Photograph by Natalie Grilli
The American Sign Museum’s mission is to celebrate the rich history of American signage through preservation and education, and this exhibition does that for Cincinnati’s queer community. It’s part of our history, our present, and our future,” says Ioanna Paraskevopoulos, director of development at the ASM, and project manager of the museum’s new exhibition, Glow and Behold: Cincinnati’s Historic LGBTQ+ Bar Signs.
The collection, which commemorates Cincinnati’s centuries of LGBTQ+ history, is the ASM’s first-ever special exhibition since its inception in 2005.
According to Paraskevopoulos, Glow and Behold’s development was partially the result of the ASM’s completion of a $5.5 million expansion last year. “It had always been the museum’s plans to use some of that extra space for temporary exhibitions, and I worked in public policy with civil rights advocacy for a long time,” she says. “I was like, It’s coming up on the 10th year of marriage equality. This would be a fantastic way to marry the history of the journey for LGBTQ+ rights and the Sign Museum.”
Exhibition curator Jake Hogue has documented Cincinnati’s queer history since his years as a master’s student at Northern Kentucky University. “These spaces for gay people were sanctuaries in a way that I don’t think that many people understand. A lot of these spaces would have been dingy and dirty, but they would have shone like a beacon to someone who’d never found their own space anywhere else,” he says. (Hogue also runs the Queen City Queer History Instagram account, and is currently writing his first book, Cincinnati Before Stonewall: The Untold Queer History of the Queen City.)
“When I started taking an interest in Cincinnati’s queer history, I knew there hadn’t been much documented about it,” says Hogue. “But as I began my research, I realized that virtually nothing has been written about it at all. I started out with the intention of making a podcast, but I was finding story after story. My professor basically said, ‘You’re writing a book now.’ ”
Paraskevopoulos had originally reached out to an archivist for help with her idea for the American Sign Museum exhibition, but was quickly directed to Hogue. Glow and Behold, the product of their partnership, is a timeline that combines images of historic bar signs around Cincinnati with physical signage sourced from the city itself. “Many of these signs date back to the late 1800s,” says Hogue. “But even up until the 1970s, these gay bars were not outwardly advertising, or if they were, they felt no need to save their signs for historical record. You’re really getting an array of signs based on accessibility, the historical timeline, and the quality of the photos we could get.”
The objects in the exhibition come from the Green Door (once located at the current-day Boca and Sotto downtown), the first gay club mentioned in Cincinnati’s oral history, as well as images of Yum’s Concert Hall (432 Vine St.), a late-19th century club where female and male impersonators performed. The latter was of particular interest to Hogue. “I found out that these male and female impersonators were hanging out at the club in drag after the shows were finished, which was something not normally done at this time,” he says.
These signs are part of Cincinnati’s long, troubled history with its LGBTQ+ population—queer people in the area were surveilled and jailed going all the way back to the 1930s. “The city has often put its head in the sand when it comes to its queer subculture,” says Hogue. “In the early 1960s, you see this orchestrated campaign of not only harassing and arresting queer people, but ruining their image in the public sphere. The queer community has been fighting for years against well-funded, well-connected people.”
Yet, Hogue still believes strongly in the power of Cincinnati’s LGBTQ+ community. “I think that the fact that so much of the area’s queer history has shone through amid this oppression makes this history all the more vibrant,” he says.
For Hogue, the importance of this exhibit goes beyond its walls. “These spaces live on only if we commit the time to care about them, so this project is a perfect microcosm of that, of making these places alive again.”
Glow and Behold is open during regular museum hours through July. Additionally, Hogue will host a curator talk on June 23, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tickets are free for American Sign Museum members, and $20 for nonmembers.
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