Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project Calls for the Removal of All Confederate Monuments Monuments are not history. They are interpretations of history. Monuments do not convey facts. Rather they convey ideas about who matters, and by omission who doesn’t matter. As LGBTQ+ people, we know this to be true: in Virginia, there is no mandate…

On February 9, 2020 local television station WFXR attended our Old Southwest Gayborhood Walking Tour and reported on the tour and the importance of our local LGBTQ history to contemporary struggles in the Star City. Check it out! Ryan Moye, “Making Roanoke more inclusive one step at a time,” WFXR (television station), February 9, 2020.

The Roanoke Times has published a groundbreaking article about Roanoke’s Black LGBTQ community and the work of The QTPOC Project: Representation Matters, an initiative of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project. Several members of the QTPOC Project spoke with the Times about their lives and their involvement in the ongoing project. Check it out: Amy Friedenberger, “Once…

This summer project member Dr. Gregory Samantha Rosenthal sat down with Book City Roanoke to talk about the Roanoke LGBT Memorial Library and our project’s efforts at preserving and interpreting LGBTQ history in Roanoke. Check it out! Book City Roanoke, “Public Historian Gregory Samantha Rosenthal on Lesbian Cat Fiction and a Collected Past in the…

The National Humanities Alliance has published a new essay on their Humanitiesforall.org website that features the work of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project. Check it out: Daniel Fisher, “Partnership and Publicly Engaged Humanities Work,” Humanitiesforall.org, August 1, 2019.

Dr. Gregory Samantha Rosenthal wrote an essay for WUSSY, an online magazine of Southern queer arts, politics, and culture, on interconnected legacies of LGBTQ history and white supremacy. Check it out: Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, “Lasting Legacy: What Stonewall Means in the South,” WUSSY, June 6, 2019.

Tiffany Stevens has written a wonderful piece about the work of the Tidewater Queer History Project and the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project for Scalawag magazine. Check it out! Tiffany Stevens, “On Archiving and Honoring Virginia’s Long Gay Histories,” Scalawag, March 18, 2019.  

On February 8, 2019, With Good Reason, a public radio program produced by Virginia Humanities, released a new episode called “How to Go Clubbing,” which features an 11-minute segment on “The Lost Queer World of Roanoke, Virginia” produced by Cass Adair. The segment features Dr. Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, Peter Thornhill, and Don Muse talking about Roanoke’s…

Local journalist and podcaster Mason Adams spoke about Roanoke’s LGBTQ history, interviewed Deanna Marcin about her time working at the Backstreet Cafe, and references the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, in episode 4 of his new podcast, Blue Ridge Free State. Check it out! Mason Adams, “4: MDC – Marcin Dishes Candidly (w/ Deanna Marcin),” Blue Ridge…

The National Humanities Alliance has launched Humanitiesforall.org, a website showcasing over 1,400 publicly-engaged humanities projects across the country. The Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project was chosen as one of 51 projects nationwide to be profiled as an exemplary project. Check it out! “Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project,” HumanitiesforAll.org, 2018.