The co-chair of the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club talks about a series of exhibits at the GLBT History Museum celebrating the organization’s 40th anniversary. The exhibits will open at 6:30 tonight with a historical retrospective of the organization by award-winning curator Nathan Purkiss.

What can we expect to see in the exhibits? One of the things we’re going to be featuring is called “The Voice that Launched the LGBT Civil Rights Platform.” We have built a listening station where you can hear the first gay rights speech in American history, spoken at the Democratic National Convention in 1972 in Miami, delivered by Jim Foster, the founder of Alice B. Toklas.

Have you listened to it? I haven’t yet. We just got the audiotape. So the first we’re all going to hear of it is [today].

Did the speech make waves? It really did. It was juicy, and it was political reformation for the time. It discusses the struggles that gay people were having all through the country, and specifically in San Francisco with the police raids.