The making of a People’s History of the LGBTQ community in Grand Rapids documentary film

(Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from my book, A People’s History of Grand Rapids.)

In 2011, the LGBT Resource Center at GVSU invited us to create a documentary on the People’s History of the LGBTQ community in Grand Rapids. We interviewed about 75 people, collected archival material and looked at how the Grand Rapids-based commercial news media reported on the LGBTQ community. You can watch that documentary online at this link.

In the process of creating the documentary, there were two things that happened, which provide perfect bookends to this chapter. Months before we were asked to be involved in this project, the GVSU LGBT Resource Center had an arraignment with the local PBS affiliate, WGVU, to run four PSAs that students would create, PSAs that were specific to the LGBTQ movement. Once representatives of GVSU had seen the PSAs, they decided to not air the videos, as they thought that the videos might not sit well with the West Michigan audience. 

Frustrated, the LGBT Resource Center at GVSU wanted to figure out how to show the PSAs to a broad audience. The center had also budgeted funds to cover the cost of airing these PSAs, but now that they were denied that opportunity on WGVU, they then approached the Grand Rapids People’s History Project about making a documentary about the history of the LGBTQ community in the area. Thus, the use of censorship led to our work with the LGBT Resource Center and uncovering this powerful part of the Grand Rapids People’s History. 

A People’s History of the LGBTQ Community in Grand Rapids film chapters

• Early years
• Organizing the First Pride
• Fighting for Our Rights: The Ordinance Campaign
• AIDS and the Gay Community
• The Religious Right and Homophobia in Grand Rapids
• Sons and Daughters – A Community Sanctuary
• GVSU: Being out on campus
• Political Victories Provide Space: The Emergence of LGBTQ Groups
• Learning from History: Where Do We Go From Here?

At the time of the screening of the film in November of 2011 (we had nearly a thousand people come to the premier of the film that was screened at the downtown GVSU campus), GVSU was in the midst of a major fundraising project to build a new library. The library was going to be named after the mother of Kate Pew Wolters and the university did not want the film to negatively impact their ability to raise the necessary funding for the new library. This is what the university’s lawyer was objecting to, that a family with deep pockets, had one member of their family “negatively depicted” in the Grand Rapids People’s History of the LGBTQ community film. The film did not depict Kate Pew Wolters in a negative light, but it did point out that Wolters was responsible for delivering the message to Dennis Komack, that he would be fired if he continued his involvement with the bookstore known as Sons & Daughters. 

This whole incident again reflects the fact that those in positions of power, or those who represent people in power, are threatened by the real history of any community. Those in power have done their best to make sure that movements like the LGBTQ+ Movement does not do anything to threaten their interests. This why it is important that we know this history, as the insurgent group the Zapatistas taught me, Estamos en una guerra en contra del olvido – We are in a war against forgetting. Let us always fight against forgetting and celebrate our collective histories!