A back-to-school message from Liz Vogel, Los Angeles Director for Facing History and Ourselves.

As LA area schools go back to school, we want to feature the new "Back to School Toolkit" from Facing History. Each day this week, we will showcase one part of the toolkit.

In addition to establishing class norms and culture, the first week of school is a time to show students what the course will be like. I always loved introducing how my class would engage their curiosity and their voice through the activities we did early on. 

Lesson 5 of the Back-to-School Toolkit pulls back the curtain on the work of a historian, inviting students to engage more critically with historical narrative:

As LA area schools go back to school, we want to feature the new "Back to School Toolkit" from Facing History. Each day this week, we will showcase one part of the toolkit.

By using the fourth lesson from the Back-to-School Toolkit, classes get to collaborate on something that can guide them and serve as a touchpoint for the whole year – the classroom contract. While it can seem like a simple exercise, the importance of this lesson should not be minimized. It provides the opportunity for the entire community to have a voice and a stake in establishing the tone for wrestling with important ideas, conversations, and learning. 

As LA area schools go back to school, we want to feature the new "Back to School Toolkit" from Facing History. Each day this week, we will showcase one part of the toolkit.

One of my favorite things about the beginning of school year as a teacher was community- building. For me, it went so much farther than learning all my students’ names—it also became about their identities. Who were these people in my classroom? Where did they come from? What experiences have they had? What experiences do they bring into my classroom?

As LA area schools go back to school, we want to feature the new "Back to School Toolkit" from Facing History. Each day this week, we will showcase one part of the toolkit.

The first days of school are so important for setting the tone of the class.  How do you signal to students that you are interested in being in partnership with them?

Did you know that two students helped get the word “upstander” in the dictionary? They studied the importance of speaking up and making positive change, and were surprised that the term -- coined by diplomat Samantha Power and popularized by Facing History and Ourselves -- wasn’t already recognized. So they worked, as upstanders do, to find a solution.

Happy Pride! As we end this series on California LGBTQ Upstanders, I encourage each of you to continue to learn and follow the history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement. The fight for social and legal equality for LGBTQ people is on-going and ultimately reflects on our values as a people and a nation by determining who among us deserve to be treated with kindness and respect.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. For many, this infamous clash between the trans and gay patrons of the Stonewall Inn and the New York City Police Department, which already had a long history of harassment against the gay community, signifies the start of the LGBTQ civil rights movement in the United States. Celebratory and educational events are happening throughout the country to mark this monumental event. The Making Gay History podcast, hosted by Eric Marcus, is dedicating their entire fifth season to stories on and around Stonewall. As important as Stonewall is to the movement, there are many other stories to uncover as we celebrate Pride Month.

This June, we are proud to continue our focus on Upstanders with a special series on California LGBTQ Upstanders, co-hosted by ONE Archives Foundation and in collaboration with the podcast, Making Gay History. Each week, we explore the content, themes, and questions raised in one past episode of the podcast. 

As I continue my dive into the history of of the LGBTQ civil rights movement in Los Angeles, it is becoming clear that it is a history of a diverse group of self-determined people and their allies fighting to ensure that society fully understands and accepts LGBTQ individuals.

You may remember this quote from Edythe Eyde, who we met last week:

“With the advancement of psychiatry and related subjects, the world is becoming more and more aware that there are those in our midst who feel no attraction for the opposite sex.” (Edythe Eyde, Making Gay History)

Eyde highlights the importance of the psychiatric and medical communities in forming current/popular social beliefs. Incredibly, universal sodomy laws were prevalent in the United States until 1963, which tells us that homosexuality was widely viewed as morally and socially abhorrent. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) officially classified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1952, confirming these general societal beliefs. (More information can be found here.) Psychiatric research studies on human sexuality conducted in the 1940s and 1950s initiated the gradual change of regarding homosexuality as a natural expression of human sexuality rather than a pathological disorder.

Today for LGBTQ Pride Month we learn about the ground-breaking work of Dr. Evelyn Hooker.

Over the course of the next four weeks, we will be exploring the intersection between the history of the City of Los Angeles and the LGBTQ civil rights movement between 1940 and 1980. Los Angelenos have a rich and sometimes unusual history of activism within their own communities and beyond. With the help of the Making Gay History podcast and its host Eric Marcus, we will get to know a few of the lesser known influencers.  Knowing some of these stories ensures that the history we teach our students is both accurate and inclusive.

The first person we are going to meet is Edythe Eyde. Her voice is like listening to someone’s polite, unassuming grandmother . . . until you realize, through her stories, what a heroine she actually was.  I’m sure you’ll agree that she was prescient, radical, and deserving of high praise. Way back in 1947, Edythe Eyde was already ahead of her time:

"Homosexuality is becoming a less and less taboo subject, and although still considered by the general public as contemptible, or treated with derision, I venture to predict that there will be a time in the future when gay folk will be accepted as part of regular society."