LGBT Pride
Guide Exhibit
In 2019, SSI collaborated with community partners to create a traveling exhibit that showcases the early years of LGBT Pride Festivals in the Lehigh Valley. With the aim of making regional LGBT history accessible to Lehigh Valley residents, SSI and partners imagined ways we might activate archival materials to engage a broad public. By building an exhibit focused upon documents from historic Pride Festivals, we were able to bring to life the significant impact of LGBT activism in our region, to showcase the value of festivals for engaging residents with political issues, to trace the evolution of support for LGBT people by area businesses, and to highlight the contributions of major LGBT leaders.
The exhibit was made possible through work with key community and university partners, including Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, Muhlenberg College’s Trexler Library, and Center for Creative Inquiry. Ultimately, our exhibition made accessible narratives about the early years of Pride celebrations in the Valley available to residents and showcased how such festivals transformed civic life in our region.
Origins
Previous collaborations with Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center (BSC) introduced SSI team members to their vibrant, and ever-expanding, Lehigh Valley LGBT Community Archive. As part of its mission to enrich LGBT lives here in the Valley, BSC began collecting archival material in 2016 from area LGBT organizations. In its current form, the archive consists of twenty-two collections, containing photographs, posters, political pamphlets, correspondences, financial records, newspapers, and bar paraphernalia. Containing material from 1969 through the present, the archive has strong collections featuring regional media and LGBT publications, memorabilia from local LGBT-owned businesses, documents from LGBT activist organizations, and community leaders’ personal papers.
Because few community members will visit a library website to explore the archive, SSI worked with BSC and special collections archivists to imagine ways to bring LGBT history to life for local residents and to make this growing material accessible for those the archive is meant to serve. Ultimately, collaborators decided that a physical exhibit could highlight a portion of the archive, create a digestible narrative about archival material, and garner excitement about the archive as a whole.
Since 2019 marked the 25th anniversary of Pride in the Lehigh Valley, we selected material from the archives’ collection titled “Records of Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley” as the focus for the exhibit. Specifically, we showcased Pride Guides, the regionally published magazines designed by local Pride organizers to accompany annual festivals and marches. These annual publications featured articles on local LGBT leadership, the regional impacts of national political struggles, LGBT-friendly businesses, nightlife, and cultural events. Although much less common today, Pride Guides are relics of the Valley’s first Pride celebrations. In fact, Pride Guides were a major feature of most of the country’s original Pride festivals. In this way, the Guides in this exhibit connect Pride in the Lehigh Valley to broader, national Pride traditions, even as they distinguish our Pride Festival from others by focusing on the LGBT community of the Lehigh Valley.
Exhibit
Pride Guides and the Early Years of Lehigh Valley Pride Festivals opened in the fall of 2019. In ten panels, the exhibit offers an account of Pride’s beginnings in the Lehigh Valley. A narrativized timeline features the Guides’ gorgeous covers from 1994-2004. The timeline preserves the designs created by early Pride organizers and contextualizes each festival within national and local LGBT history. For example, panels situate the 1995 Lehigh Valley Pride Festival within calls to amend the Pennsylvania Hate Crimes Bill to include LGBT people as a protected class. The panels likewise reflect the sense of hope and anticipation accompanying the start of a new millennium and the greater inclusion of transgender people into local LGBT organizational structures. The 2003 Guide, themed “Peace through Pride,” offers viewers a window into the feelings and reactions of the LGBT community to US engagement in armed conflict in Iraq. All together, the timeline invites viewers to consider the evolution of the LGBT community’s culture and concerns from the 90’s into the 21st century.
In addition to chronologizing Pride in the Valley, the Pride Guides exhibit challenges us to imagine functions of Pride beyond mere celebration. Six of the exhibit’s panels feature excerpted articles and images from across the Guides; each panel’s content is organized by a thematic thread, which we believe is crucial to the nature of Pride itself. While Pride festivals certainly are times to celebrate, they also offer attendees the opportunity to engage with current political battles, learn about resources in our communities, discover area artists, and reflect on the individuals who make, and have made, our community so special.
