Interview with Mike Lesperance, Chair of the LGBTQ Alliance of the American Alliance of Museums
Mike Lesperance is the Chair of the American Alliance of Museum’s LGBTQ Alliance, a professional network dedicated to “advancing diversity, equity, inclusion and inquiry with particular respect to sexual orientation and gender identity within museums.” Through Mike’s leadership, in May of 2016, the LGBTQ Alliance released a set of Welcoming Guidelines that translate AAM’s Characteristics of Excellence for Museums into internal and external policies for engaging the LGBTQ community. Mike’s work with the LGBTQ Alliance is informed by his role as a principal of The Design Minds, an exhibit design firm specializing in “development, design, research, and writing to museums, visitor centers, corporations, and other private institutions.” He also teaches museum studies in Georgetown University’s Art and Art History Department. Mike took the time to speak with me at Design Minds regarding the work of the LGBTQ Alliance, emerging trends in LGBTQ interpretation and collecting, along with some compelling examples of LGBTQ narratives he’s highlighted though current and past projects.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today and helping to facilitate my research into LGBTQ representation within museums. Before we delve into that topic, can you tell me how did you come into what you do now in terms of your career in strategic and interpretive planning, and the establishment of Design Minds?
Of course. I was a history major in school and I went to graduate school, thinking I would get a PhD. in history to teach. While I was in graduate school, I realized it was too academic for me so I got my master’s degree and went to work for a consulting firm called Booz Allen Hamilton based in this area. After a couple of years of doing that, I realized I missed the history side of things and transitioned into History Factory, a company that does corporate histories. My first big project was to do a small history museum for Andersen Consulting that was part of Arthur Andersen. In that process I met exhibit designers, exhibit fabricators, and label writers. I was the Project Manager, and I decided I could write the labels as well as the person we had hired to write them. I went to the boss saying, “I could do this.” And his response was, “No you can’t.” So, I started to write some, slipped them in with the labels written by the consultant and the boss said, “Those are great.” When the time came that I didn’t want to be at History Factory anymore, I had made some contacts in the field and began as a writer, or now what we call an interpretive planner, for some exhibit design firms. In working with exhibit and exhibit fabricators, I was introduced to both sides of the business that way. I did that on my own for five years and in so doing met many people, including my current business partner, Lonny Schwartz, who just started the Design Minds. Lonny and I, coming up on 18 years ago, began working together as his exhibit design style was very story based, which fit well with my approach. We’ve gone from two people to fourteen. So that’s my story on how I got into the field.
To skip forward to the present again, much of my research and reading has focused on how objects create queer space within a museum. After reading American Alliance of Museum’s LGBTQ Alliance Welcoming Guidelines, it’s interesting to compare how institutional guidelines and best practices can also create queer space within museums. Were there any benchmarks that you looked at in terms of institutions leading the charge in these types of practices and mentalities?
Well this goes back to where I was when I first started as part of Design Minds. My first AAM Meeting I saw there was an LGBTQ group, which was my first introduction to LGBTQ community in a museum environment. We would attend the luncheons every year, and beyond that there was a network of people. The Welcoming Guidelines, and we should be clear, the Welcoming Guidelines are a product of the LGBTQ Alliance, which is a professional network of AAM, but it’s not an AAM product, which is an important distinction. The genesis of the welcoming guidelines was not from a particular institution or museum, as it was from the determination of a group of people who looked at changes in society and decided we could do more. This came from LGBTQ staff within museums who began to feel more empowered to speak out and frankly there were also more collections that started to come in that were identified by the donors as LGBTQ related. That wasn’t happening ten years before. One of my colleagues, Annette Gavigan at the California Academy of Sciences, was inspired to do this by the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. That looked at how equally our corporations are treating employees, marketing in their advertising, etc. Step two was that AAM itself had come out with Characteristics of Excellence in the field. We decided, to take those characteristics of excellence, evaluate them, determine which were relevant to LGBTQ issues or concerns. If a museum should be treating its audience well, then a good practice would be to recognize that members of that audience are from the LGBTQ community. A best practice would be to incorporate outreach and institutional support for the LGBTQ community. For example, if a museum had a membership drive, many times you have the option to enroll as an individual, or as a husband and wife. We would say as a couple, or as a spouse. Much of it is word choice. If you look at the Welcoming Guidelines, they follow that model. Then we went a step further, repeated them and divided them based on functional areas as well so that, if you’re a curator, you can flip to a section of curating best practices and identify ways to serve the LGBTQ community. They were designed as guidelines, both regarding how museum interface with their staff internally, as well as visitors externally. There began to be some exhibits that focused on LGBTQ issues. The Chicago Historical Society featured an exhibit entitled Out in Chicago that was very well received around this time. There had been talk of a national LGBTQ museum, that hasn’t taken wing, but I’m confident it will at some point. When we came out with the guidelines in May of 2016, we also thought that society was moving in a certain direction, but we didn’t imagine that the changing landscape might change the other way, but that is now happening. We’re seeing a significant amount of interest as more and more people feel threatened and are unwilling to step back.
