Projects

Student, faculty, and community projects that have come out of GLAMA

CATEGORIES
 

Interstitial Passages: Re-enactment of Queer Bodies of Color in Art and Literature (Dissertation, 2023)

My project explores the connections between literature and visual art to re-enact and re-imagine queer bodies of color in liminal spaces or porous passages as a means of contesting invisibility, exclusion, and displacement. I engage in the literature of James Baldwin and John Rechy and the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to conceptualize symbolic and physical in-between spaces where racial and gender alternative projects of community, same-sex desire, and love are possible.
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Kansas City’s First Pride Parade

Kansas City’s first Pride parade in 1977 was spearheaded by Lea Hopkins, a bold, Black lesbian whose organizing sparked a wider gay rights movement that continues today. But it was only a few weeks after that successful event that Hopkins found herself on the defense again, when a prominent anti-gay activist came on a crusade […]

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KC Rainbow Tour

Driving tour of sites significant in local LGBTQ history. Project creator: Joel Barrett.

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Making History:  Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights

Built by students in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s public history program, the exhibit explores the activism of gays and lesbians in the decades before Stonewall, including Kansas City’s surprisingly pivotal role in helping to launch America’s gay rights movement. Focusing on ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things, the exhibit explores how history is made.
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Miss/They Camaraderie 2024

Immersive exhibition on drag performance and Black pageantry. Project creators: Boi Boy (Kansas City, MO), John Brant (Kansas City, MO), Delaney George (Los Angeles, CA), Jackob Graves (Kansas City, MO), Nasir Anthony Montalvo (Kansas City, MO), SunYoung Park (Kansas City, MO), and Trenity Thomas (New Orleans, LA).

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Mural Featuring GLAMA Images

The 6th Annual SpraySeeMo Mural Festival commissioned 20 murals through Kansas City’s Crossroads, 18th & Vine, River Market, West Bottoms, and Midtown neighborhoods. These murals focused on themes of mental health awareness and well-being. Mural featuring GLAMA images created by: Gaia.

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Navigating Change in the Homophile Heartland:  Kansas City’s Phoenix Society and the Early Gay Rights Movement, 1966-1971

Article published in volume 109, issue 4 of the Missouri Historical Review (July 2015).
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North American Conference of Homophile Organizations and Phoenix Society for Individual Freedom Historic Markers (12th and Wyandotte)

These historic markers celebrate local organizations created to advocate for equality for all and to support the needs of the local LGBT community. Project creator: LGBT KC.

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Over the Rainbow: Public History as Allyship in Documenting Kansas City’s LGBTQ Past

“Over the Rainbow: Public History as Allyship in Documenting Kansas City’s LGBTQ Past”, Christopher D. Cantwell, Stuart Hinds, Kathryn B. Carpenter, The Public Historian, v. 41, no. 2, 2019.  https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2019.41.2.245
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Queer Kansas City Mosaic

KCAI graduate Jack Olander Brooks’ 4 x 6-foot mosaic representing historical queer Kansas City moments from 1855 through the early 2010s is on permanent display inside GLAMA’s reading room on the third floor of UMKC’s Miller Nichols Library.
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