Blue Truck, Red State: Smithsonian Institution

Showing posts with label Smithsonian Institution. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Exploring Gay HIstory at the Smithsonian

Fascinating artifacts from the the Smithsonian Institution trace the stories of gay Americans, famous and obscure, from the 1800s till today in this 2024 documentary. It's fairly good, though as is so often the case with such broad summaries, it sometimes glamorizes and dramatizes a bit more than is necessary - but worth watching anyway.

We've come a long way, baby; I just hope I don't live to see the pendulum swing back the other way. But it can and does sometimes, as history has shown many times in many places.

It bugs me when people talk about being on "the right side of history" - that's a misnomer. What they really mean is the right side of the future; but the future is unknown and unknowable. It hasn't happened yet. And there are no guarantees in this universe.

All we can ever know for sure is this little stepping-stone of time we live in - the present. So make the best of it.

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Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Gay History in the Smithsonian Archives

Filmed in 2024, this video presents memorabilia of gay life in America before and after Stonewall. Quite poignant.

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Prayer for Peace

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?

It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.

If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.

--Archbishop Desmond Tutu