Distinguished Service Award to the Rainbow History Project

Award presented by Craig Howell

Acceptance remarks by Mark Meinke

GLAA 31st Anniversary Reception
Hotel Washington
Thursday, April 18, 2002

Thank you for this Distinguished Service Award. At the Rainbow History Project we appreciate the strong support we receive from our community. GLAA has been a pillar of support since we began in November of 2000. In a sort of reversed synchronicity, our first public event was a symposium commemorating the founding of GLAA 31 years ago. Our community's newest institution began with recognizing one of our community's most enduring institutions.

We are grateful to have the wholehearted support of the DC Coalition of Black Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Transgendered Persons, of One In Ten, and other community groups. The DC Public Library's Washingtoniana Division, the Washington Historical Society, the Charles Sumner School Museum, and other academic groups have proven unstinting in their support. This year, for the first time, the GLBT community has been invited not only to participate in the annual Washington DC Historical Studies Conference but also to join the planning committee as well.

Our members are a continuous inspiration to the board for their generosity of time and spirit and funds. The Rainbow History Project's board of advisors includes many of our community's founders and institution builders. The advisors also include leading figures in Washington DC's archival, museum, and academic communities who help ensure the validity and quality of our work.

The Rainbow History Project is about preserving our community memories. We work to capture and preserve the memories of those who have passed and of those who are still among us. Our oral history collection is building a portrait of our lives as they have been lived in metropolitan Washington DC. To paraphrase Walt Whitman's poem For Him I Sing, "For us we sing/We raise the present on the past/As with some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past..." The Rainbow History Project preserves the roots, giving us all a past on which to raise the present.

We are also about visibility. Fifty-one years ago, Edward Sagarin, writing as Donald Webster Cory in The Homosexual in America characterized homosexuals as an unrecognized minority, exploitable and oppressible because of their invisibility. The Rainbow History Project exists to remind metropolitan Washington DC, its academic and heritage community, its civil rights advocates, its preservationists and archivists, and its public at large that this city is and has been home to a vibrant, talented, amusing, tempestuous, and sometimes oppressed community rich in diversity and fervent in its claim to civil rights.

The Rainbow History Project is just the vehicle. Those of you in the audience tonight, your memories of your personal pasts, memories of the friends you love and have lost, and the memories of the battles you have fought -- all of that is the message we carry. Around the room are brochures inviting you to join the 60 some members of our community who have already recorded their memories of being in the life in DC for our oral history collection. Join them in preserving the memories and in preserving our visibility. We are a people with a past.

Join the Rainbow History Project in telling our story around town and around the nation. We are a 21st century Internet-exploiting kind of organization. Check out our website at www.rainbowhistory.org to see what we've done already and what we're about to do.

Again, thank you very much for this award.