By Isabella Fisher
At the heart of downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma, stories bridge the great divide between past and present: boxes brim with decades-old magazines as framed, stained photographs sit on proud display against the weathered walls of the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center's very own Rainbow Library, a small yet lively area tucked away in the corner of the center’s second floor—home to the Oklahomans for Equality History Project.
Even the door leading into the archive is a remnant of a bygone era, a keeper of its own history—metaphorically and literally. A bullet hole rests in the middle, the glass splintered in varying directions, a result of a drive-by shooting years ago.
“It was very informal at the beginning,” explained Dennis Neill, founder of the Dennis R. Neill Equality Center and long-time human rights activist. He sat in one of the many lounge chairs of the center, legs crossed and hands folded, eyes shut in reminiscence. Yet, no matter how guarded his posture, he recounted his past with openness and honesty. “But, as our organization grew,” Neill continued, “what was so apparent to us so quickly is just the interest in information. Dealing with coming out to your family, dealing with religious burdens that you’ve been carrying throughout your youth—many of them faced bullying as they were growing up, too. So we just felt it was very important to engage in educational activities, which require monthly meetings and a lot of communication.”
Urged by in-state tuition and the chance to escape the small-town clutches of Ponca City, Oklahoma, Neill transferred to the University of Texas in order to pursue a career in law enforcement. But after graduating in 1977, he learned that, “in order to be true to [himself],” joining the FBI was not a future he could follow. Soon, he returned to Oklahoma, where he picked up a job at a Tulsa law firm.
It wasn’t long until Oklahomans for Equality—typically abbreviated as OKEQ—was founded in 1980 by a rag-tag group of friends. The organization aimed to foster a space for safety, inclusion, and, of course, equality for the LGBTQ+ community throughout Oklahoma, with a special focus on Tulsa. It started small: a monthly newsletter distributed through information sessions and meetings, a helpline established and managed in a downtown apartment—anything to ensure that queer individuals had the information, education, and stories to tell them that they weren’t alone.
But what first began as a community need for more queer spaces in the ‘80s, the OKEQ organization became much more than a helpline in a shabby apartment—it was a crux of Tulsa’s queer community. Not only did it host the first gay picnic at Chandler Park in 1982, and hosted the Southwest Invitational Southall Tournaments in 1983, but they were a regional pillar of advocacy during the AIDS Crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s. As Neill put it, OKEQ were “basically the only organization at that period of time that was dealing with that issue.”
“With HIV, the interest in education just skyrocketed,” he added, palm raising from its permanent resting place as if to demonstrate. “So, where we might have had 40 or 50 people at our monthly meetings, we quickly grew to 150 and 180 as we were sharing information about the incidents of AIDS and what we could do as a response to it.”
It was this historical moment that put OKEQ onto the map; their response to the AIDS Crisis was only the beginning of the organization’s outreach.
“Indeed, one of the first things that really kicked us off in 1984 was a panel of local reporters that came to talk to us about media coverage of the community,” Neill said. “And that really started giving us a lot more press coverage. So, we set up that communication network with widestream media that helped bring us into the mainstream. As an organization, that really helped us grow to other people that are interested in our activities—whether it be sports, socialization, education—people became more aware of our organization as we expanded.”
By then, OKEQ had become widely known to the Tulsa area, connecting with LGBTQ+ community members across the region. Their expansion had enabled collaboration with a variety of straight allies, such as the Tulsa Area United Way and Community Service Council of Greater Tulsa (now rebranded Oklahoma Veterans United as of 2024).
With such expansive outreach, the organization needed a method to preserve its role during the AIDS Crisis, and its various involvement with different activities. For efficiency’s sake, and to continue what they had always strived to accomplish: sharing their stories.
“If we don't tell our stories, we're not gonna get the support of the community,” Neil said simply. “Why do we exist? Why did we exist? How did Tulsa respond to the AIDS crisis? What other programs, particularly with regard to anti-discrimination efforts, have we done? We've got a lot of history up here, of attempts we've made in the past to make policy changes, the responses to those policy changes.”