The panels “Pride Is Politics,” “Pride Is Health,” and “Pride Is Sponsorship,” each represent different aims of the Guides: to inform the community about ongoing political initiatives, healthcare resources, and LGBT-friendly businesses. Because of the scarcity of coverage of issues impacting LGBT communities in mainstream presses, Pride Guides were essential opportunities to update community members on ongoing political activism and progress in the Valley, continuous health disparities across LGBT populations, and local businesses that welcomed and supported the LGBT community. In addition, Politics, Health, and Sponsorship coverage in the Guides urged readers to get involved: to vote and volunteer for local activist efforts, to support organizations like FACT (Fighting AIDS Continuously Together), and to visit local businesses that risked serious backlash by sponsoring Pride. Consciousness-raising about political struggles and health realities are absolutely crucial functions of Pride, and are inseparable from our Pride celebrations.
The “Pride Is Art,” “Pride is People,” and “Pride Is Remembrance” panels commemorate a function of Pride that is equally urgent. On these panels, we honor the beauty, culture, and relationships that make this LGBT community so unique. The Guides give special attention to local film festivals, theaters, choirs, and literary and visual arts programming, thereby highlighting the creativity of the Valley’s LGBT artists. And community members themselves are celebrated and named throughout the Guides, from organizers to drag performers to absent friends who are no longer with us. These panels suggest that Arts and People and Remembrance are critical criteria for any expression of Pride in the Lehigh Valley.
The exhibit’s dual-focus on historicizing regional Pride festivals and broadening understandings of what Pride means offers fresh complexities to the ways our community might organize, celebrate, and relate to Pride. This is the gift of the exhibit, and the archive: situating our expressions of Pride in a specific time and place and enhancing our knowledge of what these festivals have truly meant to our community.
Traveling Exhibitions and Archival Events
Pride Guides and the Early Years of Lehigh Valley Pride Festivals is a traveling exhibition, which has been shown at Lehigh University, BSC, Muhlenberg College, and Cedar Crest College. The opening of the exhibit at Lehigh University drew together students, faculty and staff, and community members for an evening of talks about what it means to work so intimately with an archive. These reflections gestured toward radical personal impact that researchers felt as they narrativized archival objects and as they increasingly understood scholarship and curation as activism. Other exhibit openings at area colleges and BSC as well as events associated with the traveling exhibit illustrated:
- Communal value of an accessible history of LGBT life in a particular place
- History-making as a relational practice between scholars and community members
- Marginalized lives and stories as crucial to regional identities and civic histories
The exhibit’s second reception took place a few months later at the BSC, drawing together project partners and community members with some of Lehigh Valley Pride’s original organizers, whose names are featured in the exhibit itself. The exhibit team curated music from featured artists from the first decade of Pride as the backdrop for the exhibition as the researchers met with some of the Pride-pioneers whose notes and correspondences and records constitute so much of the archives. Indeed, the BSC reception became a kind of reunion for past and present Pride organizers and community members, demonstrating the powerful ways that this kind of scholarship can deepen relationships and bring people together. The exhibit continues to tour throughout our region at local community spaces colleges, including Muhlenberg College, where the archive is housed.
Partner Organizations
South Side Initiative
Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center
Muhlenberg College, Trexler Memorial Library
Lehigh University Art Galleries
Creative Inquiry + Mountaintop Initiative
Lehigh University Pride Center
Press
Awards
The Pride Guides and the Early Years of Lehigh Valley Pride Festivals exhibition project received the Lehigh University Pride Center’s “OUTstanding Initiative Award” and Creative Inquiry + Mountaintop Initiative’s “2019 Expo Award.”
Project Team
Mary C. Foltz, Director of the South Side Initiative, Associate Professor of English
Adrian Shanker, Executive Director of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center
Susan Falciani Maldonado, Muhlenberg College’s Head of Public Outreach and Information Literacy Services and Manager of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center Archive
Kristen Leipert, Muhlenberg College’s Digital Projects Archivist
Malaika Gutekunst, PhD Student, Counseling Psychology
Alysse Weinberg, Undergraduate Student, Counseling Psychology
Robin Lee, First-Year Writing Instructor, MA Student, English
Maggie Tarmey, Undergraduate Student, English
Mel Kitchen, Coordinator, Lehigh University Pride Center
William Crow, Lehigh University Art Gallery Director
Chelsea Gilbert, Director of the Lehigh University Pride Center
Nicole Johnson, Assistant Professor, Counseling Psychology
Mark Wonsidler, Curator, Exhibitions and Collections
Julia Maserjian, Digital Scholarship Manager, Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning