User:