COLUMBUS, Ohio — Historical markers honoring Akron’s LGBTQ+ enclave and a storied Cincinnati bookstore were about to be installed when DOGE canceled the $250,000 Ohio grant that had funded the project.
Ohio History Connection began developing the signs after receiving a $249,810 federal grant in 2022 to fund the Marking Diverse Ohio project, which will support the placement of ten LGBTQ+ historical markers.
The project, led by OHC’s Gay Ohio History Initiative, came to a halt on April 3 when the DOGE, led by Elon Musk, canceled the grant. View a previous NBC4 report on the canceled grant in the video player above.
Marking Diverse Ohio advisors and researchers say they are now evaluating other revenue sources to commemorate the following ten people, places, and organizations that the project was considering for a historical marker:
- South Howard Street, a historic Akron LGBTQ+ district.
- Crazy Ladies Center, a Cincinnati bookstore that housed the Ohio Lesbian Archives.
- Dr. Dolores Knoll, Kent State University’s first professor of gay and lesbian studies.
- Edmonia “Wildfire” Lewis, a 19th-century sculptor who attended Oberlin College.
- LGBTQ+ journalism in Ohio.
- Louis P. Escobar, Toledo City Council’s first LGBTQ+ member.
- Nightsweats & T-Cells, a Lakewood screen-printing company benefiting Ohioans living with HIV.
- Pater Noster House, a former Columbus hospice and care center for HIV patients.
- Rev. Jan Griesinger, an openly-lesbian pastor and Athens community activist.
- The Rubi Girls, a Dayton drag group that formed in the 1980s.
OHC enlisted Tony Pankuch, the education and outreach coordinator for the University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, as a project advisor.
Pankuch was assisting with research for a marker commemorating South Howard Street, an Akron neighborhood that housed several LGBTQ+ bars beginning in the late 1940s.
In addition to serving as an enclave for Akron’s LGBTQ+ community, South Howard “shared a history of marginalization” with North Howard Street, a nearby hub for the Black community, according to Pankuch.
However, urban renewal plans by the Akron city government in the 1960s increased policing in both districts, resulting in bar raids similar to Manhattan’s Stonewall Uprising. Local officials declared the areas blighted in 1967, and bulldozers were sent to clear them.
Pankuch stated that the research team was working with the city government to install a sign commemorating this history by the end of 2025, potentially before Akron’s Pride festival in August.
While it was “a steamroller” to learn that the grant had been canceled, Pankuch and other project advisors are looking into ways to bring the marker to life through community fundraising.
“Akron has had its own LGBTQ culture for over 80 years. “I believe it is critical that we recognize that LGBTQ people have lived in this city,” Pankuch said. “There’s no question that this story is significant enough to go on a historical marker.”
Nancy Yerian, president of the Ohio Lesbian Archives, was another advisor sought by OHC for a marker commemorating the Crazy Ladies Bookstore in Cincinnati.
The storefront, which first opened in 1979 before moving to a three-story building in 1989, served as a feminist bookstore and quickly became a safe haven for community members.
Crazy Ladies operated as a feminist bookstore that quickly became a safe haven for community members. (Courtesy of Ohio Lesbian Archives)
The store was open until 2002 and housed a number of support groups, organizations, and the first physical iteration of the Ohio Lesbian Archives, which is now located at 1308 Race St., Cincinnati. Yerian explained that the archives were part of a larger movement in the 1990s, when community members began documenting their history due to a lack of access to lesbian narratives.
The bookstore’s marker was nearing completion, and the research team was working with Cincinnati’s park division to install it this summer or fall, Yerian said. Still, the archives president believes the sign, like the effort behind South Howard’s marker, has a chance of becoming reality.
“Organizations have really been making an effort in the past decade or two to include LGBTQ stories, and obviously the cuts are a huge setback for public history in general, but also for any efforts at including diverse perspectives,” according to Yerian. “At this point in time, in 2025, unfortunately I wasn’t too surprised, but I was deeply saddened.”
The installation of these signs would add to Ohio’s small collection of LGBTQ+ historical markers. Only three of the more than 1,800 markers across the state are related to the LGBTQ+ community. OHC most recently installed a sign in June 2023 honoring Summit Station, one of the nation’s first lesbian pubs that served patrons for nearly four decades before closing in 2008.
The state’s first LGBTQ+ marker was installed near the Dayton Metro Library in 2009 to honor Ohio-born Natalie Clifford Barney, a lesbian writer who hosted a literary salon in Paris. In 2017, the second was installed on West 28th Street in Cleveland to commemorate the LGBT civil rights movement, near the Lesbian-Gay Community Service Center.
DOGE has cut $25 million in funds awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, including OHC’s grant. Musk’s department also recently slashed an Ohio State professor’s nearly $700,000 grant to investigate the link between cannabis use disorder and LGBTQ+ women.
“We are seeing pretty consistent, widespread efforts to erase LGBTQ identity from both modern society and the historic record, and I think the goal of this is just to make LGBTQ seem new, threatening, upsetting to the status quo,” says Pankuch. “No matter how people feel about the LGBTQ community specifically, the fact of the matter is that we are citizens of this country, we’re part of the history of the U.S.”
