Illinois Central College Hosts the LGBTQ Legacy Wall on Campus
Through this Friday, Illinois Central College will be hosting the Legacy Wall in the Student Lounge. The display is a traveling exhibit aimed at celebrating the lives of influential LGBTQ individuals throughout history.
The wall is nearly 400 square feet and features digitally interactive mini-biographies of these individuals stretching back through more than 4,000 years of history. Each biography is about 300 words, with a synopsis of their lives, achievements, and the effect their LGBTQ identity had on it.
The Legacy Wall was created by the Legacy Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about important LGBTQ individuals and their identities.
The Legacy Project co-founder and executive director Victor Salvo, who gave a speech for its ICC opening, said, “The overall mission is to reintegrate the historical stories about the historical contributions LGBTQ people have made back into the shared understanding of history from which these stories are remembered.”
These stories tend to have an inspiring or moving edge to them.
For example, Salvo’s favorite individual on the wall in Alan Turing, a famous programmer who is the “father of computer science”. According to the biography on the wall, Turing was gay in a time when it was illegal to be so in the United Kingdom. He was imprisoned upon being exposed as such. This led to a mental health crisis and his suicide in 1954.
Salvo said he relates to the mental health struggles associated with being gay, and found Turing’s story to be a huge inspiration toward working on The Legacy Project.
“The pipe dream of creating the Legacy Walk became an obsession after hearing about Turing’s story,” Salvo said. “In many ways, Turing was like my muse. I had to create the Legacy Walk so I would have a place to put Turing’s plaque.”
The Legacy Walk is located on a Chicago street and is the other exhibit of The Legacy Project. It is a half-mile-long display of 20 posts with signs similar to the Legacy Wall on them. It is the largest collection of detailed bronze biographical memorials in the world, with 40 actively shown biographies.
There is also a host of online information linked on both the Legacy Walk and Wall displays through QR codes on each biography, as well as hundreds of other individuals on their website that could not fit on the exhibits. Their website is accessible through this link.