By now we hope you have seen our banners and posters celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. Please be sure to see what the entire project looks like

Here is a little background behind these banners and posters. Very aware that the fiftieth anniversary of the New York Stonewall protests was coming in 2019, we knew we had to do something to commemorate this landmark event. After informal discussions that began in 2017, we began to formally plan for our commemoration last fall. One of the first actions was to inventory THP’s collections to highlight what we had that was related to pre- and post-Stonewall LGBTQ life, Bostonians’ reactions to Stonewall, and political action in the years around 1969. A group of volunteers spent many hours on this project.

THP wanted to engage the community around the many historical events and important places in Boston and Cambridge because our area has played a central role in LGBTQ history. The first idea was to project images on important buildings, but this was abandoned when the logistics of this became clear.

Working with Boston Pride’s Stonewall50 committee, a new idea emerged: banners and posters on buildings that have historical significance for the LGBTQ community. The History Project received money from Boston Pride to produce these banners and posters. We went through our extensive photograph collections for images that would convey our message of adversity, celebration, accomplishment, and inclusion and engaged a designer to create the banners and posters.

We then had to choose sites to display banners and posters. We worked with the Pride Committee to solicit nominations from the public. We received a large number of suggestions that we had to pare them down to keep the project within budget. Some of the selected buildings were easy choices, the contributions to our history were clear. Others seemed great sites, but the features of some building made attaching a banner or poster to them too difficult.

The next step was to secure permissions to display the banners. Not only did we need building owners’ permissions, we wanted to engage neighbors and neighborhood associations prior to mounting the banners and posters. We want to be good community citizens! Fortunately, most people were enthusiastic about the banners. Meanwhile, our volunteers were working on the photographs and text for the website. Fortunately, we had a great deal of help to produce the banners and web program.

We then went on to produce and hang the banners as well as debut the website. The result is the community-wide celebration LGBT history we hope you have seen. Enjoy!