In 1994, the LGBTQ+ History Month tradition originated in a Missouri High School when teacher Rodney Wilson decided a month should be set aside for the celebration and education of high school students regarding important lesbian and gay figures and events. October was chosen as the designated month because it already contained a nationally celebrated holiday: National Coming Out Day (Oct. 11), and each day in the month is dedicated to honoring a specific aspect of LGBTQ+ culture.

Magnet adopted the celebration several years ago when our LGBTQ+ Spectrum club was established and I spoke to one of the club’s presidents, Senior Garrett Kelly, to find out what kind of activities he had planned for the month.
I asked Garrett about the posters he made that can be found posted all throughout the school to celebrate the month.
“October is a busy month as is. Spirit week was the first week of October this year, seniors all have college apps so its really hard to plan a lot of activities for a month so early in the year. But, I wanted to make sure that people still knew it was LGBT History Month so I put up some posters about various LGBT figures, events, and themes that hopefully people could see and read and learn a little bit more. But through Spectrum I would like to try and plan a designated week later in the year so we could maybe do some LGBT oriented events and discussions and maybe bring in some speakers to educate the student population about LGBT issues and themes. I think even though LGBT History Month is really a significant month for queer students it’s a very prideful month. We can’t really do too much this month because of how busy it was, but we have some events in the works. I just wanted people to be able to at least acknowledge that this month is significant and that there is an LGBT presence [at Magnet] and we aren’t going to go away.”

I also spoke to Garrett about his opinion of why a celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month was important at Magnet.
His response: “Well I think it’s important that we have LGBTQ history Month to celebrate and acknowledge it at this school because there is a queer student population here and it is always a good thing to learn about the different groups of people that you will be exposed to throughout your life. I think it’s important that in an educational environment we can educate people who don’t know a lot about LGBT issues and hopefully we will be able to do a lot more later in the year but I am glad that we made LGBT History Month visible and there are a lot of contributions that the LGBT community has made to the world.”

For more information on LGBTQ+ History Month, feel free to talk to Senior Garrett Kelly, or come to a Spectrum meeting, which are held every Thursday in Ms. Callicott’s room.