On a West Hollywood sidewalk, a bronze plaque marks a public memorial to transgender victims of hate crimes. Placed in 2009 when trans visibility was low, the memorial caught the eye of poet and artist Steven Reigns roughly 15 years ago.

“It had me wondering if it was the first, or maybe the only marker,” said Reigns in an interview. “And if not, how many other markers are out there in the world and what do they look like? I started to think about how few public commemorative markers there are for queer people and queer events.”

Stories Are The Soul Of The Project

Reigns’ curiosity led him to found The Gay Rub, a collaborative archive of about 500 rubbings taken from LGBT historical markers, plaques, monuments and gravestones around the world. Using black crayon on tear-away fabric, Reigns and about 100 contributors have gathered their physical impressions from sites in Berlin, Chicago, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among other cities. The multilingual international collection is stored in Los Angeles, and loaned out for exhibitions.

While the ghostly rubbings mark proof of vibrant, often courageous lives, the stories that back them are the soul of the project. They range from Tom McBride (1952-1995), the all-American face of Winston Cigarettes who appeared on 1980s billboards, to Franklin Pangborn, a character actor in classic Hollywood films frequently cast as an effete, comedic stereotype.

Franklin Pangborn guests as a fussy male secretary on Ann Sothern's sitcom, Private Secretary.

“There was something about tracking down Pangborn’s grave (in Glendale, California), and seeing that he was buried with his parents, not with a loved one,” said Reigns, who was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood in 2014, and has published collections with City Lights Books. “It struck me that he was always the punchline of jokes; I realized that was his way of surviving in the world.”

Reigns remembers visiting the grave of Sylvester (1947-1988), a flamboyant singer-songwriter who sang disco, soul, and rhythm and blues tunes in falsetto. “His grave (in Inglewood, Los Angeles) wasn’t well tended to, there was a lot of dirt and debris over it,” said Reigns, who felt a deepening with queer history as he cleared the grave and then did a rubbing.

Some of The Gay Rub’s work reaches far back in history—to January 4, 1750, when Jean Diot and Bruno Lenoir were caught having consensual sex on Paris’ rue Montorgueil. After a trial, the men were condemned to death, strangled and burned, according to L’Humanité, a French daily newspaper. In 2024, a rubbing was taken of a memorial plaque at the site where the men were arrested.

The project spans centuries, from the 18th century to modern-day Britain.

Reigns’ project has two rubbings of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who was instrumental in cracking Nazi codes during World War II. One is from London, and another is from the Chicago Legacy Walk, a half-mile outdoor museum marked by 40 bronze biographical plaques commemorating LGBT figures.

‘Gay History Has Always Been Under Threat Of Erasure’

While Reigns captures history through physical rubbings, other organizations use digital documentation to combat threats of erasure.

The NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, founded in 2015, has documented nearly 500 LGBTQ locations across New York City’s five boroughs. When the National Park Service (NPS) scrubbed the Stonewall National Monument’s website in early 2025, the Project called it “a dangerous and divisive” act of historical erasure. The NPS had removed the words “transgender” and “queer,” done in response to new federal guidelines that only recognize male and female genders.

Historical records and eyewitness accounts show that gender-nonconforming people were central to the 1969 Stonewall uprising, especially given New York’s “three-article” rule, which required people to wear at least three items of clothing matching their birth sex.

"Gay history has always been under threat of erasure,” said Jim Downs, a professor of history at Gettysburg College and author of Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation.

“The Gay Rub is a powerful reminder that queer people have long taken the responsibility of preserving their own history, often because no one else would. The state has never reliably served as the chronicler of LGBTQ+ life—and even when it has offered moments of recognition, those gains remain precarious and subject to reversal.”

Downs continued: “At a moment when LGBTQ+ history is still being contested, diminished, and in some cases actively erased, projects like The Gay Rub ensure that these histories are not only remembered, but materially preserved by the very people to whom they belong.”

Which Lives Are Honored, And Which Forgotten?

It’s easy for pedestrians to walk by markers and not register them, Reigns said, so awareness is central to his project’s mission.

It can become a question of “who gets erased from history and who doesn’t,” he said. “There are a lot of queer historical markers for people like Tennessee Williams and Harvey Milk. And there are far fewer for people like Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006),” an author who worked in Afrofuturism, which uses science fiction to explore race, gender and themes of survival.

The Gay Rub has traveled as a gallery exhibition to the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives and Loyola Marymount University, both in Los Angeles, as well as St. Louis’ Webster University, and Appalachian State University in North Carolina, among others. A 15-minute documentary was made about the project in 2018.

“There’s a booklet given out with each exhibition that has more information on each marker, including the location,” Reigns said. “It serves as a guide, a way of contextualizing the markers. People use it to find the markers on their own.”