LGBTQ+ activism book co-authored by Fort native

By Chris Spangler

A Fort Atkinson native has co-authored a book that provides examples of LGBTQ+ activism throughout the state’s history for young people to explore and discuss.

Jenny Kalvaitis, a 2007 Fort Atkinson High School graduate, is museum educator/outreach coordinator for the Wisconsin Historical Society. The daughter of Kathy and Len Kalvaitis of Fort Atkinson, she joined Kristen Whitson, program assistant at the Wisconsin Library Services & Recollection Wisconsin, to pen “We Will Always Be Here: A Guide to Exploring and Understanding the History of LBGTQ+ Activism in Wisconsin.” 

Speaking at the Fort Atkinson Rotary Club’s virtual meeting Monday, Kalvaitis said that while sources on this topic are difficult to find, there is a genuine interest among youth to know the history of LGBTQ people and activism.

“The reality is that people we would identify today as part of the LGBTQ community have been in what we know as Wisconsin for as long as there have been people on this land,” Kalvaitis said.

She noted that for the past decade, she has been involved in the historical society’s National History Day, which allows students to choose a topic to research. Consistently, LGBTQ issues and events come up.

“Our youth, we know, are hungry for these stories and every generation has had to fight to know stories like this and dig to know stories of people just like them,” Kalvaitis said.

That is changing, however, and this book is a direct outgrowth of a two-part series written by Madison scholar and activist Dr. R. Richard Wagner and published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Wagner wrote “Coming Out, Moving Forward: Wisconsin’s Recent Gay History,” which outlines the challenges that LGBTQ Wisconsinites faced in their efforts to right past oppressions and secure equality in the post-Stonewall period between 1969 and 2000. 

Stonewall refers to a June 1968 police raid of a gay bar called Stonewall Inn that turned into a riot and sparked the fire that fueled the first wave of the Gay Pride Movement in New York City.

Wagner also is author of a sequel titled “We’ve Been Here All Along: Wisconsin’s Early Gay History.”

Kalvaitis explained that part of Wagner’s series was a fundraiser, and donors wanted to add a teen outreach piece.

“At the time these conversations were happening, I was the coordinator of secondary education for the Wisconsin Historical Society and they came to me for almost everything ‘teen,’” Kalvaitis recalled.

Ultimately, it was decided to write a primary source reader, she said, “so original material from the time that we were going to add context to and tell stories that captivated our youth.

“Just as I was looking up at that mountain and was feeling overwhelmed, the fabulous Kristen Whitson connected with me at a conference and, with her archival expertise on the topic and my educational background, we came together to form what I think is the perfect partnership that would allow us to create this book,” Kalvaitis continued.

The backbone of the book, she told the Rotarians, is what they call the “spectrum of activism.”

“Just like any two actions, no two individuals are the same, and identities can be fluid just like actions can be fluid,” Kalvaitis explained. “So there are times when truly being true to yourself is the most brave and courageous act that you can undertake and really means that there is legal action and physical acts directed toward you.”

She acknowledged that activism can be a loaded term and can make some people nervous. 

“But ultimately, when broken down to its core, activism is an act that you take, and we all do them on daily bases,” she said. 

Simply turning on the nightly news or reading a newspaper are examples of actions taken, a form of activism to educate oneself on a certain topic, Kalvaitis pointed out.

“We have in this book a wide variety of stories and sources that follow kind of a thematic approach, and as we chose what was going to be in the book, we did work directly with teens, who gave us input on what spoke most to them, what was most relevant to their lives,” she said.

Each chapter contains five to seven primary sources and thus five to seven distinct stories that cover 100 years of Wisconsin history and crisscrosses the entire state.

Chapter 1 is titled “Educating Yourself,” because knowledge is power, Whitson pointed out. 

“What we learn shapes us into the people we become; this is what we tell the teens in the book. We are taught by our teachers, families and friends, but we must also take our education into our own hands and seek out topics that matter to us.”

This particularly is true about topics that don’t normally come up in classroom discussions or casual conversations, she said.

“The simple act of reading about people like ourselves can be incredibly powerful,” Whitson added.

Thus, the sources in Chapter 1 demonstrate how information about the LGBTQ+ community can awaken, educate and inspire in different ways, she said.

As an example, the book includes an item from 1972 published in Milwaukee’s The Ladder magazine headlined “Two Black women seek marriage license.” 

Whitson noted that 1972 still was pretty early in the fight for equal rights for LGBTQ+ community, “just a few years after Stonewall and decades before the fight for marriage equality would really take shape.”

The couple in the article stated that they were missing out on tax benefits because they were not allowed to marry. The women eventually lost their court case, but did have a church ceremony.

In 2015, same-sex marriage finally became legal in all 50 states.

Kalvaitis said Chapter 2 is titled “’Tell Your Story’ because no one else can.”

It addresses the importance of journaling, and how a transgendered young man’s writing shared his story of being born female but always identifying as male. 

Lou Sullivan was born in Wauwatosa in 1951. At the age of 11, he began recording his life in a diary, Kalvaitis said.

“In his early journal entries, Sullivan recorded his feelings, observations and desires. He noted that he played boys as an 11-year-old. He explored his identity on the page long before he ever told anyone about feeling like a man trapped in a woman’s body,” Kalvaitis said.

