Trump: "The path back to national unity is to decisively win the culture wars."
MAGA / Evangelical’s are renewing the Lavender Scare against LGBTQ+ people
Donald Trump’s shtick takeover of the vaunted Kennedy Center and his ordered sweep of the Smithsonian Institution to erase anything unflattering to the White Supremacist/Christian National MAGA/evangelical myth of America sent shivers through the collective body of believers in diversity, equity, inclusion, human rights and individual personal freedom.
“As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Nation’s founding, it is more important than ever that our national museums reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story,” White House staffers, including the co-author of Project 2025, wrote to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III on Aug. 12.
“In this spirit, and in accordance with Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions. This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter says.
Mimicking previous DOGE enforcement of Project 2025 mandates, there’s a long list demanding virtually everything connected with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of the American Indian, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Portrait Gallery, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Within 120 days, the White House orders, “Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.”
The White House views this process as an “opportunity…to embrace a revitalized curatorial vision rooted in the strength, breadth, and achievements of the American story.” The focus is on “Americanism—the people, principles, and progress that define our nation.”
The letter does not indicate what the auditors will do with all the exhibits, artifacts, historic narratives that do not reflect their version of American “achievements” – such as slavery, the violent Manifest Destiny ruination of Indigenous people and the relatively new archive recognition LGBTQ+ history. Will the collections be properly stored, sold, burned or tossed out with the trash?
Trump will go after “any exhibit that narrates the complexity of America’s history,” Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. told MSNBC anchor Katy Tur on Thursday, Aug. 14. The MAGA/evangelical base believes that “we are a divinely sanctioned nation” and they are determined to “affirm that storybook version of America” instead of the story of a country “still struggling with our demons” as we work toward “a more perfect union,” expressed in the “We the People” preamble to the US Constitution.
“Cohesion and cohesiveness can’t come at the expense of the erasure of peoples and history. It has to emerge in the context of us dealing with the reality of who we are,” said Glaude, who is a scholar of famed Black gay writer James Baldwin. “Here we are 250 years later and we’re still dealing with that fantasy that somehow consensus can be had by ridding us of all the diversity who makes us who we are.”
Erasure is an existential threat for intersectional LGBTQ+ people – we are still not recognized as a demographic or an oppressed cultural minority. The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian acceptance in 2006 of early “Gay is Good” activist Frank Kameny’s collection of 70,000 letters, documents, memorabilia - now the Kameny Papers Project – plus protest and picket signs of that early era was considered a significant achievement.
Incidentally, Kameny – who co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1961 and led picket protests at the White House four years before the Stonewall riots in 1969 - told the Washington Post in 2005 that his “Gay is Good” slogan was inspired by Stokely Carmichael’s phrase “Black is Beautiful.”
“Nearly fifty years ago, the United States Government banned me from employment in public service because I am a homosexual,” Kameny said at the time the Smithsonian accepted his collection. “This archive is not simply my story; it also shows how gay and lesbian Americans have joined the American mainstream story of expanded civil liberties in the 20th century. Today, by accepting these papers, the nation preserves not only our history but marks how far gay and lesbian Americans have traveled on the road to civil equality.”
The LGBT Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has grown considerably since 2006 and no doubt would have been quite a Pride display for the project’s 20th anniversary during the celebration of America’s 250th birthday – perhaps including select papers from and the “Tennis racket used by transgender tennis player Renee Richards, who won a landmark case against the United States Tennis Association” in 1977.
Such a prominent display is not inconceivable. National Museum of American History produced exhibitions of Kameny’s contributions: “Three of the most resonant picket signs are now on display in Flag Hall, just off the entrance from the National Mall and near the Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the national anthem, and the civil rights-era Woolworth Lunch counter. Another poster is currently on view in The American Presidency exhibition among a number of protest signs. The Kameny collection is part of the Museum’s long-standing commitment to preserve the history of American democracy and the struggles for individual and civil rights in the United States.”
In her excellent remembrance of Kameny after his death in 2011, Smithsonian Magazine Senior Editor Megan Gambino provided historical context for the artifacts.
“The [Mattachine] Society’s precepts were: ‘Picketing is not an occasion for an assertion of personality, individuality, ego, rebellion, generalized non-conformity or anti-conformity. It is an occasion for an organized effort, by a group or a movement, as such, working in a calculated, coordinated fashion, to make its existence, message, and grievances known where they need to be known. Therefore the individual picketer serves, merely, to carry a sign or to increase the size of the demonstration; not he, but his sign should attract notice and attention.’
It went on to include rules for the signs, one of which stated, ‘Signs will be neatly and clearly lettered.’”
The National Museum of American History has 12 such picket signs used in civil rights marches and protests at the White House, Pentagon and U.S. Civil Service Commission in the 1960s.
“In clear print, the posters say things like ‘First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals’ and ‘Discrimination Against Homosexuals Is As Immoral As Discrimination Against Negroes and Jews.’ One, with the inscription ‘Homosexual Citizens Want to Serve Their Country Too,’ is currently on display, with other protest material, in the museum’s American Presidency exhibition. And, another, which reads ‘Sexual Preference is Irrelevant to Federal Employment,’ was actually used by activist Barbara Gittings, who Kameny called the ‘Founding Mother’ of the gay rights movement, at an early protest at the White House,” Gambino writes.
She concludes by noting that Katherine Ott, curator in the division of medicine and science at the National Museum of American History, “hopes that people continue to recognize Kameny’s involvement in a movement that really contributed to ‘that evolving understanding of what it means to be gay that we’re benefiting from now.’”
We hope that, too. Will we still have a chance to see those picket signs and all the other LGBTQ+ historical archives again one day?
We have produced a video about how we first started recognizing ourselves as an LGBTQ+ people – including successes that can be conceived as America achievements as well. Queer people are an integral part of American history, whether Trump likes it or not.