Gay Couple Mitchell and Tim Gold Are Collecting Artifacts and Donations for Museum
North Carolina furniture magnate Mitchell Gold and his husband Tim Gold are raising money and collecting artifacts to open a LGBT museum in our nation’s capital. The museum is expected to cost $50 to $100 million to open and operate.
The Museum’s Purpose
“We are going to tell American stories. We are going to tell American history, but we are going to do it through the lens of the LGBT story. The museum is particularly for the LGBT youth. That high school boy or girl who comes from a community that’s not so accepting, maybe a family that’s not so accepting, from a church that’s not so accepting, and at the very least they should be able to walk by this museum and know that it’s o.k. I want anyone walking through the door to be able to take something away from the experience, ” commented Tim.
Museum Goers Won’t be Walking Through the Door Anytime Soon.
Contributors kicked off the building campaign with $300,000. Supporters include the Arcus Foundation that promotes LGBT equality, the Velvet Foundation, a charitable group, which since 2008, has been gathering donations, and individual donors.
Tim Gold is a former Smithsonian researcher, and his husband Mitchell co-founded the $100 million home furnishing company Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. Mitchell does philanthropic work on behalf of gay youth and edited a book of coming-out stories. They are spearheading the effort.
The Planning Board
The couple live in North Carolina, a state that banned same-sex marriage last year, but legally married in Iowa. They have enlisted the help of a lawyer to arrange their fundraising, a museum design expert, Richard Molinaroli of MFM Design, a Bethesda firm that creates exhibits for Smithsonian museums, to develop the ideas and a real estate broker to locate and acquire property needed for a 100,000 –square-foot museum. Tim envisions an exhibition hall as part of a mixed-use space that would include a performing arts theatre, a cafe, offices, and a research center.
“Here I Am”
The museum’s forty-page strategic plan, titled “Here I am” explores stories of gay men and lesbians and their searches for identity. It would teach visitors the roles that LGBT Americans have played in the country’s history such as: gay men and lesbians and their searches for identity, among them lesbian performers at Harlem blues clubs in the 1920’s, photographs of gays at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 and nationwide protest signs from nationwide demonstrations. There is a sign saved from the closing in 2010 of the Dupont Circle bookstore Lambda Rising and the violin and music stand owned by Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers Freshman who committed suicide. The Museum of Sex in Manhattan has contributed a filmstrip of a 1970 Gay Pride parade in New York.
So far, Tim Gold has acquired 5,000 items which are stored in a climate-controlled warehouse in Forestville. He has been travelling the U.S. visiting the homes of gay rights activists, such as Matthew Shepard’s mother, where he is given historical mementos from their attics.