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A Tree Grows in Chicago
by Michael Bedwell
“No
matter where its seed fell, it made a
tree which struggled to reach the
sky.... this tree that men chopped
down...this tree that they built a
bonfire around, trying to burn up its
stump-this tree lived! It lived! And
nothing could destroy it. … It's growing
out of sour earth. And it's strong
because its hard struggle to live is
making it strong. My children will be
strong that way.”
- A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith,
Harper, 1943. |
From the beginning of the ever-expanding “It
Gets Better” campaign which has even enlisted
the President of the United States in
encouraging emerging LGBT youth to believe that
their future is going to be better than their
present populated by personal doubt and
bullying, I’ve felt that they’ve left out a
powerful component. Even those recorded by
well-known gay personalities about how they
prevailed over their own persecuted pasts are
missing any reference to the fact that there
have always been LGBT people, and how much
strength the young can draw from knowing that,
in their own way, they, too, come from a unique
“family tree.”
Until fairly
recently the average person could only identify
his or her ancestry by pouring through birth,
marriage, and death records in family Bibles.
Today it has become something of a major
industry with companies eager to sell others
online access to public records or even attempt
to match one’s DNA to that of others in their
data base. Perhaps such tests will one day play
a part in confirming a genetic basis for being
gay. Until then, other than learning the
occasional relative is/was also “that way,” all
we have are a handful of history books that too
few of any age today have read, and the
collections of letters, photos, and other
personal memorabilia donated to libraries which,
due to inadequate exhibit space, rarely, if
ever, leave their acid-proof folders and boxes.
A growing but still far too small sample of
images from some collections appear online, yet,
like their originals, they depend on people
knowing where to look. Due to precious
little funding, I’m aware of only five LGBT
historical groups in the entire country which
have the physical space to publicly display even
small parts of their collections, despite their
persistent passion and hard work. And those
exhibits must wait for people to come to them—at
only those days and hours when they’re able to
be open. This situation, combined with the
indifference of most non-LGBT scholars, and the
conscious efforts of some to hide or erase our
history, has produced generation after
generation of those both LGBT and not who are
almost totally ignorant of what our people have
contributed to the world.
But thanks to
activist Victor Salvo, and those he convinced to
join him in bringing to reality his 25-year old
dream first envisioned while viewing the AIDS
Memorial Quilt at the 1987 march on
Washington, Chicago
has literally taken some of our stories to
people in the street with its Legacy Walk, the
world’s first “outdoor museum” of LGBT history.
After years of major
fundraising, design creation, and countless
meetings with multiple city departments,
eighteen bronze plaques were dedicated on
October 11th for the project’s initial subjects
selected by a group of LGBT historians from a
list of over 160 suggestions. Financially
sponsored by individuals or corporations
including Levis, they beam from a series of
lit-at-night, 25-ft. tall “rainbow pylons”
installed by the city in 1998 as a salute to
Chicago’s diverse population along the half mile
of the North Halsted Street Corridor. Those
memorialized include artists, authors, and
activists; winners of the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the United Nations Peace Medal, and the
Purple Heart; a politician and a playwright and
poet; a doctor and a dancer; more than one who
died in the public closet, another by suicide,
and another by assassination. One went to jail
for fighting Jim Crow; another for fighting
Fidel Castro. Caucasian, African-American,
Hispanic, Asian, and Native American; gay men,
lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Some
who were single, some who had life partners, and
a married father of four. One of the leaders of
the successful fight to convince the American
Psychiatric Association to stop labeling gays
mentally ill, a mathematical genius who helped
win World War II, and a scientist who
unwittingly escalated the battle of the sexes.
One was a pacifist, and three were
military veterans including one chosen
from all the others to be featured in
the National Coming Out Day tented
ceremony attended by represen-tatives of
Illinois’ governor and Chicago’s mayor.
The proud nieces of onetime Air Force
TSgt. Leonard Matlovich, the first to
purposely out himself to challenge the
Pentagon’s ban on gays, were among those
who watched it unveiled, via
closed-circuit TV, as a color guard made
up of gay veterans stood attention while
two trumpeters from the Lakeside Pride
Band played Taps. Leonard’s
plaque was sponsored by Chicago
American Veterans for Equal Rights
president Jim Darby and his longtime
partner Patrick Bova. |
Photo by Hal Baim/Windy City Times
www.windycitytimes.com |
Chicago AVER President Jim Darby, Leonard’s nieces Vicki
Walker and Pam Sanders, Jim’s partner Patrick Bova
As the neighborhood is both an international tourist
destination and the host of Chicago’s annual pride
parade, an estimated million and a half people a year
will discover his story in bronze as well as those of
gay martyr and Korean War-era Navy veteran Harvey Milk,
British WWII code breaker Alan Turing, iconic activist
Barbara Gittings, civil rights legend Bayard Rustin,
physician and founder of the Women's Naval Reserves Dr.
Margaret Chung, sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey, writers
James Baldwin, Reinaldo Arenas, and Oscar Wilde,
transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen (who served in
the US Army pre-transition as George William Jorgensen,
Jr.), social justice pioneer Jane Addams, Puerto Rican
activist/educator Dr. Antonia Pantoja, choreography
great Alvin Ailey, artists Keith Haring and Frida Kahlo,
Congress-woman Barbara Jordan, and the Two Spirit People
of Native American/Canadian First Nation tribes.
Future plans include the addition of outdoor memorials
to several other historical LGBT figures, an indoor
visitors’ center/museum, and a Legacy education
initiative with the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance to
combat, in the words of committee member Owen Keehnen,
the ignorance that “contributes not only to antigay
bullying, but also to the social isolation and cultural
marginalization” of LGBT teenagers. But thanks to the
seed planted and nourished by Salvo, branches of their
family tree already grow in Chicago where 35 years ago
Leonard Matlovich led the pride parade. In retrospect,
unknown then to him or the other participants he called
to join him in the street, 1977 was the dawn of what GMS
editor Denny Meyer would call a “Rainbow Moment”—for the
theme of that year’s parade was “Gays in History.”
For individual photos of all the plaques, go to:
http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/photospreadthumbs.php?APUB=wct&ADATE=2012-10-11&AGALLERY=legwalkchosen
Video of Legacy Walk dedication ceremony; Matlovich plaque
unveiling at 54:00.
http://youtu.be/ZGGacc934EA
To learn more about or contribute to this vitally important
project, go to:
http://www.legacyprojectchicago.org/
________________________________________________
Michael Bedwell is a member of the board of Out
Military, a past president of DC’s Gertrude Stein
Democratic Club, and creator of the Website
www.leonardmatlovich.com
© 2012 Gay Military Signal |
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