For Robert Kesten of Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, June Pride Month is off to a much better start than the LGBTQ group’s annual fundraising campaign earlier this year.
In February, Executive Director Kesten feared that there would be many empty tables at Stonewall’s March 1 gala.
“The reality now is that historically in the United States, we have never had the federal government, once giving rights, make a concerted effort to take them away,” Kesten said, five months after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. “And we have never had the federal government go after the people who fund us.”
In the wake of Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “anti-woke” agendas, the 52-year-old museum (and many other arts and culture organizations) lost state and federal grants, along with many private corporate donations, said Kesten, who three years ago moved from New York to Broward for the Stonewall job.
To help close the funding gap, Kesten and Stonewall board members turned to an obvious – but for years largely ignored – demographic: successful, well-heeled women.
Those women, including F. Kendall Sharp, a retired executive recruiter who now chairs the new Stonewall National Women’s Fund, helped sell tickets to the March gala, and the event raised more than $300,000.
“We were way over the break-even point,” said Kesten.
A lifelong New York human-rights activist, Kesten at age 62 lost a 2018 Democratic primary run for a state senate seat representing parts of Westchester and Upstate New York. A few years later, as the COVID-19 pandemic wound down, Stonewall hired him as executive director.
Kesten said that days after arriving on the job in June 2022, he determined a museum culture change was badly needed.
“When I got here, it was clear that women did not hold Stonewall in the highest of esteem. And although when I was hired, I was hired by a woman chair – who was then followed by a woman chair – we were not well respected in the lesbian community.”
“In my first week, I was told by any number of people that I either reached out to or reached out to me that women didn't feel at all respected,” he added. “They felt that when they came to donate things, those things were not appreciated, that the number of books that we had, that the exhibits that we had really favored gay white men.”
Kesten immediately launched a Stonewall Women’s Fund.
“We started making noise that we were going to equalize the way this place operated,” he said. “We made a concerted effort to ask women to donate their materials and their books and to become members, and the largest single group of new members became women.
“Women, I think now, make up anywhere between 30% and 45% of our membership. Up from 16% or something like that.”
Kesten attributes this “massive success” to presenting “an extraordinary amount of women's programming … interesting enough that many, many, many men come to those programs now.”
Among those programs: an Oct. 24, 2024, conversation with lesbian writer and activist Rita Mae Brown at the Center for Spiritual Living in Oakland Park.
That event is how Sharp and her wife, Anne Marie van der Velde, became involved with Stonewall: A friend had told them about the author’s upcoming visit, and they offered their Pompano Beach home for a private, $500-a-ticket fundraising dinner with Brown.
Shortly after, Kesten and Stonewall development director Monique Force-Setlock invited Sharp and Van der Velde to dinner.
During the meal, Sharp recalled, Kesten “popped the question: ‘Would you like to be on the board?’”
“And I said, ‘Well, what would my responsibilities be? Tell me a little bit more and let me think about it.’”
After three more days of courtship, Sharp accepted Kesten’s proposal.
Going National
Kesten suggested the local women’s fund go national.
“His idea was to have the Stonewall National Women's Fund be a fund that includes chapters in other cities. … We haven’t actually accomplished that yet. In fact, we just formed our first chapter,” said Sharp, who heads up the initial Fort Lauderdale group. (Brown, an icon in the lesbian community, is the fund’s honorary chair.)
“To become a chapter, you have to have 20 women who commit to donating $1,000 a year for three years,” said Sharp. “It’s not a real big financial ask, but it gives some seed money so we can start planning programming. If we want to bring in somebody big who’s really high profile, we have to pay for their flights and their hotels and stuff like that.”
By February, Sharp had recruited the fund’s first 20 members.
“The gala was just a couple of weeks after that. We had a great turnout. Everybody was really surprised,” said Sharp. “I had never been to a Stonewall gala, but it was a much better turnout from the lesbian community than in former years.”
“A lot of the people who came to the party in March are my friends. People I know, friends of friends – let’s say 50- to 70-year-old women,” said Sharp, who turns 62 on June 8.
