“Illegal to Be You: Gay History Beyond Stonewall”

Katherine Ott, curator and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will give a special evening program in celebration of Pride Month.

Ott will discuss her work curating Illegal to Be You: Gay History Beyond Stonewall, an exhibition currently on view at the National Museum of American History that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising and other pivotal moments in the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement. To view the exhibition online, click here: https://americanhistory.si.edu/illegal-to-be-you.

Katherine Ott is a curator and historian in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She works on the history of medicine and the body, disability and bodily difference, and LGBTQ history, among other topics. She has curated exhibitions on the history of disability, HIV and AIDS, polio, acupuncture, and medical devices for altering the human body. Her most recent web exhibition is “EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America.” The author of “Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870” (1996), she co-edited “Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics” (2002) and “The Scrapbook in American Life” (2006), and is currently finishing a monograph about some of the major issues involved in interpreting historical objects. She also teaches graduate courses in material culture at George Washington University.