LGBTQ+ History Programs for Faith Communities
Learning from the past helps communities care for the present.
Many faith communities seek opportunities to deepen understanding, strengthen relationships, and cultivate places where every person is treated with dignity.
Expanding Horizons partners with affirming congregations and faith-based organizations to create history-informed learning experiences that invite reflection, conversation, and discovery. Through traveling exhibits, educational presentations, and custom historical projects, LGBTQ+ history becomes an opportunity to better understand both the past and the communities we are building today.
Every engagement is rooted in historical scholarship, designed with educators in mind, and adapted to the needs of each congregation.
How Expanding Horizons Can Help
Traveling LGBTq+ History Exhibits
Create opportunities for self-guided learning before and after worship services, community events, or educational programs through museum-quality traveling exhibits.
Learning Experiences
Presentations and facilitated conversations explore LGBTQ+ history with historical nuance, encouraging participants to engage thoughtfully with questions of identity, community, resilience, and social change.
Custom Historical Projects
Congregations and faith-based organizations have histories worth preserving. Expanding Horizons develops original exhibits and historical projects that celebrate ministries, anniversaries, and local stories of service and inclusion.
Looking to tell your own story?Why It Matters
Faith communities have long served as places where people seek meaning, wrestle with difficult questions, and build relationships across generations.
Learning LGBTQ+ history offers opportunities to better understand the experiences of neighbors, celebrate resilience, and appreciate the many ways communities have responded to challenge with compassion, courage, and hope.
Historical learning complements the ongoing work of hospitality, education, and service.
Featured Learning Experiences
✨ New in 2026 ✨
The Power Here Is You
A powerful case study examining one city's extraordinary response to the HIV/AIDS crisis—and the national lessons it offers about coalition-building, public health, and community resilience
This exhibit is the result of a two-year research intensive that involved primary source research in public archives, special library collections, and oral history interviews.
Blossom & Wilt
Through the lives of LGBTQ+ people living under fascism, this exhibit explores resilience, persecution, resistance, and the enduring importance of protecting human dignity.
The Stonewall Inn
Go beyond the familiar narrative of Stonewall by examining the people, politics, and activism that transformed one uprising into an international movement.
Why Expanding Horizons
Expanding Horizons approaches LGBTQ+ history as both scholarship and public education.
Rather than presenting disconnected facts, each learning experience is carefully curated around larger historical questions that encourage participants to think critically, appreciate complexity, and connect historical events with contemporary life.
The goal is not to tell people what to think, but to create space for meaningful learning together.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Most exhibits consist of seven to eleven retractable banners. Plan approximately three linear feet per banner for comfortable viewing.
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Most libraries host exhibits for approximately three weeks, although longer engagements can often be accommodated.
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No.
Expanding Horizons partners with affirming faith communities across many religious traditions.
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Yes.
Exhibits can be rented for a weekend, several weeks, or longer depending on your programming.
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Absolutely.
Many congregations pair a presentation with an exhibit to extend opportunities for learning and conversation.
Bring LGBTQ+ History to Your Community
Whether you're planning Pride Month programming, an adult education series, or a community event, Expanding Horizons can help create a thoughtful learning experience grounded in history.
Let’s Schedule a Discovery Call →