More than 100 people crowded into The Club Car in Station North on a recent Thursday evening, not for a drag show or dance party, but for an event many found equally exhilarating — a history lesson.
As the crowd cheered and whistled, host Ben Egerman recounted some of the topics he had discussed in previous talks: an 1830s trans horse thief, the Black Baltimore drag queens of the 1920s “Pansy Craze” and a 1955 police raid on a Baltimore gay bar, The Pepper Hill Club.
“Queer and trans folks have existed long before there was language to describe us, long before there was any form of legal protection,” Egerman said.
Egerman’s Gay Little History series, which culminates with an event Thursday evening at The Club Car, is one of many recently launched initiatives to unearth, record, preserve and share the stories of Maryland’s LGBTQIA+ residents.
A young trans librarian is compiling a queer history of Southern Maryland. A Baltimore museum curator is leading workshops on preserving items of significance to queer people. An artist is creating installations and performance pieces inspired by old Baltimore Gay Paper clippings.
As the Trump administration and conservative legislatures around the country attack rights secured for LGBTQIA+ people, local historians say sharing the stories of queer ancestors has never been more important.
“We’re here. We’ve always been here and we will always be here, no matter how many resources you take away from us,” said Kate Drabinski, a gender, women’s and sexuality studies professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who leads queer history walking tours. “We’ve gotten through periods like this before. We will be OK.”
Egerman’s most recent talk centered on another turbulent period: the post-Stonewall push for queer rights and the AIDS crisis in the late 1960s through ’90s.
“These are scenes from the Hippo on the night they passed the anti-discrimination act” in 1988, Egerman said as black-and-white photos of revelers at the now-closed Mount Vernon gay nightclub appeared on a screen behind him.
One of the people in the photographs, Louis L. Hughes Jr., 81, was sitting in the audience. Hughes helped found what is now known as the Pride Center of Maryland and Chase Brexton Health Services.
While white cisgender gay men in New York City or San Francisco feature prominently in history books, Baltimore’s queer pioneers were much more diverse, Egerman said. The city’s first queer rights organization, the Baltimore Gay Alliance, was led by a Black woman, Paulette Young.
Hughes recalled the challenges of being both Black and gay in the 1970s and ’80s. Bouncers at the Hippo, one of the city’s best-known gay clubs until its 2015 closure, forced his mother to show multiple forms of ID before allowing her entry, he said.
Hughes has recounted stories of Baltimore’s queer history for decades, and has been interviewed for a book and documentary about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights movement. He’s one of the founders of the walking tours that Drabinski helps lead.
But Hughes, who navigated icy streets with a cane to make it to Egerman’s event, said he was thrilled to see so many people in their 20s and 30s energized about LGBTQIA+ history.
“Sitting in that audience, it was glorious,” he said.
Egerman said the Trump administration’s efforts to suppress queer history — including removing a Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument last month — have made his work more urgent.
“People want something they can hold onto, metaphorically and physically,” he said. “There is a real urge towards getting offline and building community in person.”
A librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Egerman plumbed obscure newspaper archives and historical records for long-forgotten stories. While in graduate school, he interned with Preservation Maryland to work on a study of local LGBTQIA+ history.
The zines, which Egerman posts on his website along with instructions for printing them, grew out of that research.
“People in our community rarely get an opportunity to learn our history, so I want it to be as available as I can make it,” Egerman writes in the introduction to one zine, noting that he aims to make the history fun because it is “really ridiculous in a sort of melodramatic, campy way.”
Take for example “The Friday Nights: The Messy Lives of the Wealthiest and Most Powerful Queer Women Baltimore Has Ever Known,” which tells how daughters of some of the city’s most prominent families fell in and out of love and helped found cultural institutions like the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Goucher College and the Bryn Mawr School in the late 1800s.
Writer Gertrude Stein even makes an appearance. She attended Hopkins’ newly opened coed medical school in the late 1890s, and had a flirtation with wealthy Baltimorean Etta Cone. When Stein later moved to Paris, Cone and her sister, Claribel Cone, came to visit and met and bought art from Stein’s buddy Henri Matisse.
The Cone sisters later bequeathed their Matisse collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art, forming the renowned Cone Collection. But Egerman also tells the petty side of history; the sisters never liked Stein’s partner, Alice B. Toklas, and intentionally misspelled her name in letters to Stein as “Miss Taklos,” “Tackloss,” “Toaklos” and “Tachles.”
Among those inspired by Egerman’s work is Lily Crunkleton, a Southern Maryland librarian who attended a 2024 talk about the Gold Key Club, a drag bar that flourished in Calvert County’s rural North Beach community during the 1960s.
“I grew up near there,” Crunkleton said. “To hear there was a gay bar there ever floored me. It changed the way I felt about any of the history.”
Crunkleton launched a project called History of Southern Maryland Queer Recordings Archive Base to compile and share the region’s LGBTQIA+ history. She has interviewed a nonagenarian who got swept up in the Lavender Scare of the 1950s and a Navy veteran living with HIV who was stationed at the Patuxent River naval base.
“We’re going to talk about our past, we’re going to reckon with it and we’re going to be better,” said Crunkleton, 26. “If we want to start having a better future, we need to start building it now.”
Egerman’s collaborators also include Elle Friedberg, the founder of the Queer Stories Preservation Project.
An objects conservator at the Walters Art Museum, Friedberg received a grant to lead workshops to help people preserve documents and other objects related to LGBTQIA+ history.
“In this political climate, a lot of historically queer voices have been suppressed or erased,” said Friedberg, 31. “This is a way of teaching preservation principles to a group of people I feel kinship with.”
About two dozen people, including Egerman and Crunkleton, attended Friedberg’s first workshop in January at Tola’s Room, a Puerto Rican home museum and cultural space in East Baltimore. Participants learned how to restore silver, build a protective storage box and preserve documents.
Writer Barbara Perez Marquez and her partner, Bri McNamara, brought to the workshop a hefty binder full of newspaper clippings about the LGBTQIA+ community that had been given to them by an elderly neighbor.
Many people have objects or papers connected to important moments in queer history, Friedberg said, but don’t realize their significance or know how to preserve them.
“We’re having this collective experience of teaching and learning from participants,” said Friedberg, whose next workshop is planned for March 21. Friedberg will also travel to New York in the coming weeks to do a similar project with the American LGBTQ+ Museum.
Other local projects include Vintage T, a series of oral histories with trans people, led by Rahne Alexander and others. The interviews are included in the Johns Hopkins University’s archive of LGBTQIA+ history.
“Our opportunities to talk intergenerationally in trans communities and queer communities is limited,” Alexander said. “These discussions are rejuvenating.”
Multidisciplinary artist Alexander D’Agostino dug through old Baltimore Gay Paper stories to create a series of prints at the heart of “The Tower,” his 2024 art installation at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower. He’s currently working on a piece inspired by the USO-sponsored drag shows of World War II that he hopes to unveil this summer.
“Queer culture is magical and so diverse and expansive‚" D’Agostino said. “Art is a way for people to see with their own eyes the evidence and ephemera of queerness.”
As Egerman wraps up his initial series of seven zines, he is excited that his project continues to gain momentum. Local theater company Submersive Productions is working on a play about “The Pansy Craze.” Egerman is curating a shelf for an upcoming Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit. And he’s begun research for at least four more zines.
“Baltimore has a very important place in queer culture,” Egerman said. “These are stories that deserve to be told.”
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