Beth Watkins, manager of exhibition, interpretation, and visitor experience at the Spurlock Museum, discusses several exhibits relating to the Champaign-Urbana LGBTQ+ community. The first exhibit, In Her Closet, focused on drag costuming and highlighted local drag queens. One national queen who provided her outfits was Sasha Velour, a CU local and previous winner of RuPaul's Drag Race. The next exhibit discussed was Sewn in Memory, which displayed AIDS quilt panels from Central Illinois.
Georgia King, President of the Greater Community AIDS Project and a GCAP volunteer for almost 40 years, chronicles the organization’s founding—when it was still known as the Gay Community AIDS Project—and provides insight into the sort of urgency and stigma that resulted in GCAP’s founding during the 1980s. From there, King centers GCAP’s narrative in the realm of local AIDS activism through her discussion of their collaboration with organizations like the Prairie AIDS Foundation and the support of local volunteers to construct the GCAP boarding house. This boarding house, which has been in use for over 30 years, provides housing and food assistance to those living with AIDS.
