where she's buried with her partner with the two aunts and with her partner's mother so you know, I joke with people although it's of course not funny I say people where I come from don't get buried with their friends they get buried with their family Paulie was an attorney this is laid out in her will very specifically what should be on the tombstone who's buried where, all of that kind of thing so Paulie goes on to many sermons and essays and dies in 1985 in Pittsburgh but one of the things that we started to think about thank you over the course of her life Paulie lived at 50 addresses and so how did we want to make the case that the site in Durham is the most important how do we think of historic monuments and memorials as human rights work we were able to buy this house in 2011 it was literally going to become a parking lot and to begin to work to place save so I don't think about place making I don't think about place saving the woman depicted in the center of this picture is our architect she was the first black woman who was licensed as an architect in the state of North Carolina and why did she come to Durham 20 years before we started this project because of Paulie Murray so Paulie's spirit is a very powerful thing it brings us many gifts and relationships including some of these preservation partnerships National Trust program officer who lived in South Carolina but unfortunately had cancer and would come to Durham to see the doctors at Duke and visited with us that led to us being named a national treasure which you know means you're important but you're in trouble they asked me to write a blog post and when this was announced and six weeks later I had a significant check with this corporate partner who read that and was very moved by the story I wanted to give you a sense about the actual transition of the house you see that picture from 1910 another one from 1933 a sense of what it looked like when we bought it we also started to think about the site and what the site might tell us about the experiences of folks in this in this house they had a very interesting relationship with the cemetery water from the cemetery would run down under the house lots of correspondence with the city starting to remove all the non-historic material from inside the house and uncover what was underneath and finally to transform that house into something that looks a lot like it looked in 1910 it was at that point that we were very lucky to again work with another partner the National Collaborative for Women's History sites to commission the NHL nomination and on December 23rd 2016 just before a certain president went out of office we became a National Historic Landmark which we celebrated in January or in April of 2017 but that is not the story the story is not about the place the story is about what we're going to do there we are not really drawn to the typical period furniture re-creation set this in a particular period of time we decided that like Pauly we weren't going to necessarily be bound by the sort of structures of the ways things usually are done so one of the ways we're doing that is to host this series of think tanks we tried to think about the through lines of Pauly's life which we came up with as activism faith and spirit, creativity I didn't even mention Pauly's poetry justice and her family and Durham so when we think about that what is the call what is Pauly Murray calling us to do one of those is to challenge those frameworks who sets up those frameworks in periods of history why do we have to be bound by them how do we honor our own experience like Pauly did she didn't have the words to describe what she called her he she personality or her multiple experiences of oppression so she just made up the words she made up the phrases she did the best she could with what she had to describe what was happening she didn't try to conform to the ways other people were talking about it how is queerness a way of seeing and being so Rosalind Rosenberg from your own university here wrote a recent biography of Pauly where she talks about Pauly's queerness as the gateway to new thinking the gateway to see things in a different way to not be bound by all of that and then also this idea about radical welcome right if a 17 year old Pauly showed up at our site and didn't feel welcome we would have failed so our goal is less about interpreting history than it is by using history as a tool to inspire future activism it's about history arts education and mobilization I have to say I just came from a gathering of inaugural gathering in Birmingham, Alabama called Queer History South the work of us oral historians and historians beginning to think about how those stories get translated into power my time is up but I wanted to just say that one of our goals is to foster the future fire brands who are the people talking about things we're not ready for how do we embrace those conversations we do our work in numerous ways all the ways that you've heard that history organizations work plays and exhibits conversations we do things called poetry prose and sermon slams but I think that much of our work is inspired by this quote this last quote that's at the bottom of this that our responsibility is to the whole truth and sometimes that means we take on the work of grappling with the dignity and degradation of all of our ancestors we certainly hope to be open in 2020 we already do a lot of programming there but we want the house to be available and we would encourage you to read more and learn more about Paulie Murray at 35 years after she's died all of these books are now coming out about Paulie and Paulie's vision thank you all very much we're just going to touch on one thing first and I really want to throw it to the audience while we still have some time we've only touched on about 10,000 topics that we could start on I'm just genuinely interested if you could just briefly touch on how on earth some of these projects even were kick-started many people have talked about the resistance between the programs of the museums themselves about the stakeholders, families still hanging on and so on and so forth can you just like individually I mean you're very specific to the site but how you even started the conversation that ended up with a success there are ones that we know of that never had the success you mentioned one of them but I'm really just curious how a success story got achieved I'll just say with a couple of our properties it takes a person to champion it it really does and we had to really it could be a site manager it could be me partnering with the history project but also keep at it we just had to keep at it we had a queer site manager at Bowport and she worked on it I worked on it until we had the proof so they had to take the proof and they accepted it there but we're still struggling at some of