June is a time to celebrate pride, celebrate love, and commemorate the journey to ensure freedom for those of the LGBTQ community, this month is also a time to pay homage to those who came before us, explore LGBTQ history, and learn about root causes that contribute to the communities long-standing struggles. Tonight’s Queer Capitol Hill tour provides an opportunity to enhance your understanding and knowledge of queer history and join Historic Denver as they partner with The Center on Colfax to offer a walking tour focused on the LGBTQ history of the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
“I’ve been doing tours with the center on Colfax as their historian for five years, including the first one of queer capitol hill which was in 2017,” Coordinator of The Center’s LGBTQ History Project for Colorado and tour writer David Duffield says.
“I’ve got more stories about queer capitol hill and queer 19th-century Denver thanks to my colleagues and my own research than we’ve had before, so while we can’t necessarily look at the whole of Denver’s history and say where LGBTQ people were living at every single point, we can definitely say with a lot more accuracy than when we created the tour in the first place. The tour only went from the 1950s onwards; this tour touches on the early 20th century as well.”
Many queer people from across the LGBTQ spectrum grew up not being taught about their communities’ history. Some states recently imposed legislation providing more inclusive legislation to incorporate queer histories in meaningful ways in classroom settings, however, due to the eradication and erasure of queer history, too many grow up feeling unrepresented, the omitted history perpetuating the perceived “normal” cisgender heterosexual lifestyle while the infrequency and irregularity of which this history is taught lead to a lack of respect for history and those who’ve paved the way.
“In telling these stories, what we are doing is re-inscribing our own humanity into the world, and making it easier for people to understand and to hear our stories as well, and in effect, what we are creating for generations that come forward is not simply a better understanding of the past and the present, but how their future can be made better from the allegories and the stories of those who came before them and in effect bridging their legacy and their heritage,” Duffield tells us.
History can provide us with a deeper connection to or perhaps a different perspective on past events or moments that have a lasting effect on society. It can also provide us with the courage to persevere through life’s toughest moments, ensuring and additionally providing confidence that change is not only possible but inevitable.
Tonight’s Queer Capitol Hill Walking Tour tour tells stories of lives otherwise forgotten, stories that never made it to the mainstream archives. Providing relief to systemic silencing, the tour aims to uplift hidden histories, showing the variety of queer realities and recognizing local landmarks and community heroes.
“Some key legislation and advocacy took place in Denver and impacted the movement as a whole, so it’s illuminative to explore a local story with a national reach,” notes Alison Salutz, who oversees Historic Denver’s walking tour program.
“This particular piece of Capitol Hill history is not widely-known, and working with The Center and David allowed me an opportunity to tell that story in an authentic way with a local expert. Our walking tours take you to all types of interesting places in Denver. Highlights of our walking tours include accessing the D&F Clock Tower, learning about Union Station and LoDo, distinctive neighborhoods like Potter Highlands, and, of course, Capitol Hill.”
Duffield mentions additional highlights of tonight’s tour: “There’s the Irene Desoto space; we look at the history of the Molly Brown house itself as being owned by a gay man; we look at the homosocial spaces of Capitol Hill in terms of where the headquarters of the first politically successful group called the Gay Coalition of Denver was on Pennsylvania Street; we look at a little bit of the history of HIV when the Colorado AIDS project was at St. Pauls’; we look at the history of queer people experiencing poverty and being forced to do survival sex work; we look at the history of bachelor row, and poets row, and then we look at the history of The Denver Area Mattachine Society. So it’s snippets from those stories because the actual major events are very far apart and would be separate spaces from each other, but the highlights of this tour touch on some of the most human moments of the history of LGBTQ people in Denver.”
Tickets are still available for Queer Capitol Hill Walking, which runs 6 p.m.-7 p.m. and can be found here.
