Larry Sinclair Memorial Park.
Posted on 06/02/2014 1:44:21 PM PDT by billorites
The National Parks Service is convening a group of scholars who will examine lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history and identify prominent locations from the LGBT civil rights movement for nomination to the agency’s registries of historic places and landmarks, the agency announced Friday.
“One of the objectives of the park service is to tell the story of America,” Sally Jewell, secretary of the Department of the Interior, told a crowd of about 150 supporters in a speech outside the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s West Village on Friday. “The contributions of women, minorities and members of the LGBT community have been historically underrepresented in the National Park Service, and the LGBT theme study will help ensure that we understand, commemorate and share these key chapters in our nation’s complex and diverse history.”
The Stonewall Inn, which was named a national historic landmark by the NPS in 2000, was the site of the 1969 riots following a police crackdown on the bar’s gay patrons that is widely recognized as the impetus of the modern gay rights movement.
The parks service’s National Register of Historic Places includes more than 1.7 million buildings and sites that represent historically significant places or people. Around 2,500 of them are designated as national historic landmarks based on their importance in U.S. history – think Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas, the first public school to desegregate back in 1957, or the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in California, honoring the famed organizer of the first permanent union for farm workers.
But Stonewall is the only LGBT-associated national historic landmark in the U.S. It joins just four LGBT-related spots in the National Register of Historic Places, the park service said. Those historic places include the Carrington House, one of the earliest residential properties on Fire Island, which has become a gay-friendly vacation destination. Others are the island’s Cherry Grove Community House and Theatre, and the James Merrill House in Stonington Borough, Connecticut, owned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
The first to be recognized in 2011 was the Dr. Franklin E. Kameny Residence in Washington, D.C., home of the eponymous gay rights activist. Kameny was one of the first advocates against the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness, and he argued in front of the Supreme Court in 1961 after he was fired from the Army Map Service for being gay.
Since 2010, NPS has been working to identify and nominate more of them. And now, as part of its new Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Initiative, Jewell said scholars of LGBT history will hold their first meeting on June 10 and spend the next 12 to 18 months identifying about 10 to 12 more such landmarks.
“We’re proud of the National Park Service’s role to preserve this part of history, but it’s time for us to do more,” she told the crowd, which included State Sen. Brad Hoylman, D-Manhattan, and Manhattan Borough President Gayle Brewer.
Among the more than a dozen participating experts are John D’Emilio, a professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is recognized as a pioneer in the field of LGBT studies, as well as Nan Alamilla Boyd, a women’s and gender studies professor at San Francisco State University who has written about the rise of LGBT politics in San Francisco.
Jewell added that she’d received letters of support for the project from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and that much of the country’s civil rights history remains controversial to this day. “That doesn’t mean their stories shouldn’t be told. And we feel strongly that it’s part of the National Parks Service’s duty to tell those stories,” she said.
The study is being funded by the National Parks Foundation and the Denver-based Gill Foundation, which was founded by tech entrepreneur and LGBT activist Tim Gill, who also addressed the crowd. “America is at its best when it acknowledges and utilizes everyone,” he said.
Comedian and actress Lea DeLaria, who plays the character Big Boo on the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” attended the park service announcement. DeLaria, who was widely recognized as the first openly gay comedian to appear on a late night TV show when she proclaimed herself “a biiiiig dyke” on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1993, told Al Jazeera, “Hearing what it’s about means everything to me. It’s very exciting. I had no idea this was going on, and I’m thrilled about it.”
???
Sodomy in the park?
Guess I won’t be visiting any national parks anytime soon.
Beyond words ... FK the park service!
Rest stops on the turnpike?
More land that needs to be taken away from the feds.
I can see the little plaques now:
“And right behind this here tree was where John and Bill consumated their marriage.”
The founders and supporters of the early National Parks hardly had this in mind.
What a travesty.
.
National Historic Landmarks (and Registered Historic Places) are at the bottom of the ladder. It means they get a plaque for the front wall and a dot on a map. This is only the beginning, though.
Larry Sinclair Memorial Park.
What, are they going to put up a bronze plaque in the rear stall of the men’s room?
So what’s the deal? Are we supposed to visit the Stonewall Inn, and go have a drink there? Is it still a homosexual bar? Is it still there, or did they just mark the site of it?
Maybe I’m a cranky old man, but, shouldn’t “LGBT” history just be something that can be mentioned, if a member of the “LGBT” community has done something that would be historic whether such person was sexually confused or not????
For example, I hear that astronaut Sally Ride was lesbian. Isn’t her place in history as the first woman astronaut due to her being that first woman astronaut, not that she was a homosexual?
:: Sodomy in the park? ::
I think it was the 4th of July...
The features of this bathhouse included a disco dance floor, a cabaret lounge, sauna rooms, an “Olympia blue” swimming pool, and a capacity to serve nearly 1,000 men, 24 hours a day.
One gay guide from the 1970s described the Continental Baths as a place that “revolutionized the bath scene in New York.”[3]
Some features of the Continental Bathhouse included a warning system that tipped off patrons when police arrived. There were also an STD clinic, a supply of A200 (a lice-killing shampoo) in the showers, and K-Y Jelly in the candy vending machine.
Will the National Historic site have a commemorative Petri dish with a variety of STD cultures?
Well, let’s see - we already have:
Bent’s Old Fort
Big Hole
Big South Fork
Bighorn Canyon
Castle Clinton
Fire Island
Golden Spike
Mammoth Cave
Organ Pipe Cactus
I’m certain the rope suckers can claim to have had something to do with some of these. I also see the National Park service has already created a couple for the rest of us as well:
Poverty Point
Trail of Tears
OMG, LOL!
I’m getting to the point I’m not sure I want to live out my final years in this drain-circling, rotting mess of a country. Things have gone irretrievably off-track.
So NASA was converted to bearded-savage outreach, and now the park service is promoting the rainbow flag crowd. What next? The post office promoting abortion?
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