AbstractThe stories of gay spaces across the United States are largely unrecorded, undocumented, and are not centrally collected or archived beyond informal reports and oral histories. Evidence demonstrates that the preservation of historic sites allows for future generations to benefit from intangibles related to community and identity. However, the LGBTQ+ community has been unable to gain benefits that place-based, historic sites can provide, due to an inability to commemorate spaces that have shaped LGBTQ+ history in significant ways. This chapter explores the disparities between the preservation and commemoration of significant LGBTQ+ spaces and the amount of funding distributed to these sites. As of 2016, LGBTQ+ sites comprised only 0.08 percent of the 2,500 U.S. National Historic Landmarks and 0.005 percent of the more than 90,000 places listed in the National Register of Historic Places. This representation is well short of the share of American adults that identify as LGBTQ+ , which in 2017 was approximately five percent of the United States population. In 2010 the Administration of President Barack Obama launched the LGBTQ Heritage Initiative under the National Historic Landmarks Program. This effort underscored a broader commitment to include historically underrepresented groups, including LGBTQ+ individuals. As a result, LGBTQ+ communities became eligible to receive funding for projects through the Underrepresented Community Grant Program. An analysis of the distribution of Underrepresented Community Grant Program funds revealed that the LGBTQ+ community receives considerably less funding compared to other underrepresented communities. The findings from this study suggest that there is still a significant amount of work that remains to be done to integrate LGBTQ+ histories into historic preservation programs that exist at various levels of programming (local, state, and federal).
Charitable Support for U.S. National and State Parks Through the Lens of Coproduction and Government Failure Theories