So in terms of the adoption, have you seen institutions putting the guidelines into practice? What has been the range of endorsement and use that you’ve seen so far?
Good question. We are working on what I’ll call Welcoming Guidelines 2.0. Part of that process is to answer your question and we are going to have a session at AAM’s Annual Meeting in St. Louis where we are conducting case studies of nine institutions around the country, art museums, science museums, etc., to try to answer that question. I’m not aware of any museum that has fully adopted the guidelines into their operating protocols, however, that is the goal. Several museums are participating in this, some of which include the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, and several others large and small. Our goal is to figure out how to actualize the guidelines to a) make museums aware and b) help them implement them by giving them a check list, or protocol, or flow that lets them do this. This may include taking the guidelines and putting them into a digital friendly app type format allowing institutions to grade themselves on these practices as yes, no, maybe. HRC’s Index as I mentioned before actually was an index that graded these companies. While we haven’t done anything like that, what I can say is that through this process, I’ve become aware of museums that, prior to the guidelines coming out, have implemented an entire day of training for all their docents on LGBTQ issues and specifically looking at some of their artwork completed by LGBTQ people. One of the projects we worked on here at Design Minds, was for the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is another that is a good example. My friend Dana Hand Evans is the Executive Director there and she wanted to change the experience from typical mode of a historic house where the museum docents would point out the furnishings. As part of this process, she held a series of community meetings and what came out of that was people wanted to know about the people who lived in that house and how they lived. These are people who were New Yorkers who restored a family home in Winchester, used it as a summer home, built a big wall around it, and had blow out parties for their wealthy friends. The community was excluded from that and wanted to know, so far from recoiling, the museum embraced that feedback. You can go to the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, go through the Glen Burnie House, that is what is interpreted. They still interpret that the couple had a tremendous interest in fine art, and furnished their home that way, but instead of referring to the occupants as the owner and his secretary or the owner and his gardener, they call them a couple. There are photographs and documentary evidence of all of that. It’s a great example where the field of interpretation in general, looking at creating personal interpretations of individuals dovetails very well with creating an honest assessment of those individuals. It raises other questions. Neither of those people would have wanted to be identified that way, we’re certain of that, so that’s a challenge. If there are descendants or others who are uncomfortable with that, that would be a challenge. Like most social history, is this any different than Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings? We as a society have come to the point where we are going to be honest about our interpretation. So I think that those are some of the trends we see in interpretation today that include multiple perspective that include first person accounts that encourage opportunities to bring LGBTQ interpretation into our museums in a really honest way. I’ve had several house museum directors inquire about this, because, let’s face it, I would assume that perhaps a more significant percentage owners of historic homes that survive as house museums, might be homosexual, only because they had more disposable income, no children, etc.
Are you familiar with Franklin Vagnone’s book, The Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums? Its all about taking down the barriers to access for historic house museums, in terms of intellectual barriers, physical barriers, community identification barriers. He would have some insight into that percentage of LGBTQ sites.
Very interesting. I view it as something of a deconstruction. We’ve done a lot with the National Park Service and the idea of traditionally underrepresented communities has been very salient for some time. It has not always extended to the LGBTQ community. When you’re interpreting the mid-nineteenth century you don’t have the same type of evidence you’re able to interpret as with other communities. I trust that this focus will continue to expand.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is queer experience within museum spaces though exhibition design. Do you find any aspects of queer theory that your incorporate into your practice as a story teller or designer?
