Confronting Erasure, Rejecting Visibility, and Demanding to Be Seen: Transmasculine Stories from U.S. Archives, 1940-1975, by Sam Brooks

This exhibit explores how transmasculine people in the mid-twentieth-century navigated being seen by their communities, medical professionals, the press, and future historians. It examines the horrific and untimely death of Thomas Mapes, an assigned female person living as a man in rural Michigan; jazz performer Gladys Bentley's public rejection of queerness during the Lavender Scare; activist Pauli Murray's bus desegregation protest; and trans medicine doctors' clinical discussions of their transmasculine patients. Its themes are historical loss and how visibility is alternately wielded, resisted, and refused in personal and political contexts. Published originally on OutHistory in August 2026.