At the beginning of June, the Museum of Science & History (MoSH) opened two exhibitions to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, both nationally and locally, with “Rise Up: Stonewall & the LGBTQ Rights Movement” and “Memphis Proud: The Resilience of a Southern LGBTQ+ Community.”
Bookended by the historical moments of the Stonewall Uprising and Obergefell v. Hodges, “Rise Up” explores how the media and coinciding movements of the latter half of the 20th century shaped the national LGBTQ+ history. Though the exhibition’s timeline begins with Stonewall, Raka Nandi, director of exhibits and collections for MoSH, points out that the story of the LGBTQ+ national rights movement “is not so much driven by the Stonewall Uprising but by the stories of various activists who were a part of the movement. These activists were here long before Stonewall, which was in 1969. When you go in, you learn about other activists who were at the foreground fighting for rights straight people take for granted.”
To complement the traveling “Rise Up” exhibition, MoSH also curated “Memphis Proud” to demonstrate how national moments intersected with local ones as Memphans of different backgrounds and experiences came together in community, creating safe spaces and becoming powerful voices for change. Through artifacts, photographs, oral histories, videos, and more, the exhibition intersperses various LGBTQ+ stories in Memphis, beginning as early as 1876, with Frances Thompson, a formerly enslaved Memphian and survivor of the Memphis Massacre, who was imprisoned for dressing as a woman even though she was assigned male at birth.
Though LGBTQ+ people have always lived in Memphis, even before Thompson, before our vocabulary and conceptions of sexual orientation and gender identity even existed, tracing the LGBTQ+ community’s history in Memphis proved a laborious yet gratifying task for MoSH’s curatorial team. “There really isn’t any book about the Memphis LGBTQ+ community,” Nandi says. “There’s a historiography published in 1997 by Daneel Buring — Lesbian and Gay Memphis: Building Communities Behind the Magnolia Curtain. This book is actually out of print. It was kind of the formative text that we started with, but we went to archives. We went to Gaze, Gaiety, Triangle Journal, Focus Magazine, The Unleashed Voice Magazine.”
Yet these archives could go only so far in telling Memphis’ LGBTQ+ history. “You can’t talk about Memphis history without talking about race,” Nandi says. “To uncover the Black LGBTQ+ community story was challenging because their history is not archived anywhere.” So to fill the gaps in the archives, the curatorial team talked one-on-one with people who were there in addition to forming an advisory committee with groups and organizations like OUTMemphis and TriState Black Pride to make sure the museum depicted the community accurately and respectfully.
“We wanted to make sure that this wasn’t an exhibit for straight people. It’s for the LGBTQ+ community and their allies,” Nandi says, adding, “This is not a perfect exhibit. Things are left out, and we know things are left out, … but we were very intentional also to make sure that we were including certain things.”
Both exhibits are on display through September 26th, and the museum will have programming throughout the summer because celebrating Pride shouldn’t be constrained to just June. Events include the Summer Pride Film Series, which will screen Swan Song, To Decadence with Love, Thanks for Everything, and Moonlight; an Intergenerational Conversation Panel Series, a live webinar series covering topics important to the local and national LGBTQ+ community; Cocktails and Chemistry with the Blue Suede Sisters, which promises a night of cocktails, drag nuns, and science experiments; and the museum’s first ever drag show on September 24th. For more information or to purchase tickets for these events, visit moshmemphis.com/celebrate-pride-all-summer.