The Making of LGBTQ+ History Month

The 90s were not an easy time to come out as a gay teacher, but that's exactly why Rodney Wilson decided he needed to. This is the story of the founder of LGBTQ+ History Month and his quest to include queer people in history lessons across the country (and eventually the globe).

Show Notes/Transcript:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gBhhSQWK2bQJOGKPLBpzTHnc_rkfltMbhftKXxZJvgo/edit?usp=sharing

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Transcript

In October of 1994, a teacher from Mehlville High School in St Louis Missouri named Rodney Wilson proposed a brand new History Month, modeled after Black History Month and Women's History Month: LGBTQ History Month. He chose October because Coming Out Day is celebrated on October 11th, and it was also the same month that the first and second marches on Washington for LGBTQ rights occurred in 1979 and 1987. It was also a part of the standard school calendar year. He proposed this month soon after making a potentially career-ending decision: coming out as gay to his students and colleagues. 

Wilson had every right to be concerned for not just this job but his safety, as the moral panic over gay teachers and mentors has deep roots in the US. Less than 20 years before he came out, the Briggs Initiative, which would have legally barred gay and lesbian teachers from teaching, had been proposed and narrowly defeated in California. Just recently in 2025, the Supreme Court decided in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents could use religion as justification to withdraw their children from any education that may expose them to LGBTQ topics. 

With this backdrop of fear and controversy, Rodney Wilson felt that in order to give the school children he taught the education they deserved, he had no choice but to come out. 

During a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., Wilson went through the symbols that prisoners in the concentration camps were given, gesturing to the pink triangle for gay prisoners and mentioning that it would have been assigned to him had he been in the camps. It was a small gesture, but a monumental one, making him the first openly gay K-12 teacher in Missouri. It accomplished what Wilson set out to do: it allowed him to connect with his students and become a role model for the queer children at the school. 

Including queer history in his curriculum was so much more than intellectual exercise for him - it was about demonstrating to the school children, queer or otherwise, that queer people were present throughout time, and that they had a past as well as a future, one that those students would be a part of. He remarked that he had been inspired by his graduate studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis “‘[With] a particular professor, Gerda Ray, who allowed us to talk about and examine anything, including social history, including LGBTQ history,” Wilson said.” He wanted that same opening of horizons he experienced in university for his own students. 

And, as it turned out, he wasn't without support. As soon as he started reaching out to other members of the community, queer teachers across the nation rallied behind him and helped design lesson plans and classroom activities to support LGBTQ History Month. “Dedicated friends like Johnda Boyce collaborated with him to establish the holiday. Together, they aimed to bring LGBTQ+ history to the forefront, not just for the present generation but for the generations to come. ‘It shouldn’t have been controversial, but it was,’ Boyce remembered.” And there was controversy - as the news picked up on the story, calls came for Wilson to be disciplined or even fired. This backlash included then-Congressman Dan Burton, of Indiana, calling for the parents to “scream bloody murder” over teachers coming out, which created a buzz on talk shows at the time. 

Despite all that, it seems that Rodney Wilson was the right person, in the right place and time, to make this move. At his school in Missouri, students, colleagues, and many members of the local community celebrated his brave decision, and in 1995, Mayor Freeman Bosley signed a proclamation recognizing LGBTQ History Month right there in St Louis. Within years, cities, states, and even other countries would join suit in celebrating queer history.

LGBTQ History Month is now celebrated in more than 20 countries, although not always in October. In the UK, the month is celebrated in February in celebration of the abolition of the anti-gay legislation section 28. In some other countries, like Hungary, it’s celebrated in March, not to reflect the country's personal LGBTQ history, but because the weather is better then. In October, LGBTQ History Month is now being celebrated by queer rights organizations, libraries, universities, and more. The year after its founding, Wilson’s own alma mater of University of Missouri-St. Louis became the first college in the country to hold an LGBTQ History Month function. In 2009, it was officially recognized by President Barack Obama as a month of national importance. 

Rodney Wilson continues to teach to this day, and his small proclamation has grown to an international celebration. As Wilson said to St. Louis Air, “My hope, though, is that over time, we become a warmer, more welcoming community. No matter what our ethnic background, whatever our employment background, whatever our sexual orientation or gender identity or religion, I hope that we can just learn to let everybody live in peace.” 

Thank you for tuning in to the second episode of this season of This Month in Queer History. Join us next month for our third episode, about transgender trailblazer Christine Jorgensen!

The arguments used by those opposing LGBTQ+ teachers and classroom curricula have morphed in between the Briggs initiative in 1978 and the supreme Court case in 2025. Back in the 50s and 60s, the messaging focused around a "Boys Beware" style of fear-mongering about gay teachers being pedophiles or agent seeking to recruit children into their deviant lifestyle. To be clear, those arguments still exist and are being made today, but around the 80s and '90s, arguments using the reasoning we see in the case Mahmoud Taylor became more popular. This line of argumentation poses that the exercise of free religion should give persons who oppose LGBTQ rights the ability to freely discriminate against LGBTQ people. In the case of gay teachers this becomes a parent's rights argument, where the desire on the part of the parent to have their child brought up in exactly how they see fit overrides the right of the child to have free access to information and expanded horizons. As with any moral panic, these fears are statistically baseless and any argumentation using free exercise of religion is simply a legalist cloak to openly discriminate against a marginalized community.