KU professor Katie Batza, left, recently met with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell as part of an effort by the National Park Service to research LGBT history.

A Kansas University professor is one of 16 scholars from across the country participating in an effort by the National Park Service to identify historic places and events commemorating the history and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

“If you look in the history books of not so long ago, there was very little about the African American experience or Native American experience,” said Katie Batza, an assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies who was recently hired from Gettysburg College.

“Now you see more of that included. Including LGBT will make the understanding of ourselves richer. The more clarity we can get, the better,” Batza said.

The National Park Service convened the scholars last month in Washington, D.C., and now will work over the next year or so to explore ways to celebrate and interpret LGBT heritage.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced the effort in May as she stood outside the Stonewall Inn in New York, the site of riots in 1969 that are widely recognized as a major event in the gay rights movement.

“We know that there are other sites, like Stonewall Inn, that have played important roles in our nation’s ongoing struggle for civil rights,” said Jewell. “The contributions of women, minorities and members of the LGBT community have been historically underrepresented in the National Park Service, and the LGBT theme study will help ensure that we understand, commemorate and share these key chapters in our nation’s complex and diverse history.”

The effort is a challenge because many LGBT people kept their sexual orientation a secret. Another stumbling block, Batza said, is that many potential historical landmarks are in the hands of private owners and sometimes those owners aren’t supportive of LGBT rights.

But Batza said there are many sites, some well-known, some not so well-known, across the country that represent triumphs and dark periods in the history of the LGBT community and how sexuality shaped American history.

For example, there is work to get landmark status of a former bar in New Orleans where 32 patrons, most of whom were gay, died in 1973 in an arson fire.

Other potential landmarks include makeshift hospice homes for people in the final stages of AIDS in the 1980s when some hospitals turned them away and gay community health clinics in the 1970s. Even the history of well-known icons, such as Rosie the Riveter, can be expanded to show how expanding the female workforce during World War II helped lesbian communities, Batza said.

Park Service officials said Batza and other members of the advisory group provided valuable input.

“It was a great group of scholars who gave us recommendations and pointed us in the right direction,” said Barbara Little, program manager for the cultural resources office of outreach of the National Park Service in Washington.

Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said she hopes the study will result in the stories of the people within the LGBT community becoming part of the “national narrative.”

“For us, the main thing is the opportunity to have U.S. history and social studies reflect the full reality of the LGBT experience in this country,” Byard said.

Byard said she believed the research will reveal important historic sites and events across the country, including middle America. She mentioned the formation in the summer of 1970 of the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front at KU, which fought an unsuccessful legal battle to be an officially recognized group at the university, as one of those events that could be included.

“Landmarks need to be in Arizona and Kansas, Louisiana and Wyoming. There are critical sites in all of those places,” Byard said. She said scholars, such as Batza, are crucial to provide the rigorous research to help identify possible historic sites and events.

Batza said, “I’m trying to honor the experiences of people in the past and provide for people today, and students in my class who are LGBT, a sense of their own history, and to make it part of American history, because it is relevant.”