Image by Tone Madison Expedited Graphics Desk. Images and text from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s LGBTQ+ History web page.
A missing Pride flag and the impossible neutrality of public institutions.
This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.
Early this Pride month I learned that there is a building on the Square called the Gay Building (please do not tell Dave Mustaine, he will almost certainly make it weird) and that Eric Hovde’s company owns it, which has to be some sort of hate crime. The Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) is building a new museum right next door (to replace the old Wisconsin Historical Museum on the same site), which at first glance might seem an odd fit alongside the luxury hotel Hovde plans to develop in the historic Gay Building. But Hovde and at least some of the Historical Society’s leadership deserve each other.
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The WHS has decided to no longer display a Pride flag outside its headquarters on Library Mall this June, for the first time since 2019. One employee told Channel 3000 that leadership canceled a planned flag-raising on short notice. What makes this exceptionally rotten is the infantilizing justifications WHS has offered to the public and to a contingent of very unhappy employees. As The Capital Times reported on June 6, agency leaders explained in a memo to employees that they are “choosing not to fly any flags or symbols that can be seen as tied to political or social movements, even ones that reflect values many staff members care deeply about, because not everyone sees those symbols the same way.”
Much like the new “Institutional and Public Position Statements” policy UW-Madison adopted in fall 2024, this framing attempts to mime-draw an apolitical box within a bigger, inherently politicized box. It’s a grotesque betrayal of the work historians do to help people understand the complex political entanglements that run through all of our lives. The U.S. and Wisconsin flags certainly represent the “political movements” required to establish a new nation-state and add territory to it. Whatever meaning it holds or lacks for you, a flag is never not political. Worse than making feeble excuses, WHS leadership is asking us to pretend.
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Both the WHS and UW-Madison are state agencies charged with educating and informing people, often about incredibly complex and controversial events and issues. Both have to contend with the political appointees who serve on their governing boards and the elected officials who control crucial portions of their budgets. Both engage in either formal or informal lobbying. Both trotted out their commitments to neutrality in ways that ceded ground to the political right on a crucial issue—UW-Madison on the genocide in Gaza that continues to rage with bipartisan support, WHS on LGBTQ+ rights that the fascist Republican Party is attacking with terrifying fervor (and that Democrats have shown little stomach for defending).
Various parts of WHS itself are involved in politically fraught decisions, including the Burial Sites Preservation Board (BSPB). This is a body that literally helps to enforce state law. It deals specifically with the treatment of Native American burial sites, which is politically sensitive for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s contemplated the implications of handling historic sites and objects in the context of a violently colonized land. The BSPB’s existence and open proceedings made it a bit harder for UW-Madison’s administration to downplay a 2021 incident in which a student accidentally damaged a burial mound on campus. If you ever visited the old Wisconsin Historical Museum and stopped to look at its exhibit of the first unemployment check ever issued in the United States, you’ll also know that UW-Madison scholars have played pivotal roles in shaping public policy.
In short, these are institutions that do politics. They have to do politics. Ideally, they do it in a way that safeguards important work from the whims of ideological factions and corrupt politicians. But this in itself means it’s all politics, all the time, especially for the people who lead these institutions. When they declare that they are suddenly not doing politics in this specific instance, at this particular time, at this particular location, they are lying.
Both WHS and UW-Madison also really want to protect funding for new building projects as the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature gets to work on the 2025-27 state budget. Anonymous WHS employees drew the connection more explicitly in reporter Maddie Heimsch’s June 3 story for Channel 3000:
“The history center is consuming a lot of time, energy and money. And [WHS CEO and Director Christian Overland] has been pushing especially hard for it,” said the anonymous employee. Throughout May, Overland met with the Society’s Board of Curators, which includes at least one Republican legislator that co-authored a 2025 bill attempting to ban political flags from flying over state buildings. Overland also presented “Wisconsin Historical Society’s Legislator of the Year” awards for apparently the first time in May. Several of the awards went to Republicans on the Joint Committee of Finance. “Leadership has framed the decision… as political. And that flying the Pride flag would be political and we’re not a political organization,” said the WHS staff member. “But not choosing to fly it is equally a political act.”