Yes. I can’t always say that our clients embrace it, but I do think that the process of being precise in interpretation leads one to avoid generalities and to avoid stereotypes. Through that lens of authenticity is the opportunity to do what you asked about. I also believe that as more institutions develop LGBTQ collections and identify them as such, more curators will be more comfortable interpreting them. So I can’t point to exhibits where it’s been, well actually I can. We designed the first changing exhibit that’s going into the new African American Museum of History and Culture, which features African American photographers. Part of that is looking beyond the lens and that experience expanded to include LGBTQ relationships, from the direction of the curators. So that is an example of a museum looking at its collection, and of course that’s a new collection and they expanded their collection to consciously include African American LGBTQ community members as part of that story. I think it is something that will only continue. One thing that we have incorporated into a lot of our work are vehicles to gather user-generated content. For example, we worked on the Albuquerque Museum. The exhibit is thematic based on the core characteristics of the people of Albuquerque. As you go through you see these screens with people discussing stories themselves, their personal reminisces. As more and more people provide reminiscences, we’re going to see more and more of queer speak come through. That exhibit in Chicago, that’s what you had, multi-generational with parents bringing their kids in there, LGBTQ or otherwise. As the community becomes more a part of the discussion of curating, I think it will make it more accessible for members of the community to share their stories.
That makes a great deal of sense and reminds me of one of the Unstraight Museum that serves as a web-based archive of queer experience through uploaded narratives. It’s a sensibility, a zeitgeist, but not necessarily tangible or concrete.
Let me give you an example of an artifact that we interpreted at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. A cache of letters came to light, that luckily had been preserved. They were correspondence of the men who lived there to some of their friends and lovers over the years and written in code. We began to see these things signed, “123, Julian.” In discussion with some of their contemporaries, we learned that was code for I love you. It would never have been interpreted that way as it was talking about buying furniture or something. So being able to decipher some of these things and give visitors the insight into that is a good example of an object that without that layer of interpretation, the meaning would be elusive. If you investigate into nineteenth century, potentially LGBTQ people, so much of that has to be deciphered from circumstances, code and surmising, because it was illegal to do or write or talk about these things because of morality laws or what have you. I think we’ve just scratched the surface.
Absolutely. In terms of making this history accessible, one of the articles I’ve read, “Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice” by Patrick Steorn, the search-ability of objects that have queer provenance or queer intent and the difficulty of doing that because the searchable metadata does not tag it as such. For example, artworks that have a history of queer appropriation as erotica, like depictions of Venus, would not necessarily register be tagged in that manner. Have you seen any examples of institutions that make queer history and objects accessible from a collections management perspective?
I am learning. Our LGBTQ Alliance Luncheon speaker at the AAM Annual Conference in May is the curator responsible for the LGBTQ collection at the Missouri Historical Society. We’re going to go over there and do a field trip, so I’ll be able to answer that question better after that. I do know many historical societies and institutions, the Historical Society of Washington D.C. for example, has an LGBTQ archive collection. If you’ve ever met or talked to Greg Hinton, he is best known for Out West, an exhibit that focused on gay rodeo. The way that it emerged is illustrative is how these collections may start to be built. I do country western dancing and there’s a gay circuit. There was a cross-over between country western dancers and people at the rodeo. Over the years, they began to accumulate ephemera related to this topic, and they kept it in the basement of the dance club. The people were aging, and somehow became connected with Gregory Hinton, wanting to know what to do with it. I forget where the collection is now, but it has been processed, has a home and in maintained. We didn’t get a lot of personal stories of the Holocaust until the 60’s and 70’s because people weren’t ready to talk about it. I feel that we’ve already reached that point, and it will continue, where people are ready to talk about those early experiences in their lives. As we promulgate welcoming guidelines and as museums and cultural institutions become more overtly welcoming, people will realize that there’s a home for their collections. By the circumstances, many people who may have these overtly queer objects and materials, may not have anyone to leave them to. I think we’ll see more and more collecting, donating really, of these types of collections going forward. That would be my prediction. One aspect of how these guidelines are being promulgated, the Canadian Museums Association called me last week and they had found the guidelines. Their annual conference is coming up in a few weeks so one of my colleagues is going up to Ottawa to do a session on the guidelines and it’s kind of ironic that the Canadians are looking to us right now for anything that’s promoting acceptance and tolerance, so that’s fantastic. Its super gratifying. I think there’s a lot of interest and demand, but people just don’t know where to look. The other thing I have found during the past year is that the welcoming guidelines have spurred staff at museums to develop diversity and inclusion groups, LGBTQ groups, and its been a grassroots initiative. There are certainly directors and officers who are open and promoting, but it has also empowered staff. Our hope is that one day AAM accreditation will include the Welcoming Guidelines.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today and helping to facilitate my research into LGBTQ representation within museums. Before we delve into that topic, can you tell me how did you come into what you do now in terms of your career in strategic and interpretive planning, and the establishment of Design Minds?
