From the beginning, a variety of stories have been included, not all of them happy ones: Japanese internment, African-American segregation and Native American hardship. The Rosie the Riveter park, located across the bay in Richmond, was founded on the idea that the stories of American civilians on the World War II homefront are complex. That much of this effort is happening in San Francisco-long a gay mecca-is not surprising. Two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are conducting studies to document such places of historic importance. This can be seen in attempts by the National Historic Landmarks Program and the National Register of Historic Places to acknowledge buildings and landmarks significant to LGBT history. "It's one thing for a local entity to document their history, and it's another when a federal agency decides this is really an important story to tell."īoth D'Emilio and Graves view the Rosie LGBT campaign as part of a recent trend within the federal government to openly recognize LGBT people. While recent decades have seen the inclusion of LGBT history in specialized courses and venues, what the Rosie the Riveter park is doing is "pioneering" says Graves, the project's lead historian and an exhibit consultant. In March the park finally announced a campaign to collect some of those stories for a 2015 traveling exhibit. Since the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park was established in Richmond, California, earlier this century, Graves has been pushing for the inclusion of LGBT stories. "There's a national D-Day museum in New Orleans-they don't touch this," she says. It was a watershed moment in LGBT history, but public historian Donna Graves says most people and places that talk about World War II do not acknowledge it. "But it creates a space where it's safer and easier to find other people like you and in which there's also-both in military and homefront-more tolerance, because it's the war and we're all working together." Some homosexuals were not necessarily declaring they were gay or lesbian, says John D'Emilio, a history and gender and women's studies professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Women also left their homes, to work in factories and live in same-sex settings under similar conditions. During the war years, millions of young men left their homes and small towns for the military, living in a same-sex environment where they were exposed to a greater variety and volume of people than they had previously known. World War II has long been viewed by historians as an important moment in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history in America. They apparently recognized her as one of their own-a lesbian. "Evidently they took one look at me and said, 'There's another one,'" says Hickok, now 94. But mostly she remembers the friends, the women who invited her to sit with them at lunch her first day on the assembly line at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California, in 1942.
She remembers how everyone smoked on breaks and that all the women wore pants. Bev Hickok remembers the deafening noise, the ceaseless mechanical hammer blows of women riveting airplanes together.
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