our sites because of the other issues family who don't want the story told remember museums are dependent for people on money we really have to consider sustainability so that is an issue that we are dealing with and have to and I actually work as a historical consultant so you're the trouble maker well to tell you the truth there are a lot of house museums and other history museums out there that are eager to to tell a richer story of their sites or to be a little more practical regardless of other motivation is just they're eager to bring in a younger audience or a wider audience than are currently coming in to see the wallpaper so but they don't know how to start right they want to do a good job they want to be culturally sensitive but they don't have those resources and so so I play much more of a consulting role than an advocacy role although there certainly sites if anyone wants to play an advocacy role I have some ideas for you but I actually usually enter the game when the museum has already decided or at least someone in the museum on the museum staff has decided that it's time to at least explore the idea but they don't even know where to start so in our case the folks in the West End neighborhood early on really wanted to see our site preserved and so my role actually started in helping to facilitate that process but I would say that we are led by Pauly's own words about our responsibility to that whole truth and the work and as I tell people just telling her story is not enough if her story does not then inspire action that's really not the point of what we're doing it's not just about education but it is about taking the step beyond that and so yes we've had some challenges with folks in the family which is a sort of big and spread out family we've had conversations with them and some people have stepped away from the effort and other family members have stepped in so that is an ongoing conversation just like all of the other communities to whom we are accountable in our work so we just think of the family as one of the many kinds of communities that we try to work with and be accountable to so thank you Susan you mentioned the word unsatisfying when you were talking about and you also just brought up how should we start I think as professionals in the field maybe we can take a tip from our colleagues in San Francisco that instead of just having them to make the case for something to be historic we need to just have historic house museums be default gay because we know that that's true having to always prove our queerness and again speaking again about how this is problematic history is a problem so we're controlling this narrative as professionals so if we step forward that way I think that's an important step to take because always having to prove that and never having to prove heterosexual normative life it's we know that preservation is inherently queer you know survival albeit architectural survival is an act of queer resistance so we need to work harder to do that I think that's an excellent point thank you I think we have time for just one more question actually before we wrap up we've got a lot of volunteers for the final word everyone who has already commented I'm gonna come over here hello you know I'm so interested in the notion of diversity because year after year, decade after decade I come to these preservation gatherings and they are so undiverse so it seems to me and I just wonder how can you help I hope to gain greater diversity without having the stories of people of color telling their own story as preservationist and in terms of historic communities like Harlem but the other thing that interests me was you talking about Ogden Cobbins family house and I'd heard a long time ago about this cache of erotica and wondered do you feel you ever be in the position to exhibit it so one thing well you're touching on a lot of things I'll just answer the Ogden Cobbins and I have some thoughts on the other but the Cobbins thing is those papers and his letters were all sealed for decades so even when the history project was doing the history of Boston they weren't allowed to use them I'm happy to say now that they are open to scholars but that's not unusual to happen so will the photographs ever be displayed well the new book that will be coming out on bachelor houses will certainly have some material in it so look for that at this point I can't tell you anything more than that but I think can I just say something about the diversity thing because you're absolutely right and one of the things that in our field the museum field that we're doing is tried to encourage more people to enter the field because I agree with you how can you tell those stories without involving people so at our organization we heard us say 37 houses all dead rich white guys and a couple women thrown in so we've made an effort to try to address that so we're offering paid internships to people of color to help tell the stories because I have I should not be telling those stories I can work on the LGBTQ story but I think we need to encourage more people into our field and our field I can speak to you is struggling with that how do we attract more young people into the field I just want to smash the whole I mean I don't know exactly what to replace it with but the whole structure of preservation policy in this country is based on an assumption of the 1960s that is makes it you're just jamming stuff into a his conceptual model that applies to the white elite so it's I mean I work a lot with the National Park Service and for like 20 years at least they have been very sincerely trying to diversify the properties that the stories through the properties that are represented about the American past but they still hold on to the need like the integrity requirement that like structures need to not be substantially changed from their historic period that's a lot easier to accomplish if it's this beautiful grand mansion than if it's an under resourced person who like moves at 50 times in their lifetime and so I think the very conceptual structure of preservation is maddeningly working against you know a substantive body of preservationists who are trying to change things but haven't found the replacement structure so that's not a satisfying answer by any means but I like this conversation we've been having today about well maybe place based maybe building based programs aren't the way to capture this past maybe it's not the way to capture a lot of past and it's I'm not sure how much like traction it has in the preservation community but Ned Kauffman who's based here in New York City has a book on race, place and story and in it he talks about the concept of story scapes and how like place how meanings cultural meanings might be represented in ways that aren't like dead on about a particular geographic location