October was LGBTQ History month thanks to a history teacher from rural Missouri. Rodney Wilson made history in 1994 when he came out as gay to his St. Louis high school classroom, not far from where he grew up in rural Potosi, Missouri, where he is now helping preserve queer history.

Wilson didn’t plan on coming out to his students that day. But while explaining the pink triangles used to forcibly identify queer people in concentration camps during the Holocaust, he felt compelled to tell his students that had he lived there at that time, he might have been marked with one too.

Wilson’s coming out sparked backlash in Missouri and across the country. But Wilson remained firm in his efforts to humanize himself and his community, going on to establish a nationally recognized month commemorating LGBTQ+ history.

He was not alone then, nor is he now. Across the state, queer Missourians–teachers, historians, journalists, and ordinary people–have fought for decades to document and preserve the stories of their peers, elders, and ancestors that would otherwise be erased or unheard. The people continuing the fight are speaking up about why it matters more than ever.

Preserving Queer History in the Classroom

For Wilson, coming out to his students meant becoming something that he never had as a kid in Potosi: an openly queer teacher.

“Growing up, I didn’t know a single LGBTQ person,” Wilson told the Daily Yonder in an interview. “There was no one out in that town that I was aware of.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that queer people didn’t exist in Potosi. They were always there. “Even on television, queer people came into our living rooms through television in the 1970s. We just didn’t recognize them,” Wilson said.

Today, Wilson teaches full-time at Mineral Area College in rural Park Hills, Missouri, a school he used to attend as a student in the 1980s. Back then, he said, the current infrastructure didn’t exist for LGBTQ+ students and faculty.

Read the full article about preserving queer history in rural Missouri by Betsy Froiland at The Daily Yonder.