Of course. I was a history major in school and I went to graduate school, thinking I would get a PhD. in history to teach. While I was in graduate school, I realized it was too academic for me so I got my master’s degree and went to work for a consulting firm called Booz Allen Hamilton based in this area. After a couple of years of doing that, I realized I missed the history side of things and transitioned into History Factory, a company that does corporate histories. My first big project was to do a small history museum for Andersen Consulting that was part of Arthur Andersen. In that process I met exhibit designers, exhibit fabricators, and label writers. I was the Project Manager, and I decided I could write the labels as well as the person we had hired to write them. I went to the boss saying, “I could do this.” And his response was, “No you can’t.” So, I started to write some, slipped them in with the labels written by the consultant and the boss said, “Those are great.” When the time came that I didn’t want to be at History Factory anymore, I had made some contacts in the field and began as a writer, or now what we call an interpretive planner, for some exhibit design firms. In working with exhibit and exhibit fabricators, I was introduced to both sides of the business that way. I did that on my own for five years and in so doing met many people, including my current business partner, Lonny Schwartz, who just started the Design Minds. Lonny and I, coming up on 18 years ago, began working together as his exhibit design style was very story based, which fit well with my approach. We’ve gone from two people to fourteen. So that’s my story on how I got into the field.
To skip forward to the present again, much of my research and reading has focused on how objects create queer space within a museum. After reading American Alliance of Museum’s LGBTQ Alliance Welcoming Guidelines, it’s interesting to compare how institutional guidelines and best practices can also create queer space within museums. Were there any benchmarks that you looked at in terms of institutions leading the charge in these types of practices and mentalities?
Well this goes back to where I was when I first started as part of Design Minds. My first AAM Meeting I saw there was an LGBTQ group, which was my first introduction to LGBTQ community in a museum environment. We would attend the luncheons every year, and beyond that there was a network of people. The Welcoming Guidelines, and we should be clear, the Welcoming Guidelines are a product of the LGBTQ Alliance, which is a professional network of AAM, but it’s not an AAM product, which is an important distinction. The genesis of the welcoming guidelines was not from a particular institution or museum, as it was from the determination of a group of people who looked at changes in society and decided we could do more. This came from LGBTQ staff within museums who began to feel more empowered to speak out and frankly there were also more collections that started to come in that were identified by the donors as LGBTQ related. That wasn’t happening ten years before. One of my colleagues, Annette Gavigan at the California Academy of Sciences, was inspired to do this by the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. That looked at how equally our corporations are treating employees, marketing in their advertising, etc. Step two was that AAM itself had come out with Characteristics of Excellence in the field. We decided, to take those characteristics of excellence, evaluate them, determine which were relevant to LGBTQ issues or concerns. If a museum should be treating its audience well, then a good practice would be to recognize that members of that audience are from the LGBTQ community. A best practice would be to incorporate outreach and institutional support for the LGBTQ community. For example, if a museum had a membership drive, many times you have the option to enroll as an individual, or as a husband and wife. We would say as a couple, or as a spouse. Much of it is word choice. If you look at the Welcoming Guidelines, they follow that model. Then we went a step further, repeated them and divided them based on functional areas as well so that, if you’re a curator, you can flip to a section of curating best practices and identify ways to serve the LGBTQ community. They were designed as guidelines, both regarding how museum interface with their staff internally, as well as visitors externally. There began to be some exhibits that focused on LGBTQ issues. The Chicago Historical Society featured an exhibit entitled Out in Chicago that was very well received around this time. There had been talk of a national LGBTQ museum, that hasn’t taken wing, but I’m confident it will at some point. When we came out with the guidelines in May of 2016, we also thought that society was moving in a certain direction, but we didn’t imagine that the changing landscape might change the other way, but that is now happening. We’re seeing a significant amount of interest as more and more people feel threatened and are unwilling to step back.
