A lacking Pleasure flag and the inconceivable neutrality of public establishments.
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Early this Pleasure month I realized that there is a building on the Square called the Gay Building (please do not tell Dave Mustaine, he’ll nearly definitely make it bizarre) and that Eric Hovde’s firm owns it, which has to be some sort of hate crime. The Wisconsin Historic Society (WHS) is building a new museum proper subsequent door (to interchange the outdated Wisconsin Historic Museum on the identical web site), which at first look might sound an odd match alongside the posh lodge Hovde plans to develop within the historic Homosexual Constructing. However Hovde and no less than a number of the Historic Society’s management deserve one another.
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The WHS has determined to now not show a Pleasure flag outdoors its headquarters on Library Mall this June, for the primary time since 2019. One worker told Channel 3000 that management canceled a deliberate flag-raising on quick discover. What makes this exceptionally rotten is the infantilizing justifications WHS has supplied to the general public and to a contingent of very sad workers. As The Capital Times reported on June 6, company leaders defined in a memo to workers that they’re “selecting to not fly any flags or symbols that may be seen as tied to political or social actions, even ones that replicate values many workers members care deeply about, as a result of not everybody sees these symbols the identical approach.”
Very similar to the brand new “Institutional and Public Position Statements” policy UW-Madison adopted in fall 2024, this framing makes an attempt to mime-draw an apolitical field inside a much bigger, inherently politicized field. It’s a grotesque betrayal of the work historians do to assist individuals perceive the complicated political entanglements that run by all of our lives. The U.S. and Wisconsin flags definitely symbolize the “political actions” required to ascertain a brand new nation-state and add territory to it. No matter which means it holds or lacks for you, a flag is rarely not political. Worse than making feeble excuses, WHS management is asking us to fake.
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Each the WHS and UW-Madison are state companies charged with educating and informing individuals, typically about extremely complicated and controversial occasions and points. Each should deal with the political appointees who serve on their governing boards and the elected officers who management essential parts of their budgets. Each have interaction in both formal or casual lobbying. Each trotted out their commitments to neutrality in ways in which ceded floor to the political proper on a vital concern—UW-Madison on the genocide in Gaza that continues to rage with bipartisan assist, WHS on LGBTQ+ rights that the fascist Republican Get together is attacking with terrifying fervor (and that Democrats have proven little stomach for defending).
Numerous components of WHS itself are concerned in politically fraught choices, together with the Burial Websites Preservation Board (BSPB). This can be a physique that actually helps to enforce state law. It offers particularly with the therapy of Native American burial websites, which is politically delicate for causes that needs to be apparent to anybody who’s contemplated the implications of dealing with historic websites and objects within the context of a violently colonized land. The BSPB’s existence and open proceedings made it a bit tougher for UW-Madison’s administration to downplay a 2021 incident in which a student accidentally damaged a burial mound on campus. Should you ever visited the outdated Wisconsin Historic Museum and stopped to take a look at its exhibit of the first unemployment check ever issued in the United States, you’ll additionally know that UW-Madison students have performed pivotal roles in shaping public policy.
Briefly, these are establishments that do politics. They should do politics. Ideally, they do it in a approach that safeguards necessary work from the whims of ideological factions and corrupt politicians. However this in itself means it’s all politics, on a regular basis, particularly for the individuals who lead these establishments. Once they declare that they’re all of the sudden not doing politics on this particular occasion, at this explicit time, at this explicit location, they’re mendacity.
Each WHS and UW-Madison additionally actually need to shield funding for brand new constructing initiatives because the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature will get to work on the 2025-27 state finances. Nameless WHS workers drew the connection extra explicitly in reporter Maddie Heimsch’s June 3 story for Channel 3000:
“The historical past middle is consuming quite a lot of time, vitality and cash. And [WHS CEO and Director Christian Overland] has been pushing particularly exhausting for it,” mentioned the nameless worker. All through Might, Overland met with the Society’s Board of Curators, which incorporates no less than one Republican legislator that co-authored a 2025 bill trying to ban political flags from flying over state buildings. Overland additionally introduced “Wisconsin Historic Society’s Legislator of the 12 months” awards for apparently the primary time in Might. A number of of the awards went to Republicans on the Joint Committee of Finance. “Management has framed the choice… as political. And that flying the Pleasure flag can be political and we’re not a political group,” mentioned the WHS workers member. “However not selecting to fly it’s equally a political act.”
This particular person (together with, I imagine, the overwhelming majority of people that work for WHS) will get it. The sincere place for establishments to tackle its strategy to all issues political is one thing like: “We’ve to navigate political points with integrity and make applicable choices—however shit, people, we’re on this soup whether or not we prefer it or not!”
