Philadelphia is well known for residents who have led the charge in civil rights, health care and entertainment.
However, a little-known collection of archives shows that many of the same people were also leaders in the Black LGBTQ+ circles. That includes people like Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Black man from West Chester, Pennsylvania, who, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., organized the Civil Rights march to Washington, D.C., in 1963.
“There are so many folks from other communities that just don’t really understand being Black and queer in the world today. How it is currently, how it was in the past,” said Gary Hines, a community leader working alongside Bob Skiba to preserve these histories. “Particularly the Black and queer culture, [there’s] really not a lot of history written about.”