So in terms of the adoption, have you seen institutions putting the guidelines into practice? What has been the range of endorsement and use that you’ve seen so far?
Good question. We are working on what I’ll call Welcoming Guidelines 2.0. Part of that process is to answer your question and we are going to have a session at AAM’s Annual Meeting in St. Louis where we are conducting case studies of nine institutions around the country, art museums, science museums, etc., to try to answer that question. I’m not aware of any museum that has fully adopted the guidelines into their operating protocols, however, that is the goal. Several museums are participating in this, some of which include the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, and several others large and small. Our goal is to figure out how to actualize the guidelines to a) make museums aware and b) help them implement them by giving them a check list, or protocol, or flow that lets them do this. This may include taking the guidelines and putting them into a digital friendly app type format allowing institutions to grade themselves on these practices as yes, no, maybe. HRC’s Index as I mentioned before actually was an index that graded these companies. While we haven’t done anything like that, what I can say is that through this process, I’ve become aware of museums that, prior to the guidelines coming out, have implemented an entire day of training for all their docents on LGBTQ issues and specifically looking at some of their artwork completed by LGBTQ people. One of the projects we worked on here at Design Minds, was for the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is another that is a good example. My friend Dana Hand Evans is the Executive Director there and she wanted to change the experience from typical mode of a historic house where the museum docents would point out the furnishings. As part of this process, she held a series of community meetings and what came out of that was people wanted to know about the people who lived in that house and how they lived. These are people who were New Yorkers who restored a family home in Winchester, used it as a summer home, built a big wall around it, and had blow out parties for their wealthy friends. The community was excluded from that and wanted to know, so far from recoiling, the museum embraced that feedback. You can go to the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, go through the Glen Burnie House, that is what is interpreted. They still interpret that the couple had a tremendous interest in fine art, and furnished their home that way, but instead of referring to the occupants as the owner and his secretary or the owner and his gardener, they call them a couple. There are photographs and documentary evidence of all of that. It’s a great example where the field of interpretation in general, looking at creating personal interpretations of individuals dovetails very well with creating an honest assessment of those individuals. It raises other questions. Neither of those people would have wanted to be identified that way, we’re certain of that, so that’s a challenge. If there are descendants or others who are uncomfortable with that, that would be a challenge. Like most social history, is this any different than Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings? We as a society have come to the point where we are going to be honest about our interpretation. So I think that those are some of the trends we see in interpretation today that include multiple perspective that include first person accounts that encourage opportunities to bring LGBTQ interpretation into our museums in a really honest way. I’ve had several house museum directors inquire about this, because, let’s face it, I would assume that perhaps a more significant percentage owners of historic homes that survive as house museums, might be homosexual, only because they had more disposable income, no children, etc.
Are you familiar with Franklin Vagnone’s book, The Anarchist’s Guide to Historic House Museums? Its all about taking down the barriers to access for historic house museums, in terms of intellectual barriers, physical barriers, community identification barriers. He would have some insight into that percentage of LGBTQ sites.
Very interesting. I view it as something of a deconstruction. We’ve done a lot with the National Park Service and the idea of traditionally underrepresented communities has been very salient for some time. It has not always extended to the LGBTQ community. When you’re interpreting the mid-nineteenth century you don’t have the same type of evidence you’re able to interpret as with other communities. I trust that this focus will continue to expand.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is queer experience within museum spaces though exhibition design. Do you find any aspects of queer theory that your incorporate into your practice as a story teller or designer?
