A nonprofit organization that documents the history of LGBTQ+ people in the South invites Alabamians to two Pride events happening Wednesday, June 15, in Montgomery and Birmingham.
The Invisible Histories Project researches, locates and preserves the stories of those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer.
One of two events kicks off Wednesday at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery at 7 p.m.
Maigen Sullivan is the Director of Research and Development for the IHP. She’s leading the hour-long talk, and she said it will be about queer history from across Alabama that people may not be familiar with.
“We're going to talk about Lambda Inc, which was the state's first LGBTQ Resource Center. It opened in 1977,” she explained. “We're going to talk about the Cracker Barrel protest, when Cracker Barrel went on this spree of firing gay and lesbian people in the early 1990s. We'll talk the AIDS history, the AIDS taskforce that happened here in Alabama during the late 1980s.”
The Invisible Histories Project will also hold an event in Birmingham Wednesday evening. The non-profit’s “Discourse Birmingham” event starts at 7 p.m. at the Monday Night Brewing Social Club.
Josh Burford is the Director of Outreach and Lead Archivist for the IHP. He said the discussion will center around the LGBTQ south as a whole, including items already archived by the organization.
“Basically, come and get a real spot-on history lesson about the queer South and all the ways that the queer South has been a part of national movements and a part of building its own community,” he explained. “And the sort of unique way that Southern LGBT history has manifested in the documents and things that we've discovered from Invisible Histories.”
More Pride events from the IHP can be found below:
