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This article, entitled "History, Nationalism, and Lesbian Cabaret: Agnieszka Weseli 'Furja' and Maria Konopnicka," traces the role that nineteenth-century Polish Positivist author Maria Konopnicka has played in the twenty-first century Polish LGBT rights movement, as well as the backlash against her newfound status as an LGBT icon from nationalist factions. More specifically, I examine how activist-historian and performance artist Agnieszka Weseli-Furja has reimagined nineteenth-century queer and feminist history through her performances as Konopnicka as part of the lesbian cabaret troupe Barbie Girls. Through my analysis of her sketches collectively titled "From the Album of Maria Konopnicka," I argue that Furja utilizes a form of feminist revisionist historiography to navigate the historical Konopnicka's ambiguous sexuality and her association with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Polish nationalism (often hostile to the LGBT community). Through these performances, Furja attempts to decouple patriarchy and heteronormativity from Polish national belonging, producing an alternative vision of Polish patriotism based in feminist community and same-sex desire.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piotr Domalewski's Operation Hyacinth (2021) centres on the young police officer Robert's (Tomasz Ziętek) investigations into a case of serial murder and his developing romance with the student Arek (Hubert Miłkowski). The connective tissue is that all of the victims are gay men and Arek plays a role in it. As the film unfolds, we learn, alongside Robert, that the case is a massive cover-up operation and that his discoveries marry together his private and his professional lives. In this interview, I discuss, with writer Marcin Ciastoń, his extensive research for the film, which was inspired by historical events; and Robert's and Arek's romance. We explore how, if on the one hand, Arek represents rebellion to Robert, then, on the other, Robert is the embodiment of reticence, and we attend to a key scene wherein Robert is pressured by his father (Marek Kalita), also a police officer, into questioning Arek about his sexual history. All of the characters appear to be on trial, and as Ciastoń declares, '[e]veryone involved had a secret'. This interview advances scholarship by recovering the critical project that directly informs this imaginative one, by suggesting its importance in LGBTQ history and by attending to Ciastoń's approach to personal and public histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 Kansas City installed a marker that celebrated its role as host to the first meeting of the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations in 1966. The marker was the first to commemorate this historic gathering of gay rights activists as well as the first to recognize Missouri's LGBTQ history. This article charts the effort to install Kansas City's marker as a case study of the issues involved in documenting LGBTQ history. What began as a community collecting initiative quickly evolved into an effort that included students, city officials, and a federal heritage area. The authors--a founder of the community collection initiative, a public history educator, and a public history student--demonstrate how those involved attempted to navigate questions of ownership and shared authority. Ultimately, the authors ask public historians to see themselves as potential allies to, rather than authorities of, the communities with which they work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, presented at the Museum of the City of New York from May to October 2017, aimed to complement and complicate popular narratives about the history of HIV/AIDS by examining how HIV/AIDS played out in the everyday lives of diverse communities in New York. The exhibition placed works of art alongside documentary photography, film, and archival materials in unique ways to ask visitors to rethink what counts as activism and to reconsider home as a crucial political space. This paper reflects on the ways the curator sought to activate the domestic archive--the everyday ephemera and affects of illness, care-taking, and family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report from the field examines the interpretation of two notable queer women from Columbus, Georgia: blues musician Gertrude "Ma" Rainey (1886-1939) and Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers (1917-1967). Although these women maintained complicated relationships with their hometown, the Columbus Museum is utilizing new ways to examine their sexuality in the context of their cultural contributions. Nuanced interpretation of Rainey's and McCullers's bisexuality offers opportunities to discuss connections between sexuality, gender, race, and economic realities. In presenting the museum's efforts to interpret these fascinating personalities through exhibitions and permanent collection artifacts, this article offers ideas, strategies, and questions for public historians to consider in their own practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great challenges for public historians in LGBTQ history is finding and developing interpretation of the history of sexuality for public audiences at current historic sites. This article answers this challenge by repositioning historic house museums as sites of some of the most important LGBTQ public history we have, by using the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a case study. At this house museum, we can re-see historical interpretation through a queer lens and take on histories that have been until recently "slandered, ignored, and erased" from our public narratives of the past.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) historical interpretation is an increasingly common feature of museums and historic sites, while at the same time one that often pushes beyond the physical boundaries of historical organizations. This article considers various interpretive methods as tools for delivering LGBTQ history and offers multiple examples of each type of interpretation. Methods discussed include exhibits (both temporary and permanent); special events; arts programming; youth programming; monuments and memorials; historical engagement with the built environment; and digital history projects. The author acknowledges that, in 2019, these efforts still tend to favor the experiences of white cisgender men and to focus on the realm of political activism and offers some suggestions for how LGBTQ interpretation might develop in coming years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868-1935), an early campaigner for 'gay rights' avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. When researching Hirschfeld's biography (published in English in 1986) Wolff met a librarian and gay activist, Manfred Herzer, who would eventually be a cofounder of the Gay Museum in Berlin and publish (in German, in 1992) the other major Hirschfeld biography currently available. Using, inter alia, the correspondence between Wolff and Herzer, the article aims to explore and interrogate the boundaries and possibilities of 'biography' as a form of 'doing history'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]