This person (along with, I believe, the overwhelming majority of people who work for WHS) gets it. The honest position for institutions to take on its approach to all things political is something like: “We have to navigate political issues with integrity and make appropriate decisions—but shit, folks, we are in this soup whether we like it or not!”
Any variation on “let’s not make this political” really adds up to: “I would like to limit the scope of which things in our society are politically contested, and I would like to limit the number and kinds of people who get to contest them.” This requires included and excluded constituencies. A public institution places itself, untenably, in both camps, when it tries to selectively de-politicize itself on one front and ignores its political entanglements on others.
But to get back to what WHS itself has explicitly stated: “choosing not to fly any flags or symbols that can be seen as tied to political or social movements, even ones that reflect values many staff members care deeply about, because not everyone sees those symbols the same way.”
No. Fuck off. This is simple. A public institution must serve the whole public. It must welcome the whole public. Communicating acceptance and welcome to various segments of the public—especially groups that historically and presently face oppression and discrimination, but also folks across different geographic regions, age ranges, affinity groups interested in different niches of Wisconsin history, and people with different preferences about how they’d like to engage with WHS programming—is not only entirely appropriate but literally part of the job.
A historical society, especially a public one, should advocate vigorously for inclusion and equality, because everyone deserves to be treated fairly in a historical context. Everyone deserves access to historical programming that helps them understand their own place in the world. LGBTQ people who’ve made historic contributions to Wisconsin, despite every effort the world made to shame and kill them for being queer, deserve a place in history that does them justice. Our very conception of the role of history and historians—much like our conceptions of academic freedom and the civic role of journalism—in fact assumes and depends upon a pluralistic and inclusive democracy.
In this context, no, you don’t have to indulge discriminatory ideas or treat them as holding equal currency in some sort of pitched debate. Especially in a state that was ahead of the curve in providing LGTBQ people with some, albeit imperfect, protection from discrimination. Affirming that you welcome queer people is actually just plain in line with state law (and various local laws around the state). That in itself is not a neutral political alignment, because legislators and activists and other politicized actors shaped those laws.
It is absolutely incredible for a historical society to note that “not everyone sees those symbols the same way” as an excuse for not taking a position. Sure, different people see different symbols differently. You know who is great at helping us contextualize and navigate that? Historians! Historians are obliged to document discriminatory attitudes and movements, explain them, contextualize them, even on some level withhold judgment for the sake of thorough understanding. They are not obliged to treat these attitudes as acceptable. They get to say that stigmatizing and oppressing LGBTQ people is harmful, because, among other things, that is empirically true.
Historians also get to celebrate the fact that LGBTQ people are an essential part of Wisconsin’s story, because that is empirically true. That’s why, as the WHS has noted in its own defense this month, a Pride flag flies year-round at the Pendarvis Historical Site in Mineral Point, honoring the two gay men, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, who helped to preserve it. (Someone even wrote a dissertation about it.) Such stories have taken on a greater prominence in the public eye thanks in part to WHS’ own LGBTQ history efforts, which include events happening this very month centered on Pride. WHS’ online shop includes a whole section of Pride merch. This is absurd. Surely it’s not an overreach for the Historical Society to signal that LGBTQ people are welcome at its own Pride events. If it can fly the flag at one place year-round, why does it even have to treat flying the flag for a month at its headquarters as a contested thing?
The trap of conflating “political” and “partisan”
One gets the sense that WHS leadership is hastily slapping together its justifications for all this. Particularly enraging—and just plain ahistorical—is the idea that WHS shouldn’t fly the Pride flag (sorry, one of its Pride flags) because the agency is “nonpartisan.” An unfortunately named spokesperson invoked that word in a May 30 story from Madison365:
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“This was a complex and difficult decision that was made with consideration of many perspectives,” WHS spokesperson Colleen Lies wrote in an email to Madison365. “Ultimately, the decision was guided by our mission of connecting people to history by collecting, preserving and sharing stories. As a nonpartisan agency, the Society does not participate in advocacy outside of that mission. With that in mind, we have chosen not to raise any flags on our agency’s flagpoles that can be perceived as an act of advocacy. We remain committed to our mission work to collect, preserve and share stories of Wisconsinites from all backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives—including the LGTBQ+ and other communities. We will continue to share these stories through our collections, program areas, exhibitions, publications, and partnerships forged with scholarship and great public history.”
