As part of an initiative by the Smithsonian Institution to add more historic LGBT artifacts to their collection, the museum has included items from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace.
Will & Grace “used comedy to familiarize a mainstream audience with gay culture,” curator Dwight Blocker Bowers says of why the show was included. “It was daring and broke ground in the same way All in the Family did in the 1970s around issues of bigotry and tolerance.”
“Years ago, nobody would have bothered with this material,” Franklin Robinson Jr, archives specialist at the National Museum of American History, tells MSNBC. “But that was just a reflection of society. So 50 years from now, when LGBT civil rights will be something that we don’t even think about, people will ask, ‘Well, what was the big deal?’ And you can say, ‘Here it is.’ This is the primary materials from which history will be written. And if you don’t save it now, then it’s gone.”
The collection of Will & Grace items includes scripts, props and set décor. Doesn’t look like Jack’s Cher dolls made the cut, but find out what did by watching a virtual tour of the exhibit and a video discussion with its curators on MSNBC.
Why you can trust Xtra
