Not so long ago it seemed improbable if not impossible that two words might exist side by side in the same sentence: "out" and "elected." It was this striking juxtaposition that captured my imagination and curiosity, and inspired Out and Elected in the USA.

A statement I ran across in the course of assembling this project captures the significance of the accomplishment of these individuals: “A critical marker of a maligned class of people’s arrival in a democratic society is the ascendance of its members to public office.”

In November 1974, something extraordinary happened. Openly lesbian Elaine Noble made international news when she arrived at the Massachusetts state legislature. Kathy Kozachenko had in fact become the first openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender person to be elected to public office in the United States in January of that year, when she was elected to the City Council in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a rather muted and largely unnoticed event compared with Noble's victory. Noble had endured death threats, bullets through the windows of her campaign headquarters, intimidation of her campaign staff, and ugly hostility from her new colleagues in the State House. But Kozachenko's comparatively quiet accomplishment in community politics and Noble's high profile ascension to state office turned a page in America's political history.

Since then, many more openly lesbian, gay, and bisexual, and a few transgender, Americans have been elected to serve at nearly every level of local, state, and national public office. Their numbers are a small percentage of the approximately 500,000 elected officials in the United States. But their visibility and impact on policies about, and perceptions of, LGBT people, while simultaneously focusing on the issues of primary concern to their constituents, has been transformative.

The collection does not attempt to serve as a comprehensive catalog of everyone who ever was elected while being out of the closet during the time frame covered. And it includes no one who serves, or has served, while remaining in the closet. The aim was to capture a broad and diverse cross-section of the first thirty years of the courageous and community-minded people who have been, and in many cases still are, part of this recent and inspiring history, and to convey that history through their images and personal stories.

For information on a touring exhibit version of the collection, contact Ron Schlittler at rlschlittler@verizon.net.