The erasure and exclusion of LGBTQIA+ history is nothing new, but it can be difficult to uncover — especially when looking decades and centuries back. Northern Colorado has records of people who would likely today be considered gay going as far back as the 1850s, according to the local records.

A caveat to those records, however, is that those accounts do not include the understandings and norms of Indigenous peoples in the region, creating even further erasure of people and their experiences. Despite this historical erasure, progress has been made throughout the years, and there are projects and people dedicated to preventing further erasure and exclusion.

The Queer Memory Project of Northern Colorado is an organization dedicated to maintaining, consolidating and sharing the stories not often heard. Founded in 2020 by Tom Dunn, a Colorado State University associate professor of communication studies, the QMP digitizes and publishes collections of artifacts, newspaper clippings and is currently working on an oral history piece set to be made public in the next year.

Dunn discussed the involvement of students and the larger impact on community involvement.

“We’ve had a lot of undergraduate students and graduate students engaged in the project over the years,” Dunn said. “But we also work a lot with community members, particularly LGBTQ elders in the community, so people who’ve lived here for a really long time, who’ve lived various kinds of LGBTQ lives, and especially during a time when Fort Collins was not as accepting as it is about those identities and those ways of living.”

Dunn said that materials archived throughout the project are vital pieces of history and it remains committed to not just sharing negative news and events, but the joy and good, too.

“It takes more work to tell the positive story, but there’s a lot of positive story to tell,” Dunn said. 

The 1960s and 70s, Dunn said, are when LGBTQ+ people became more visible in Fort Collins and at CSU. 

“When (the Pride Resource Center) was founded, that’s a whole (other) level of visibility that happened on campus,” Dunn said. “But before that, there was a lot of student work and a lot of student-centered organizing that really drove that. Certainly there’s people on campus before that … identify as gay or lesbian, and there’s certainly people on campus who are probably living same-sex desires out loud on campus as well, too, prior to that, but maybe aren’t as visible in that sort of way.”

“I think that it’s really powerful to be able to still celebrate in the midst of it all.” –Clarissa Trapp, CSU Archives and Special Collections archivist

Though records may not always match current understandings of LGBTQIA+ people, that doesn’t mean those people didn’t exist, both at CSU and beyond.

Jayna Sheats is an alumna of CSU who, after a few different stints at the university and in the U.S. Army, graduated in 1974 with a degree in chemistry. After graduation, she attended Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1978. Her recent book, “Hanna’s Ascent,” pulled from her own experiences growing up as a transgender woman in rural Colorado and embarking on a journey of self-discovery, and it was recently added to CSU’s catalogue at the Morgan Library.

“If you wanted to find out what your feelings were — I mean, we all know these things from an early age, but we don’t know what to call them because the adults are not telling us, and they’ve made it very clear that we should not ask,” Sheats said. “I remember going to the library when I was in the Army. I went to the library, and I found these books by sexologists from 100 years ago. … (It’s) sort of like you went to a back alley somewhere and didn’t know what you were going to find.”

Following a career in Silicon Valley and finding her true passion in writing, Sheats said she returned to campus with a sense of hope for the future, and also confusion and fear.

“(A few years ago) it felt like we’d come out of the dark ages, you know,” Sheats said. “And yeah, there were still plenty of prejudiced people around, but we were making tremendous progress, … and now we’re just, I don’t know what we’re doing.”

Queer and transgender history at CSU became more visibly mainstream in the 1970s, with the Fort Collins Gay Alliance being active on campus, according to editions of The Rocky Mountain Collegian — then named the Fort Collins Daily Journal.

“The Fort Collins Gay Alliance (FCGA) was one of three organizations recently awarded free office space in the Student Center Cave, which will be remodeled this summer to accommodate more groups,” a 1976 article reads.

In 1977, there was a “Gay Lifestyles Symposium,” held by FCGA and it was set to feature Elaine Noble, the first gay person elected to a state legislature.

Throughout the university’s historical records, there are recorded experiences that aren’t always kind and accepting; however, these stories show how progress has been made and also serve as a reminder of where we can continue to grow.

What is now known as the Pride Resource Center wasn’t formally founded until 1998, when the GLBT Student Services opened Aug. 1 with no physical office space, according to the Pride Resource Center. An office was established that November in the basement of the Lory Student Center. Scrapbooks from Pride going back to 1971 have been archived and are available digitally through CSU’s Archives and Special Collections. 

Clarissa Trapp works as an instruction and outreach archivist at CSU and discussed the collection compiled with Pride and the library, which includes celebratory, exciting moments as well as those more somber.

“This is a collection that really, like, brings out strong feelings in people,” Trapp said. “People are excited that we have it and then … they get into it and they’re like, ‘I have to take a break.’”

Trapp said that the collection heavily documents Matthew Shepard’s murder and subsequent community action following his death. According to the QMP timeline, there was a candlelight vigil held the day after Shepard’s death that drew 600-700 students, faculty and community members. 

“It’s a really emotionally charged thing to read about,” Trapp said. “There’s something about (the collection) being student life and about documenting something that, for the most part, culturally, we’ve accepted as … an OK … thing.”

Shepard was brutally beaten in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was attending the University of Wyoming. He was left tied to a fence post and brought to the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins the following morning, but died five days later of his injuries. His parents started the Matthew Shepard Foundation in his honor, and Shepard’s death served as a catalyst for hate crime legislation.

Another large part of the collection are original newspaper clippings collected in scrapbooks, Trapp said, and those illustrate the importance of joy, celebration and resistance. 

“I think that it’s really powerful to be able to still celebrate in the midst of it all,” Trapp said. “I think that’s something that the queer community (has) been doing for as long as it’s been around, … cheers to celebrating in spite and because of.”

Reach Aubree Miller at life@collegian.com or on social media @aubreem07.