She noted that journals can act as time capsules, recording who you were and what you felt at pivotal moments in your life.

Their book Includes journal entries from when Sullivan was 15, 16 and 19 years old. 

For example, on March 10, 1967, at age 16, Sullivan wrote: “I thought of the days when I really thought I was a cowboy. I dressed the part and I really was one. I don’t have to dress up anymore, and I am glad. The cowboy is in my soul, where he counts. He doesn’t have a name because he is a thousand different men … always men now. I really should have been a boy. I’d be so much happier as a boy. I probably would make a good marriage because my husband will be me and all I want from myself. I’ll treat him as if he were me … strange.”

He continued to keep a diary until his death from AIDS in 1991.

Chapter 3 of the book is “’Be True to Yourself’ because no one else can,” Kalvaitis said. 

“We can never truly know what it feels like to be someone else. But as you read primary sources in this chapter, we challenge you to see the world through another person’s eyes,” she said. “Imagine how you might have felt in their shoes. We hope these stories embolden you to take action by expressing your own identity. Sometimes being true to yourself is the most courageous thing you can do.”

The book shares the story of Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum, who started what would become the Pendarvis Historical Site in Mineral Point. The couple renovated the Cornish miners’ old stone cottages, opening a restaurant and creating a mecca for artists and like spirits that enhanced local tourism.

A letter reflects on the first weekend they met in the 1930s.

Whitson said that Chapter 4 is titled “‘Build Community’ because there is strength in numbers.”

She shared the history of Lysistrata, a feminist cooperative that ran a bookstore, restaurant, bar and performance space in downtown Madison from 1977-82. It drew lesbians, as well as feminists of all genders.

The Madison fire and police departments came to Lysistrata to recruit their first female firefighters and police officers. 

Sadly, fire destroyed the coop on Jan. 8, 1982.

“Lysistrata’s community mourned the loss of this feminist oasis,” Whitson said.

“People create change by actively supporting or opposing issues of the time,” she continued. “This chapter provides examples of actions that affected real change in Wisconsin’s LGBTQ+ community.”

She said almost no other event in LGBTQ+ history has motivated more individuals to take action than the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. “The LGBTQ+ community was devastated by this infectious disease and blamed for it at the time, especially during the early years of the epidemic when many believed only gay people and drug users were affected,” Whitson said. 

She noted that some LGBTQ+ people with AIDS were outed without their permission when hospitals called their families and revealed their diagnoses,  and some families were not supportive of their orientation and did not allow patients’ partners and friends to visit them in the hospital while they were dying. 

“These tragic experiences were recalled in legal battles decades later when gay people tried to gain marriage rights,” Whitson said. “Now that two people can be considered legal spouses regardless of their gender, they cannot be barred from visiting one another in hospital rooms.”

The AIDS epidemic encouraged the LGBTQ+ community and their loved ones to be active in many ways, Whitson said. Some worked to memorialize those who had died to ensure that the tragedy of the global epidemic would not be lost to history.

In 1987, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a  traveling memorial to those who lost their life to this disease, was created. Containing more than 48,000 squares, if displayed in its entirety, it would roughly be the size of Sheboygan today.

The book contains a picture of the quilt displayed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Fieldhouse. 

“Activism takes many forms and spans a spectrum of ways of making change,” Whitson said. “The LGBTQ+ people and allies and activists that we read about in this book changed the world by educating themselves, telling their own stories, being true to themselves, building communities and by getting active. These people made their own contributions to a large movement, and over the decades, their efforts added up to significant changes in this state and beyond. 

“Today, same-sex marriage is legal in Wisconsin and around the United States; legal protections in housing, jobs, restaurants and businesses for LGBTQ+ people are much more common than they were 50 years ago; and, in fact, attitudes about gay rights have changed faster than attitudes about almost any other social issue in the history of the United States,” Whitson said.

“Our goal with this book was to educate teens about Wisconsin’s unique LGBTQ+ history, the good and the bad,” she added. “We wanted teens to see how Wisconsin was at the forefront of the gay rights movement when it passed the first nondiscrimination law in the country in 1982. Not many people know that Wisconsin was so far out front.”

Whitson noted that when Republican Gov. Lee S. Dreyfus signed that law, he said, “It is a fundamental tenet of the Republican party that government ought not intrude in the private lives of individuals where no state purpose is served, and there is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love.”

“We wanted teens to know that LGBTQ+ people have existed here going back to the two-spirit people of the Ho Chuck, Ojibway and Potawatomi,” Whitson said. “We wanted teens to know that LGBTQ+ people are still here today and always will be.”

Kalvaitis acknowledged that there still are court cases and legislation regarding LGBTQ+ equality under way.

“This book is by no means a definitive source or the definitive history, but our youth are powerful and resilient and this book is truly meant to celebrate their identities and give then the knowledge of the history that they continue to write today,” she concluded.

The launch event via Zoom for “We Will Always Be Here” will take place at 7 p.m. Friday, June 25, hosted by Woodland Pattern Book Center and Milwaukee Pride. For more information, visit https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Press.

An accompanying online educational resource and discussion guide will be available on the Wisconsin Historical Society website at www.wisconsinhistory.org.

In addition, a forthcoming Wisconsin Historical Society traveling exhibit highlighting the voices in “We Will Always Be Here” will tour schools, public libraries and other community centers beginning in early 2022.