Badge Of Pride

10/12/2026

Dallas Sapphic history belongs in the archive, and some of it may be sitting in your closet!

Next Thursday, October 22, we’re digging into Dallas’s le***an nightlife herstory, and we need your help!

Bring your old bar photos, flyers, memorabilia, and other pieces of LGBTQ+ nightlife history to our Community Scanning Event, hosted by Badge Of Pride in partnership with The Dallas Way, DSQO - Dallas Social Q***r Organization, and Coalition for Aging LGBT - TEXAS.

We’ll scan your treasures before The Dallas Way’s live oral history event, “Raise a Glass: Stories from Dallas’s Le***an Bars.”

Thursday, October 22 | 5:30–6:30 PM
Sue Ellen's | 3014 Throckmorton St., Dallas

Your memories are part of our shared history. Help us preserve them.

This program is made possible with support from Humanities Texas, Moody Fund for the Arts, and Permanent Legacy Foundation.

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10/12/2026

BEFORE COLONIZATION, THERE WAS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO BE.

Long before Europeans arrived in North America, some Indigenous nations recognized understandings of gender and social roles that extended beyond a male/female binary.

Colonization brought more than territorial conquest. European religious and legal systems also imposed ideas about gender and sexuality, suppressing traditions that had existed for generations.

But those histories did not disappear.

In 1990, Indigenous LGBTQ+ activists adopted the term Two-Spirit, creating language for cultural reclamation and self-determination. The term does not describe every Indigenous LGBTQ+ person or replace the distinct traditions of individual nations.

On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor Indigenous communities, past and present, and their continuing fight for sovereignty, cultural preservation, and the right to tell their own stories.

History belongs to the people who lived it.

10/11/2026

In 1988, Keith Haring gave National Coming Out Day an image of joy, liberation, and a door flung wide open.

Nearly four decades later, that image carries renewed urgency.

Our rights are under attack. Our stories are being censored. And the freedom to live openly remains out of reach for too many.

Today, we honor those who opened doors before us, those walking through them now, and those still waiting for a world where it’s safe to do so.

The progress of one generation is not guaranteed to the next.

Coming out is personal. Protecting that freedom is everyone’s responsibility.

Happy National Coming Out Day.

Artwork: Keith Haring, 1988.

10/08/2026

Don’t Let the Critics Curate Your Show.

We’re excited to share the first of two articles co-authored by by Badge Of Pride founder and executive director Adrian Cardwell and Jennifer S. Landry, Director of Museums at Irving Archives and Museum, is now published in Informal Learning Review.

“Don’t Let the Critics Curate Your Show: Shared Preparation for LGBTQ+ History in a Municipal Museum” examines what it took to bring our landmark 2025 exhibition to the public amid mounting political pressure and efforts to censor LGBTQ+ narratives.

Behind the 600+ artifacts and four months of exhibitions and programming were years of planning, difficult conversations, institutional cooperation, and some uncomfortable questions about whose history gets told and who gets to decide.

One lesson stands out: When institutions allow the fear of controversy to dictate their decisions, censorship can succeed before a single protest takes place.

Our experience offers five practical lessons for museums and cultural institutions navigating politically contested histories, particularly when working with communities whose stories have too often been excluded.

We’re proud to contribute to this important conversation and grateful to our partners at Irving Archives & Museum for demonstrating what committed institutional partnership can accomplish.

And there’s another article coming later this fall!

Read the full article:

In 2025, a city-owned museum in Irving, Texas, a Dallas–Fort Worth suburb, prepared to open Badge Of Pride: From Silence…To Celebration!, an LGBTQ+ history exhibition, amid widening efforts to censor LGBTQ+ stories and limit their visibility. If anticipated objections determined its scope, langu...

10/07/2026

In the 1960s, the “gay agenda” was pretty basic:

Don’t get arrested.
Don’t get fired.
Don’t get entrapped.
Don’t get raided.
Don’t disappear.

Being openly homosexual could cost you your job, your housing, your family, or your freedom. Police harassment was routine. The Lavender Scare had already pushed thousands of suspected homosexuals out of federal employment.

So LGBTQ+ people did something deeply inconvenient: They organized and took a stand.

At Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966, transgender women, drag queens and other q***r people fought back against police harassment.

From 1965 to 1969, activists gathered every July 4 at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall for the Annual Reminders, some of the country’s earliest sustained public demonstrations for gay and le***an civil rights.

Then came Stonewall. June 28, 1969.

A decade spent telling homosexuals to stay quiet ended with a movement getting much louder.

Today’s agenda? PUT HISTORY ON THE AGENDA.

Save the photograph. Keep the flyer. Record the story. Preserve the artifact. Teach it. Share it. Make damn sure the next generation knows who came before them.

That’s the work of Badge Of Pride.

Join The Continuum at $6.28 a month in honor of June 28, 1969, or at any level that works for you. 🏳️‍🌈✊🏳️‍⚧️

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/the-continuum

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10/04/2026

Outgoing secretary Lonnie Bunch rejects claims the institution is unpatriotic, telling audience ‘You cannot understand all without illuminating the dark corners’

10/04/2026

The Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project is launching a new zine series to make trans history more accessible.

10/03/2026

We have a bold agenda. It involves history. And homosexuals.

October is LGBTQ+ History Month, and this year we’re trying something a little different. The Gay Agenda is a new campaign designed to bring more people into the work of Badge Of Pride and give you a new way to be part of what we’re building.

We’ll start in the 1960’s and take a trip through time. Each Wednesday, we’ll move forward another decade, with a new look, a new chapter, and another item on The Gay Agenda.

It’ll be fun, a little cheeky, and probably not quite what you’re used to seeing from us. But underneath it all is something we take very seriously: making sure is collected, preserved, shared, and there for the generations that come next.

Stay tuned. Join us. The Gay Agenda starts Wednesday.

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09/30/2026

One year ago this week, “Badge Of Pride: From Silence…To Celebration!” closed its doors.

We marked the anniversary in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the Southeastern Museums Conference, sharing what we learned from that exhibition with colleagues from across the region. It felt like the right place to mark the moment because the past year has been less about looking back at what we built and much more about figuring out what it made possible.

Since then, Badge Of Pride has expanded well beyond a single exhibition. We’ve launched new community archiving work, created original performance programming, begun cataloging our growing collection, hired our first staff, contributed to the field through conferences and two journal articles publishing later this fall, and built relationships with institutions and collaborators across the country.

And we are only beginning.

The next chapter is already taking shape: new exhibitions, new partnerships, deeper investment in archives and oral history, and projects that will carry this work well beyond North Texas.

Some of those announcements are coming very soon.

A year ago, an exhibition closed.

What followed was an opening.

09/29/2026

It’s hard to believe that one year ago yesterday, September 28, we closed our landmark exhibition, “Badge Of Pride: From Silence…To Celebration!”

What a year it has been since. We’ve connected with new colleagues across the country, opened doors we could not have imagined then, and begun charting an ambitious path for what comes next.

It feels especially fitting to mark the anniversary here in Winston-Salem for the Southeastern Museums Conference-SEMC, where today we’ll take the stage with colleagues from the Irving Archives and Museum and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture for our workshop, “Navigating Challenging Topics: Community, Trust and Museum Practice in Changing Times.”

There will be time soon to reflect on everything this past year has brought. For now, we’re getting back to the conference, the conversations, and the work ahead.