Transcript for Gender Identity in the Queer Rights Movement of the 1960s

My name is Wendy Harris and I’m a high school social studies teacher at Metro Deaf School here in St. Paul, and this summer I’ve been working with the History Center as a teacher-in-residence pulling together primary source sets to be able to be used in our classrooms. 

This set is about LGBTQIA+ history, focusing around the long 1970s. 1969 is the year that is often mentioned in history as the turning point in queer history as the Stonewall Uprising. All of our students have seen something about queer history, queer studies, current events in the news, family members, themselves, in the school. This is a way to bring it into historical context, give students an idea that queer people have always been here and that there is a history and a legacy of people fighting for their rights, and other options of how to fight for their rights. 

This source set shows people in a variety of ways fighting for their rights and trying to get a better life for themselves and their people. 

We start out with the late 1960s and early 1970s with some source sets of how people were protesting and what they were doing. 

There’s a representation of ballroom culture, house culture from the seventies in New York. 

We have lesbian movement and intersectionality between lesbians of color and the politics and social movement that they fought with. 

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson are often names brought up, but without a lot of context of their background and what they were fighting for. There are some sources here that use their experience, and specifically Sylvia Rivera and the Manifesto from the S.T.A.R. group.

And finally, we have sort of a stereotypical protest of white gay men and what they were protesting at the National Democratic Convention.

These sources represent a variety of people, a variety of intersectional identities, and they can be used in several different ways. One way is to look at gender representation, gender expression, pulling in students’ own experiences. How do they represent their genders in various settings: a formal setting like a wedding or a graduation, versus at home, or out with their friends? What choices do they make based on the situation of how they represent their gender? How do the people in these sources make choices about representing their gender?

Another way to look at these sources is through a civics/political action lens. What things were these people doing to promote their cause? What methods did they use? Where were they using them? With whom were they using them? And how did those different ways of working to make change in the public sphere reflect what we do today and what students can do? What ways do students resonate with? What types of activities would they be willing to do for a cause that’s important to them?

All of these sources are on the History Center website, and you can click on them and look at the activity guide for more ideas on how to use these in your classroom.