What are we Doing?
- alexanderrpreston7
- Nov 8, 2024
- 3 min read
By Al Preston
Where’s the Pittsburgh? Why do I care about all this other stuff?
Excellent questions some reading may have had at this point. The Holiday Pride is a Pittsburgh based queer history institution. Why are we talking about all this other stuff?
Don’t worry, we’ll get there! But there are some things that we need to cover first. Pittsburgh’s queer history hasn’t come out of a vacuum after all. As isolated we can sometimes feel, Pittsburgh is part of a wider and broader history and stuff from outside can come creeping in at all times.
As a historical institution, we have a duty to impart history the best we can. That includes talking about things that happen outside of our particular location. For example, we talked about Anita Bryant in a podcast because a number of our Pittsburgh based narrators talk about her. Soon, we’ll have conversations about AIDS, and it will be really helpful for those conversations if there is some baseline we can all share about our knowledge about the AIDS crisis when we talk specifically about Pittsburgh.
There’s a method to the madness! It can be extremely difficult to talk about a history without acknowledging or explaining what was going on to cause that history. The Pittsburgh based group, Thursday Night Life, the topic of an upcoming oral history, did not come from nowhere. One of the founders had known of a similar organization in another city. Its role as an advocacy group for AIDS also comes from the impact of AIDS and even the Pitt Men’s Study which happened in Pittsburgh but also had national implications as well as cause and effect.
History layers on top of itself. It builds and builds until the current moment. Every topic we cover has a purpose to build up that history. As we get further along, more podcasts and blog posts will be focused on Pittsburgh.
Book reviews will stay relatively the same, there are next to no books about Pittsburgh’s queer history. However, these books can help us understand what might be happening in Pittsburgh and the information gained from them will contribute to wide conversations. They are as much about research as transparency and encouraging critical thinking.
Then…what about the global stuff? Why talk about places not America, the place in which we live?
Well, we are a city. People from across the globe have landed here and made Pittsburgh their home. Some may have lost touch with their heritage, some are still deeply within it. Regardless, we are in a global world.
With the internet, we are connected to the far reaches of the globe with just a few taps from a keyboard. The world is out there, and it matters. We, as a fairly welcoming city, should be aware of what’s going on out there. It may one day affect us. Even if it doesn’t, people who now live here may have been affected by it. As much as some may want it to be so, we don’t abandon everything about our heritage or pasts when we move somewhere new. A lot of folks who live here find strength in knowing that their culture may not wholly reject them or hadn’t rejected them in the past. That is how we revive those feelings and views.
Finally, there’s a more logistical reason we cover these topics. We are an infant institution. We need to talk about something.
While all of the above is very true, starting out with these things inevitably also fills the website. It brings people in, gives them something to do when they get here, and come away with our goal; knowledge.
We are actively researching what makes Pittsburgh special and if we’re going to be doing all of that work, we might as well show it off. Not only does it help us when we create an exhibit, but it also helps you, our audience. It allows us to point you where to go when a topic comes up, but it also allows you to come into an exhibit with pre-existing knowledge. Kind of like an in-person museum.
While all of this may seem disjointed and out of place, there is a purpose, I swear. As exhibits are researched and built, it all comes together in the end. I just hope you’re willing to stick it out with us.
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