The need for a record-keeping system culminated in the creation of the OKEQ History Project in 2002. With the combined efforts of Dennis Neill himself, Laura Belmonte (former volunteer and Professor of History at OSU), and Carrie Lewis (former president of OKEQ), the organization has spent over twenty-two years collecting historical artifacts, artwork, articles, and records of queer individuals throughout east Oklahoma.
Currently, the project is led by head archivist Mary Bishop-Baldwin, although she often refrains from calling herself such, due to her tendency to pronounce her title as arr-kive-ist rather than arr-kih-vist; Bishop-Baldwin prefers referring to herself as “a researcher and a writer, and even a historian to some extent.”
Although Bishop-Baldwin has been involved with OKEQ since 2008, she didn’t begin working with the project until last year, after she was laid off from her journalism position at the Tulsa World—an occupation she has held for more than thirty years. Yet, Bishop-Baldwin’s skills in researching and writing made her a prime candidate for the OKEQ History Project.
“I was searching for a job,” said Bishop-Baldwin, lounging in one of the conference chairs of the Rainbow Library. From her jewelry to her apparel, she was decked in purple—it’s her color, as she put it. “Dennis contacted me and said, ‘Would you be interested in helping us with the archives? I think that your skills might be good.’ And I said, well, I'd certainly be interested in talking to you about it. So we talked. And we talked about the possibility that I could actually write some articles about our history. And so, I was hired.”
Bishop-Baldwin’s position in the History Project was almost made just for her. Not only does she enjoy the solitude, but she is meticulous and careful in all that she does—a key characteristic of any researcher or writer. Her job is to ensure that each and every donated item is tucked away into its proper location, and encoded into the database.
“What we do to include them is to put them on this web,” Bishop-Baldwin explains as she turns to face her rose-gold desktop computer, the screen alight with various spreadsheets. “This is the database I was talking about, and it's organized with the various boxes that are in that room, and what's in each box. We find an appropriate place for it, and then put it in that specific folder in that specific box.”
Besides collecting artifacts and documents, the History Project has started conducting oral interviews, or oral history videos. They’re a way to preserve the unique voices, identities, and stories of the interviewees.
“We bring in a person, or a couple, and we seat them right here in front of that background,” said Bishop-Baldwin. “We put a camera over there. And we interview them about their lives, starting from the time they were children, you know? Things like ‘where were you born?’ ‘Where did you go to school?’ That kind of thing. And then we get into the, ‘when did you 1st realize that you were different?’ ‘How did you find community?’”
The equality center doesn’t only want to stay stuck in the past, though. The building has plans to move forward by constructing a miniature museum inside of the Rainbow Library, replacing the walls with panels and displays to proudly show off the payoff of years of researching, journalism, writing, and archiving. In the words of Bishop-Baldwin, Dennis Neill hopes to complete the project within the next year.
“When I realized that I was in love with another girl in 1980, I thought, I can't tell anybody,” explained Bishop-Baldwin. “And I didn't know anybody else in the world who was gay. I wasn't aware that there were any gay people anywhere except in New York City and San Francisco. And I was aware that society and the church condemned it. You had to live in the closet back then—and then when you found someone else who was also gay, you felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of you. And, you know, it's like, oh, my gosh, I found a community.”
Stories span divides. They build bridges, close chasms; they’re the thread that weaves communities together. The OKEQ History Project matters because queer stories matter. Collecting the remnants of the individuals that lived before now reminds communities and allies that, in spite of everything, it is still possible to thrive.
If you want to learn more about the Oklahomans for Equality History Project, check out their socials below!
OKEQ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oklahomansforequality/
OKEQ History Project Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/okeqhistoryproject/
OKEQ History Project Official Website: https://history.okeq.org/
