Meet the teacher who created LGBTQ History Month

Thirty years ago, Rodney Wilson walked into his classroom at Mehlville High School, prepared to teach his students about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

He then did something he wasn’t expecting to do that day. He came out to his students.

“I simply mentioned there was a pink triangle,” Wilson said of the shape sewn into the uniforms of gay people held in Nazi Germany concentration camps that has since been reclaimed as a symbol of LGBTQ+ liberation.

During the lesson, Wilson said the pink triangle could have been used to mark him as a gay person: “I might have fallen underneath that umbrella of persecution.”

At that time, Wilson was already out to family and friends. Coming out to his students and coworkers was the next step in his coming out journey. Three decades later, he recalls what the world felt like back in 1994.

“There was so much going on outside of my classroom. We were having huge national debates about ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ about marriage equality, about HIV and AIDS,” he told PBS News Communities Correspondent Gabrielle Hays. “But there was very little in the classroom. My textbook, for example, didn’t have anything about LGBTQ people or LGBTQ history,” Wilson said.

That lack of inclusion led him to found Lesbian and Gay History Month in 1994.

Wilson recalled his experience coming out and how everyone is part of the historical narrative.

This video was produced by Casey Kuhn, Joshua Barajas, Erica Hendry, Yasmeen Alamiri and Julia Griffin.

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