As the sun set Dec. 3, 130 students and faculty excitedly gathered in the ATEC lobby for an archival research gallery. Twelve students were presenting their final project that night, but the space did not feel like an examination hall. Instead of the usual hushed whispers of the lobby, the space swirled with endless conversation about an often-overlooked topic — the history of queerness in the Southern U.S.
At one desk, a student stood surrounded by old cassette tapes, ancient files and a turn-of-the-century computer monitor to recreate a workspace from days gone by. A dozen feet away, a small crowd formed around a vibrant array of stickers covering a table that, for that night, was using a lesbian pride flag as its tablecloth. Behind the crowd, an attendee placed their carefully handwritten note on a corkboard. For the students of HIST 4383, History of the Queer South, this end-of-semester gallery is more than just a project. It is a reflection on a history that for too long has been hidden under relentless attacks and a culture of fear and silence.
At the far end of the gallery, political science senior Akiva Ward showed guests his carefully curated installation. It included an old trench coat, archive files, an ancient monitor and a small pile of books. It felt less like a display and more like a preserved slice of life from when UTD was first founded.
“Everything here is from surplus,” Ward said. “I did not spend a dime to find these relics.”
The display honored the life of Walter Charles Law, a Black gay activist, archivist and professor from Texas who was active from the 1970s to ’90s.
“I wanted to highlight somebody who had more of a quiet life,” Ward said. “Somebody who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page but still made their own mark on the state.”
Ward found Law’s history by scraping through digitized archives and obscure audio files, piecing together a legacy that had not been particularly cataloged in the historical record prior. Ward said that for him, as a queer Black person, this recovery was an extremely personal process.
“It’s about highlighting lives like his, highlighting lives like mine,” Ward said. “I want this installation to be an act of respect and a challenge to the idea that only the loudest voices can be remembered.”
A kaleidoscope of color and flags from all over the world cover animation and games junior Ana Rachel Gonzalez’s table. The cheerful lesbian stickers are the hook to bring in her audience, but the story of her research is about Hispanic queer history in the South and its severe lack of documentation.
“When I first started looking through the archives, I couldn’t find anything about the topic,” Gonzalez said.
After weeks of research, Gonzalez was finally able to access a book that made an off-hand mention of a group called Lesbiana Latinas de Dallas, which was active from 1995-97. Gonzalez said she was instantly hooked.
“I wanted to dig into them more because they were clearly important enough to at least be mentioned, which I hadn’t found at that time before them,” Gonzalez said.
So she plunged into the class archives, scouring every newsletter from the short-lived organization. She said she was fascinated to find that the group had created a safe space for women facing intersectional discrimination, supporting Latina lesbians who were facing homophobia within their own cultural communities while also being marginalized by the broader LGBTQ+ community that didn’t address their specific struggles with immigration.
“As I read more and more about them, I saw that the struggles they faced were really just the start of what the community continues to feel today,” Gonzalez said. “In the ’90s you saw this increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become super common today. But I really appreciate that even despite those obstacles, we have always been here. We’ve been in Dallas, and we continue to stay in Dallas.”
Sitting on the center of public policy senior Nandita Kumar’s table was a lovingly crafted scrapbook. Kumar’s project explores “queer family making in the U.S. South.” The scrapbook practically overflowed with historical news clippings, legal documents and personal narratives.
“I chose a scrapbook because they are incredibly unique and very DIY,” Kumar said. “They are special because each one is different. That doesn’t take away from their magic, it is their magic.”
Kumar’s research revealed heartbreaking legal battles over what constituted a “legitimate” child of queer parents. She said that the modern political rhetoric around the family had an alarming parallel to the decades-old documentation she had found.
“So much of what I found was a lot of old, very discriminatory dog whistles that queer people aren’t fit to be parents,” Kumar said. “We are seeing a resurgence of this in how we treat people in the legal and foster system as well as socially … It’s really important that we continue to tell these stories so that they’re not forgotten and that we can also continue to work towards progress and not be regressing without even knowing it.”
But Kumar’s project wasn’t just a historical record. Next to the scrapbook’s table stood a poster stand with a scrappy array of handwritten sticky notes answering Kumar’s question: “What does family mean to you?” A nearby letter writing station encouraged visitors to write letters for a chosen family.
“Not everyone gets to have supportive family members,” Kumar said. “But everyone deserves to hear that support from somewhere.”
The sheer diversity of projects, from interactive art to a doll house, was not an accident. It was the core of associate history professor Anne Gray Fischer’s “dream class,” a vision she’d carried for years until the field of queer public history started to blossom, allowing for a swathe of literature to become available to students to make the class possible. Support from the U.S. Open History Lab allowed each student to receive materials for the class free of charge.
“As we put things under the rubric of queer history, the idea of it being niche fades away,” Fischer said. “It actually opens up a whole new field of inquiry that for decades has been historically untapped.”
Fischer structured the class to encourage students to create projects for a public audience instead of writing a paper that would be read by “an audience of one.” This ethos spilled well beyond campus walls. Driving one day in the middle of fall, Fischer heard one of the founders of Sue Ellen’s, the oldest lesbian bar in Texas and the only one in Dallas, on Lambda Weekly, the longest-running LGBTQ+ radio show. Fischer said she got excited because one of her students had researched this person as part of her project, so Fischer called in to the show. That connection spiraled all the way to the office of Texas State Rep. Julie Johnson.
For the entire duration of the gallery, Johnson’s two-minute video plays on a loop.
“This project is more than an academic showcase,” Johnson said in the video. “It is a celebration of courage, community and the power of telling our own stories and for me it’s deeply personal.”
When she was elected in 2024, Johnson was the first LGBTQ+ person from the South to serve as a representative in Congress. In the video, she said that the students of UTD had undertaken a crucial mission that would make LGBTQ+ history more than just a footnote in an archive.
“[The history of the South] is a story that has always included LGBTQ people even when our histories were pushed into the shadows,” Johnson said. “When young people see families or identities like theirs reflected back at them, it sends a message: you belong, you are a part of this history and you are part of this future.”