“I was, frankly, pleasantly surprised with the enthusiasm, because I think a lot of people who are like me, either at the tail end of their working career or are early retirement or even well into retirement, are discouraged about what's going on in the political landscape and want to get involved, but didn't know how.”
In addition, she said, “most of us want to have a social aspect to it. We want to get together and spend time with each other, develop friendships.”
Everyone Welcome
Sharp said she is happy the women’s fund has helped raise substantial money. Now, she and other members are ready to negotiate with Kesten how it’s allocated.
“I was literally at dinner last night with a member of the women's fund, who said to me, ‘You’ve got to talk to Robert and get real clear about what our budget is, and if the money from the women – is that our budget?’”
Sharp, who grew up in Vero Beach, said fund members are planning events for the fall and beyond.
The women’s fund now has about 40 members, including one man: Sharp’s friend Pennsylvania philanthropist David Topel, who 33 years ago founded Philadelphia's Attic Youth Center, one of the nation’s oldest queer youth programs.
“As politicians attempt to rewrite, erase, and reverse our hard-fought freedoms, safeguarding LGBTQ+ history and protecting our stories is more important than ever,” said Topel. “The Stonewall Museum is on the front lines of that vital mission, and the addition of Kendall Sharp, with her drive, passion and smarts, drew me to allyship for The Women's Fund.”
Sharp said she welcomes all allies.
“I personally think anybody who wants to join and support us is welcome. I’d be happy if a straight woman joined. You don’t have to be a gay woman. This is my personal opinion because there might be some other women who feel differently.”
Sharp also would like Stonewall to be more focused on bringing in youthful members.
“We want to have an infusion of younger people,” she said. “The more people we can get that are younger, the better. If they start in their 20s, and they feel connected to Stonewall, maybe they'll be a little bit more involved in their 30s and 40s and so on. We can't just have an organization that's a bunch of old people. Young people aren't going to want to come to any of our stuff.”
How It All Began
Stonewall National Museum began in 1973 as the Stonewall Library. Mark Neil Silber, then 17 of Hollywood, founded the repository with books and publications he personally collected, according to a 2024 article published by the National Endowment for the Arts.
After Silber moved to New York in 1984, the library was housed at the old Metropolitan Community Church of Fort Lauderdale, now known as Sunshine Cathedral at 1480 SW Ninth Ave., Fort Lauderdale.
In the mid-1990s, Stonewall moved into the then-new Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Greater Fort Lauderdale on Andrews Avenue, now The Pride Center at Equality Park and located since 2009 in Wilton Manors.
In 2007, the Fort Lauderdale Commission voted 3-2 to allow Stonewall Library to move into its current space at 1300 E. Sunrise Blvd., the same building that houses a Broward County library branch and ArtServe, an arts and culture incubator.
During commission debate, Fort Lauderdale’s then-Mayor Jim Naugle outraged the city’s LGBTQ community when he said he’d vote against the move, describing the Stonewall archive of queer books and newspapers as “hardcore pornography.”
In 2009, the library moved to its current location. Stonewall also has three off-site storage spaces totaling about 2,000 square feet. And Kesten described the museum’s public exhibit space as “10,000-plus feet too small.”
Stonewall holds about 30,000 volumes. “When adding in paper documents and other materials, we are at around one million,” he said.
Kesten described Stonewall’s most important acquisitions as “the ones that demonstrate just how powerful and diverse a community we are.” Included are:
- An original 1980s SILENCE = DEATH Act Up poster for AIDS visibility.
- The gavel then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used in 2010 to mark the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the federal ban on openly gay men and women serving in the U.S. military.
- A copy of New York residents Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer's 2007 Canadian marriage license. After Spyer died in 2009, the IRS cited the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act to deny Windsor an estate tax exemption for surviving spouses. Windsor sued and in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional the portion of DOMA that prevented the federal government from recognizing legally married same-sex couples.
Stonewall National Museum also hosts free public events, such as two planned for Pride Month: a free 6 p.m. June 16 conversation with MSNBC journalist Jonathan Capehart at Sunshine Cathedral (RSVP
Sharp described the physical museum as “interesting because it's really an exhibition space. It's not a museum like I think of museums, say in New York, where they have the same exhibits year in, year out, and then they have some traveling exhibits. With Stonewall, they're mostly rotating or traveling exhibits.”
