The Wisconsin LGBTQ History Project recently produced an exhibit and documentary profiling eight living elders who have played a significant role in Milwaukee's queer history. Beacons of Brew City documents 50 years of local LGBTQ trials and triumphs.
The exhibit honors Dynasty Scott, Reverend Janis K. Doleschal, Israel Ramon, Eloise McPike, Shannon Dupree, Jack H. Smith, Karen Valentine and Casper Garcia as pillars of Milwaukee’s queer community.
Beacons of Brew City will travel to multiple locations in the Milwaukee area throughout June and July. A companion documentary screens Tuesday, June 16, at the Oriental Theatre. You can check out the exhibit at Style Pop Cafe in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood through June 21, after which it will re-locate to the Milwaukee County Courthouse.
Lake Effect's Sam Woods met Milwaukee LGBTQ History Project President and Chair Michail Takach at the exhibit, while it was at Milwaukee’s City Hall.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Woods: So, Michael, we are standing in the middle of City Hall, in front of an exhibit that will be traveling throughout the Milwaukee area over the next couple of months, which has a documentary screening attached to it coming up soon that we'll get to. But first, can you explain what we're looking at here and how it came to be?
Michail Takach: Sure. So, our beacons project launched earlier this year in Green Bay, and the Beacons Project is really dedicated to honoring our LGBTQ seniors and elders of the community. There are a lot of obstacles to LGBTQ people knowing their own history, and one of them is generational ageism. When we get to a certain age, we're kind of pushed off the stage, we're told that our time is done and we're invisible or forgotten. Our goal with the history project is to make sure that intergenerational knowledge transfer happens and that those barriers are broken down, so that, much like any other community, we can learn from those who have been here and have done the work and built the bridges and lit the torches. And the beacons project is a dedication to that.
So, our first beacons project was in Green Bay. The Beacons of the Bay launched on February 6 and featured elders from Northeastern Wisconsin. And thanks to the Canary Fund, that project was quite successful and traveled through the Green Bay metro area throughout the winter. We then turned our attention to Milwaukee, and the Eldon Murray Foundation and Potawatomi Hotel Casino have underwritten the project so that we can elevate the stories of eight local elders in the Milwaukee metro market.
Sure, so one thing we always forget is that LGBTQ history is a fairly new discipline. It really didn't begin in earnest until 1994, which was the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. And there were very committed efforts that year to start documenting and preserving a history that was rapidly disappearing at the height of the AIDS crisis. And in Milwaukee, we were ahead of the curve thanks to Louis Stimac, who was researching and documenting LGBT history in the 1970s. He taught a gay history course at the Milwaukee Free University from 1975 to 1980, which was groundbreaking when you consider that there was no internet, no digital records, no on-demand anything. But somehow, Louis pulled together a pretty strong curriculum and taught it for five years, even though he was pretty much dismissed by academia as not real, not legitimate, not professional.
One thing the Beacons Project has been very clear about and what's special here is that we're honoring people before they've passed on. So, how does that matter in the larger timeline of how LGBTQ history has been documented and told?
And even our founder, who signed on board in 1994, really struggled to get people to share their histories. When he came out in 1971, no one talked about the past, because the past was seen as a place of sorrow. It was a place of shame. It was a place of embarrassment. No one wanted to talk about the past because the future was going to be better. And in the age of Stonewall and gay liberation and civil rights, that was what people believed. So, they really didn't talk about their past, and they were almost reluctant to even mention it.
And we deal with that even now. Many years later, generations later, we're still dealing with that reluctance to share. We have a lot of elders in our community who really went through a lot of trauma when they were younger – not only about their identity, but at the hands of people who really brutalized them or criminalized them in ways that left them feeling kind of shell shocked. And they're still living with that unresolved PTSD of their earlier lives. I can't imagine what it's like for somebody who was raided by the Milwaukee Police Department in 1965 to see the Milwaukee Police Department marching in a pride parade. It just has to make their head spin. But in the greater effort of LGBT history, our project for the past three decades has been chronicling and protecting and preserving hidden history in a way that very few communities have been able to do, and we're very proud of the collections that we've built out over time.
So, what's next for this exhibit and the documentary screening tomorrow?
So, the exhibit moves throughout Milwaukee County this summer. First, it will head to Art Bar from June 11 to 14 and then Style Pop Cafe in Walker’s Point from June 15 to 21. And then, it will move to the Milwaukee County Courthouse for two weeks in the rotunda, where it'll be publicly viewable by all, and then, finally to the Milwaukee Public Library for two weeks, and then the Milwaukee LGBT Community Center. So, there are lots of opportunities to see these faces, to hear their stories. But, most importantly, the documentary will debut on Tuesday, June 16th at 7 p.m. at Milwaukee's Oriental Theater. Admission is a $10 donation to the history project – which is tax deductible, as we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your investment in the LGBTQ History Project will support the next chapter of the Beacons Project, which will be in Madison this fall, as we select eight additional elders who have contributed to life in the beltway.
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