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Program Overview
This talk will cover topics, methods, and views of LGBTQ people in American history from the Revolutionary period to the Civil War. Along the frontier from the Rio Grande to the Rocky Mountain region, frontiers offered a space which was both highly homosocial and a space for reinvention. Laws, politics, and moral values around gender and sexuality radically shifted by the end of the 19th century. Public views of LGBTQ people became harsher by the end of the 19th and hegemonically oppressive by the middle of the 20th. Yet resistance to such oppression flourished in the arts and private social spaces which fostered the contemporary LGBTQ rights movement.
About Presenter David Duffield
David Duffield is the creator of the Colorado LGBTQ History Project, a board member of the Committee on LGBTQ History, presented at the Western History Association, the American Historical Association, winner of the 2023 Eleanor Gehres Award from Denver Public Library’s Western History Department and the 2019 Denver LGBTQ Commission Community Service Award, and works as a teacher in Denver Public Schools. In his work as a historian with the Center on Colfax for the Colorado LGBTQ History Project, the accomplishments include 100 oral histories, the first tours, lesson plans, 6 exhibits on LGBTQ history, as well as contributions and talks with multiple organizations.