Abstract
The Gibson House Museum, located in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, has a significant track record of acknowledging and incorporating LGBTQ history into its programs, presentations, and tours. And yet this history is complex. The museum, a kind of Victorian time capsule, was founded by Boston poet Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874-1954) in the mid-twentieth century as a literary monument and shrine to himself; however, family members and the early board of directors were never really comfortable with Gibson’s eccentricity and sexual identity and in the early years sought to “eradicate his problematic presence” from museum’s collections, tours, and presentations. Reckoning with the museum’s engagement and disengagement with issues of race and class is still an open question. This paper explores the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion which inform and yet fragment the museum’s self-fashioning and ongoing reimagining.
Presenters
Todd GernesAssociate Professor, History Department, Stonehill College, Massachusetts, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
House Museums, Literary History, LGBTQ History, Representations, Race, Sexuality, Class
