From The Washington Blade:
Thousands of students, teachers, and parents attended a ceremony at the University of Maryland in College Park on Thursday, June 14, in which a 17-year-old high school student won the National History Day Contest award for an exhibit on the 1969 Stonewall riots.
Nicholas Gupta, a student at Pensacola High School in Florida, won the first-place award for a museum style exhibit he worked on for eleven months called “Out of the Closet and Into the Streets: The Stonewall Uprising of 1969.”
Gupta, who’s straight and just completed his junior year at Pensacola High, said he first learned about the Stonewall riots while searching for a topic for the contest. Organizers of the annual contest called on students to select a topic that fits into the theme of “revolution, reaction, and reform in history.”
“When I read about the Stonewall uprising it was something that really hit me,” Gupta told the Blade. “You know, wow, this is something that nobody really talks about. It’s kind of left out of the history books.”
While high school can be a challenging place for many a LGBT teen, those like Mr. Gupta show that history is moving in the right direction. Soon will come a day where we won’t be “left out” and projects on LGBT history will become as commonplace as anything else. Mr. Gupta’s win is a step toward that direction and another reason why it gets better.
Why It Gets Better is a series of postings showing, real-time, concrete, tangible ways that life is getting better for LGBT people.
