Badge Of Pride
Badge of Pride collects and activates artifacts from LGBTQ+ history to inform, enrich, and engage the power of the contemporary Queer experience.
We envision a world where LGBTQ+ history informs public life, strengthens civic participation, and fuels the cultural imagination needed for global progress.
Drawing from a nationally significant archive of more than 10,000 artifacts, we are a community-powered nonprofit that puts Queer history to work in public life. Through award-winning museum exhibitions, staged readings, oral history projects, participatory art, and storytelling initiatives, we build the case that the LGBTQ+ community has always shaped culture and public life, and always will.
Programs
Exhibitions
Badge of Pride builds exhibitions that make LGBTQ+ history visible, rigorous, and public. Our exhibition program draws from a nationally significant archive of 10,000+ artifacts to bring LGBTQ+ history into public life. Our flagship exhibition, "Badge Of Pride: From Silence...To Celebration!" was the largest artifact-based LGBTQ+ history exhibition ever presented in Texas and has earned six national honors, including awards from the American Alliance of Museums and the American Association for State and Local History. The exhibition is currently in development as a traveling production. Research is underway for two new major exhibitions premiering in 2028 and 2031.
Community Archiving Initiative
Badge of Pride's Community Archiving Initiative captures LGBTQ+ history before it disappears. "The Way We Were" collects photographs, ephemera, and personal artifacts documenting LGBTQ+ community life, built as a scalable model replicable in communities beyond North Texas. Our Oral History Project records first-person accounts of LGBTQ+ life across generations, anchored by "Deep in the Heart," which documents the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ Texans in rural and small-town communities whose histories are most at risk of being lost.
Performance Programs
Badge of Pride brings LGBTQ+ history off the page and onto the stage. "CORRESPONDENCE: Letters of Queer Resistance, Love & Revolution" transforms archival letters and primary source documents into live theatrical productions, connecting audiences to the voices behind the history. "Say It Loud!" activates queer poetry as public performance, centering living voices alongside historical ones. Together, these programs make the emotional truth of LGBTQ+ history immediate and undeniable.
Education & Workshops
Badge of Pride's public workshops bring LGBTQ+ history into direct, participatory contact with the community. As an example, our Pride & Protest sign-making workshops connect the tradition of queer activism to hands-on creative practice. Our LGBTQ+ history walking tours place participants inside the physical geography of queer history. A new virtual tour project, currently in development, will map LGBTQ+ historic sites across Texas, making that history accessible to communities statewide regardless of location.