Yes. I can’t always say that our clients embrace it, but I do think that the process of being precise in interpretation leads one to avoid generalities and to avoid stereotypes. Through that lens of authenticity is the opportunity to do what you asked about. I also believe that as more institutions develop LGBTQ collections and identify them as such, more curators will be more comfortable interpreting them. So I can’t point to exhibits where it’s been, well actually I can. We designed the first changing exhibit that’s going into the new African American Museum of History and Culture, which features African American photographers. Part of that is looking beyond the lens and that experience expanded to include LGBTQ relationships, from the direction of the curators. So that is an example of a museum looking at its collection, and of course that’s a new collection and they expanded their collection to consciously include African American LGBTQ community members as part of that story. I think it is something that will only continue. One thing that we have incorporated into a lot of our work are vehicles to gather user-generated content. For example, we worked on the Albuquerque Museum. The exhibit is thematic based on the core characteristics of the people of Albuquerque. As you go through you see these screens with people discussing stories themselves, their personal reminisces. As more and more people provide reminiscences, we’re going to see more and more of queer speak come through. That exhibit in Chicago, that’s what you had, multi-generational with parents bringing their kids in there, LGBTQ or otherwise. As the community becomes more a part of the discussion of curating, I think it will make it more accessible for members of the community to share their stories.
That makes a great deal of sense and reminds me of one of the Unstraight Museum that serves as a web-based archive of queer experience through uploaded narratives. It’s a sensibility, a zeitgeist, but not necessarily tangible or concrete.
Let me give you an example of an artifact that we interpreted at the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. A cache of letters came to light, that luckily had been preserved. They were correspondence of the men who lived there to some of their friends and lovers over the years and written in code. We began to see these things signed, “123, Julian.” In discussion with some of their contemporaries, we learned that was code for I love you. It would never have been interpreted that way as it was talking about buying furniture or something. So being able to decipher some of these things and give visitors the insight into that is a good example of an object that without that layer of interpretation, the meaning would be elusive. If you investigate into nineteenth century, potentially LGBTQ people, so much of that has to be deciphered from circumstances, code and surmising, because it was illegal to do or write or talk about these things because of morality laws or what have you. I think we’ve just scratched the surface.
Absolutely. In terms of making this history accessible, one of the articles I’ve read, “Curating Queer Heritage: Queer Knowledge and Museum Practice” by Patrick Steorn, the search-ability of objects that have queer provenance or queer intent and the difficulty of doing that because the searchable metadata does not tag it as such. For example, artworks that have a history of queer appropriation as erotica, like depictions of Venus, would not necessarily register be tagged in that manner. Have you seen any examples of institutions that make queer history and objects accessible from a collections management perspective?
I am learning. Our LGBTQ Alliance Luncheon speaker at the AAM Annual Conference in May is the curator responsible for the LGBTQ collection at the Missouri Historical Society. We’re going to go over there and do a field trip, so I’ll be able to answer that question better after that. I do know many historical societies and institutions, the Historical Society of Washington D.C. for example, has an LGBTQ archive collection. If you’ve ever met or talked to Greg Hinton, he is best known for Out West, an exhibit that focused on gay rodeo. The way that it emerged is illustrative is how these collections may start to be built. I do country western dancing and there’s a gay circuit. There was a cross-over between country western dancers and people at the rodeo. Over the years, they began to accumulate ephemera related to this topic, and they kept it in the basement of the dance club. The people were aging, and somehow became connected with Gregory Hinton, wanting to know what to do with it. I forget where the collection is now, but it has been processed, has a home and in maintained. We didn’t get a lot of personal stories of the Holocaust until the 60’s and 70’s because people weren’t ready to talk about it. I feel that we’ve already reached that point, and it will continue, where people are ready to talk about those early experiences in their lives. As we promulgate welcoming guidelines and as museums and cultural institutions become more overtly welcoming, people will realize that there’s a home for their collections. By the circumstances, many people who may have these overtly queer objects and materials, may not have anyone to leave them to. I think we’ll see more and more collecting, donating really, of these types of collections going forward. That would be my prediction. One aspect of how these guidelines are being promulgated, the Canadian Museums Association called me last week and they had found the guidelines. Their annual conference is coming up in a few weeks so one of my colleagues is going up to Ottawa to do a session on the guidelines and it’s kind of ironic that the Canadians are looking to us right now for anything that’s promoting acceptance and tolerance, so that’s fantastic. Its super gratifying. I think there’s a lot of interest and demand, but people just don’t know where to look. The other thing I have found during the past year is that the welcoming guidelines have spurred staff at museums to develop diversity and inclusion groups, LGBTQ groups, and its been a grassroots initiative. There are certainly directors and officers who are open and promoting, but it has also empowered staff. Our hope is that one day AAM accreditation will include the Welcoming Guidelines.