Any variation on “let’s not make this political” actually provides as much as: “I want to restrict the scope of which issues in our society are politically contested, and I want to restrict the quantity and sorts of people that get to contest them.” This requires included and excluded constituencies. A public establishment locations itself, untenably, in each camps, when it tries to selectively de-politicize itself on one entrance and ignores its political entanglements on others.
However to get again to what WHS itself has explicitly said: “selecting to not fly any flags or symbols that may be seen as tied to political or social actions, even ones that replicate values many workers members care deeply about, as a result of not everybody sees these symbols the identical approach.”
No. Fuck off. That is easy. A public establishment should serve the entire public. It should welcome the entire public. Speaking acceptance and welcome to varied segments of the general public—particularly teams that traditionally and presently face oppression and discrimination, but in addition people throughout completely different geographic areas, age ranges, affinity teams taken with completely different niches of Wisconsin historical past, and folks with completely different preferences about how they’d like to interact with WHS programming—shouldn’t be solely fully applicable however actually a part of the job.
A historic society, particularly a public one, ought to advocate vigorously for inclusion and equality, as a result of everybody deserves to be handled pretty in a historic context. Everybody deserves entry to historic programming that helps them perceive their very own place on the earth. LGBTQ individuals who’ve made historic contributions to Wisconsin, regardless of each effort the world made to disgrace and kill them for being queer, deserve a spot in historical past that does them justice. Our very conception of the function of historical past and historians—very similar to our conceptions of educational freedom and the civic function of journalism—actually assumes and relies upon upon a pluralistic and inclusive democracy.
On this context, no, you don’t should indulge discriminatory concepts or deal with them as holding equal foreign money in some type of pitched debate. Particularly in a state that was ahead of the curve in offering LGTBQ individuals with some, albeit imperfect, safety from discrimination. Affirming that you just welcome queer individuals is definitely simply plain in keeping with state regulation (and various local laws around the state). That in itself shouldn’t be a impartial political alignment, as a result of legislators and activists and different politicized actors formed these legal guidelines.
It’s completely unimaginable for a historic society to notice that “not everybody sees these symbols the identical approach” as an excuse for not taking a place. Certain, completely different individuals see completely different symbols in a different way. You recognize who’s nice at serving to us contextualize and navigate that? Historians! Historians are obliged to doc discriminatory attitudes and actions, clarify them, contextualize them, even on some degree withhold judgment for the sake of thorough understanding. They don’t seem to be obliged to deal with these attitudes as acceptable. They get to say that stigmatizing and oppressing LGBTQ individuals is dangerous, as a result of, amongst different issues, that’s empirically true.
Historians additionally get to rejoice the truth that LGBTQ individuals are an important a part of Wisconsin’s story, as a result of that is empirically true. That’s why, because the WHS has famous in its personal protection this month, a Pleasure flag flies year-round on the Pendarvis Historical Site in Mineral Level, honoring the two gay men, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, who helped to preserve it. (Somebody even wrote a dissertation about it.) Such tales have taken on a higher prominence within the public eye thanks partially to WHS’ personal LGBTQ history efforts, which embody events happening this very month centered on Pride. WHS’ on-line store includes a whole section of Pride merch. That is absurd. Absolutely it’s not an overreach for the Historic Society to sign that LGBTQ individuals are welcome at its personal Pleasure occasions. If it could possibly fly the flag at one place year-round, why does it even should deal with flying the flag for a month at its headquarters as a contested factor?
The entice of conflating “political” and “partisan”
One will get the sense that WHS management is unexpectedly slapping collectively its justifications for all this. Significantly enraging—and simply plain ahistorical—is the concept that WHS shouldn’t fly the Pleasure flag (sorry, one of its Pleasure flags) as a result of the company is “nonpartisan.” An sadly named spokesperson invoked that phrase in a May 30 story from Madison365:
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“This was a posh and troublesome determination that was made with consideration of many views,” WHS spokesperson Colleen Lies wrote in an e-mail to Madison365. “Finally, the choice was guided by our mission of connecting individuals to historical past by accumulating, preserving and sharing tales. As a nonpartisan company, the Society doesn’t take part in advocacy outdoors of that mission. With that in thoughts, we now have chosen to not elevate any flags on our company’s flagpoles that may be perceived as an act of advocacy. We stay dedicated to our mission work to gather, protect and share tales of Wisconsinites from all backgrounds, cultures, and views—together with the LGTBQ+ and different communities. We are going to proceed to share these tales by our collections, program areas, exhibitions, publications, and partnerships solid with scholarship and nice public historical past.”