One of the most infuriating and deadening features of public discourse in the U.S. is the tendency to conflate “partisanship” with any expression of political values. The formulation implies that any stance on these values must all map somehow onto the two-party system’s spectrum of ideologies. Said spectrum runs from the center-left to the apocalyptic far-right. So when we treat all things political as necessarily “partisan,” we narrow the acceptable window of debate. This framing also tempts us to treat political stances as merely self-serving products of groupthink and factional loyalty, rather than examining the experiences or reasoning that might have shaped those stances.
Reducing the Pride flag to a “partisan” symbol does a grave disservice to the millions of LGTBQ people who’ve fended off homophobic attacks from the political mainstream for generation after generation. The Republican Party has actively sought to eradicate queer people as a core political plank. The Democratic Party gradually came around to some affirmatively pro-LGBTQ positions, and only recently, after decades of pressure. Members of both major parties are now actively participating in a divide-and-conquer strategy that seeks to pit cisgender gay people against trans people, or at the very least oh-so-pragmatically abandoning trans people. Nowhere and at no time in this partisan spectrum have people all across the LGBTQ spectrum been consistently well-served. Like any other oppressed group, they’ve always to a large extent had to fight outside the mainstream electoral system, both in terms of ideology and tactics. No matter how welcoming the political mainstream becomes, someone is always left out. Someone is always sacrificed.
The basic facts of Wisconsin’s history and present—again, stuff a lot of us know because of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s work—illustrate that queerness has never mapped neatly onto partisanship. Wisconsin’s 1982 anti-discrimination law was SIGNED INTO LAW BY A REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR, Lee Dreyfus, who even justified his decision at the time by citing what he called the “fundamental Republican principle that government should have a very restricted involvement in people’s private and personal lives.” Democrats had majorities in both houses of the Legislature during that session. But the law did have bipartisan support, according to media reports at the time and various historical sources. I admittedly don’t know the exact vote breakdown—to get that, I would need to take a field trip to the WHS stacks, probably.
One Republican state legislator, District 51 Rep. Todd Novak, is openly gay. He is not a member of the legislature’s LGBTQ+ Caucus, which remains all-Democratic. Novak has gone so far as to complain that Wisconsin Republicans don’t get enough credit for advancing gay rights. Wisconsin was also home to the first openly gay Republican member of Congress. Steve Gunderson was in the closet when he served in the Assembly in the 1970s. He went on to represent the 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives; and, in 1994, a virulently anti-gay California Republican, Bob Dornan, outed Gunderson in a floor speech. One of Wisconsin’s most infamous Republican figures, Senator Joe McCarthy, faced accusations that he was gay, even as he—with the help of the not-so-well-closeted Roy Cohn—led a purge of gay federal employees. Of course, this leaves Democrat Tammy Baldwin as both the first openly gay Wisconsin state legislator and the first openly gay U.S. Senator.
You can understand two important things at once. 1) Flying a Pride flag is a political act. 2) It is up to LGBTQ people themselves—as individuals and as constituencies of all sorts—to decide their own partisan and ideological alignments, including necessarily radical ones. That agency and self-determination is perhaps the most fundamental thing of all for a Pride flag to assert, if you want to attach powerful political symbolism to a flag. It’s likewise up to various parties/factions to decide how they approach LGTBQ issues. None of these choices are monolithic or permanently fixed.
The appeal to nonpartisanship is also a foolish blunder if WHS really wants to build favor and leverage with Republicans. WHS has implicitly now framed its own previous (and ongoing!) displays of Pride flags as “partisan.” This creates even more of an opening for bad-faith accusations of partisanship whenever WHS does anything even remotely controversial in the future. It’s a complete self-own, another tacit surrender to right-wing framing.
Academic and educational institutions have a duty to push beyond the “sheesh, politics amirite” default of American discourse. We look to these institutions to give us knowledge and concepts that allow us to form our own complex and vital analyses of the world, rather than rely on the cheap ready-made narratives that politicians would have us settle for. They should support and encourage us in navigating a world that’s always going to be entangled in the political, rather than help us fool ourselves into thinking we can ever truly escape the political. The top leadership at UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Historical Society have both, disgracefully, modeled that escape attempt and demonstrated just how futile it is.