Re-enacting A Pivotal Moment
For Pride Month last year, the museum held its first re-enactment of the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising in New York’s Greenwich Village, a bar raid that sparked the modern LGBTQ-rights movement. The exhibit has traveled to other cities, most recently to Key West.
Kesten estimates that in 2026 it will take a minimum of $1.5 million to run the museum “at 90% capacity” with its three full-time employees and two part-timers.
In addition to its space problems, Stonewall must deal with other challenges at its 77-year-old location.
Kesten said the museum has run out of shelf space for new books and he worries about the older building’s creaky roof and antiquated air conditioning.
“Just last week, the air conditioning went out, and the humidity went crazy here and we were dumping our dehumidifier every few hours,” he said. “That makes us very nervous about what happens to the books and the inherent mold that seems to live all over South Florida.”
Kesten has considered moving Stonewall from its current space.
“One of our primary things is to find a location, but a location will cost funds and as of now we certainly don't have that kind of funding,” he said, who has at times suggested relocating from Fort Lauderdale.
“As other people have said, never say never. But the intention is to stay where the fight is,” Kesten said, referring to the state of Florida. “If someone came to us and made an offer that we couldn't refuse, we wouldn't be able to refuse. I don't think that's going to happen, and at this particular moment in time, we're not pursuing alternative sites.”
All this comes just as Stonewall National Museum faces an additional challenge: the planned opening next year of The American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City.
The new national museum will be located at New York Historical on Central Park West, the city’s first museum, founded in 1804. Supported by both the state and city of New York, The American LGBTQ+ Museum is its own nonprofit “fiscally sponsored by the Fund for the City of New York,” according to the website.
It’s in the midst of a $30 million fundraising campaign and features celebrity endorsers such as tennis icon Billie Jean King and Tony-winning Broadway star André De Shields; and high-profile board members including former National LGBTQ Task Force executive director Rea Carey, “Dear Evan Hansen” composer Benj Pasek and queer historian Sharon Ullman of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Getting a Boost
Kesten believed the New York museum “will help” Stonewall in Fort Lauderdale.
“The more people who are talking about the work going on in the community, the more organizations within the community that work together to highlight our history and culture, the better it is for everybody.”
One of Kesten’s predecessors is Our Fund Foundation President/CEO David Jobin. Last year, Our Fund granted $113,242 to Stonewall.
Jobin became the museum’s executive director in June 2013. “When I got there, I remember saying, ‘You're not going to be a national organization,’” he said. “You don't make yourself a national organization. The country calls upon you for that role. And nobody's calling on Stonewall to play that role.”
While Jobin ran the museum, he opened a Stonewall gallery on Wilton Drive. (It closed years later during the pandemic.)
“My purpose was, ‘You just have to matter locally.’ Which is why we opened on the Drive. I tried to pull them away from that national moniker because I just didn't think it made sense,” Jobin said. “I think it's most successful when it focuses on the local community, and I don't just mean the archive being local. I mean in terms of its service to the local community.”
Jobin, who left the museum for Our Fund in December 2015, describes the traveling Stonewall Inn re-enactment exhibit as “brilliant” for a South Florida audience.
“I thought it was a great idea. I loved seeing it. I think it helped educate and inform a generation of people and remind them of the importance of that,” Jobin said, adding, however, he questions the value of taking the locally produced exhibit to cities outside South Florida.
Regardless, Kesten said he’s moving ahead with promoting Stonewall across the United States.
“When I was hired, I was hired as coming into a national museum. My mandate was to increase our national footprint and that is our mission and that is our goal and that is the objective.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library
WHERE: 1300 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale
HOURS: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday
TICKETS: Free to visit. Members ($50 annually per person) may check out materials and attend special events.
INFORMATION: https://stonewall-museum.org
This story was produced by Broward Arts Journalism Alliance (BAJA), an independent journalism program of the Broward County Cultural Division. Visit ArtsCalendar.com for more stories about the arts in South Florida.