Some of the infuriating and deadening options of public discourse within the U.S. is the tendency to conflate “partisanship” with any expression of political values. The formulation implies that any stance on these values should all map one way or the other onto the two-party system’s spectrum of ideologies. Mentioned spectrum runs from the center-left to the apocalyptic far-right. So once we deal with all issues political as essentially “partisan,” we slim the suitable window of debate. This framing additionally tempts us to deal with political stances as merely self-serving merchandise of groupthink and factional loyalty, relatively than analyzing the experiences or reasoning which may have formed these stances.
Decreasing the Pleasure flag to a “partisan” image does a grave disservice to the hundreds of thousands of LGTBQ individuals who’ve fended off homophobic assaults from the political mainstream for era after era. The Republican Get together has actively sought to eradicate queer individuals as a core political plank. The Democratic Get together progressively got here round to some affirmatively pro-LGBTQ positions, and solely not too long ago, after many years of strain. Members of each main events at the moment are actively collaborating in a divide-and-conquer technique that seeks to pit cisgender homosexual individuals towards trans individuals, or on the very least oh-so-pragmatically abandoning trans individuals. Nowhere and at no time on this partisan spectrum have individuals all throughout the LGBTQ spectrum been constantly well-served. Like another oppressed group, they’ve all the time to a big extent needed to struggle outdoors the mainstream electoral system, each by way of ideology and ways. Irrespective of how welcoming the political mainstream turns into, somebody is all the time not noted. Somebody is all the time sacrificed.
The essential details of Wisconsin’s historical past and current—once more, stuff quite a lot of us know due to the Wisconsin Historic Society’s work—illustrate that queerness has by no means mapped neatly onto partisanship. Wisconsin’s 1982 anti-discrimination law was SIGNED INTO LAW BY A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR, Lee Dreyfus, who even justified his determination on the time by citing what he known as the “elementary Republican precept that authorities ought to have a really restricted involvement in individuals’s personal and private lives.” Democrats had majorities in each homes of the Legislature throughout that session. However the regulation did have bipartisan assist, based on media studies on the time and varied historic sources. I admittedly don’t know the precise vote breakdown—to get that, I would wish to take a discipline journey to the WHS stacks, in all probability.
One Republican state legislator, District 51 Rep. Todd Novak, is overtly homosexual. He isn’t a member of the legislature’s LGBTQ+ Caucus, which remains all-Democratic. Novak has gone as far as to complain that Wisconsin Republicans don’t get sufficient credit score for advancing homosexual rights. Wisconsin was additionally dwelling to the primary overtly homosexual Republican member of Congress. Steve Gunderson was within the closet when he served within the Meeting within the Seventies. He went on to symbolize the third Congressional District within the U.S. Home of Representatives; and, in 1994, a virulently anti-gay California Republican, Bob Dornan, outed Gunderson in a floor speech. One in all Wisconsin’s most notorious Republican figures, Senator Joe McCarthy, faced accusations that he was gay, at the same time as he—with the assistance of the not-so-well-closeted Roy Cohn—led a purge of gay federal employees. After all, this leaves Democrat Tammy Baldwin as each the primary overtly homosexual Wisconsin state legislator and the primary overtly homosexual U.S. Senator.
You may perceive two necessary issues without delay. 1) Flying a Pleasure flag is a political act. 2) It’s as much as LGBTQ individuals themselves—as people and as constituencies of all kinds—to determine their very own partisan and ideological alignments, together with essentially radical ones. That company and self-determination is probably probably the most elementary factor of all for a Pleasure flag to say, if you wish to connect highly effective political symbolism to a flag. It’s likewise as much as varied events/factions to determine how they strategy LGTBQ points. None of those selections are monolithic or completely fastened.
The attraction to nonpartisanship can be a silly blunder if WHS actually needs to construct favor and leverage with Republicans. WHS has implicitly now framed its personal earlier (and ongoing!) shows of Pleasure flags as “partisan.” This creates much more of a gap for bad-faith accusations of partisanship each time WHS does something even remotely controversial sooner or later. It’s a whole self-own, one other tacit give up to right-wing framing.
Tutorial and academic establishments have an obligation to push past the “sheesh, politics amirite” default of American discourse. We glance to those establishments to present us data and ideas that enable us to type our personal complicated and important analyses of the world, relatively than depend on a budget ready-made narratives that politicians would have us accept. They need to assist and encourage us in navigating a world that’s all the time going to be entangled within the political, relatively than assist us idiot ourselves into considering we will ever really escape the political. The highest management at UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Historic Society have each, disgracefully, modeled that escape try and demonstrated simply how futile it’s.
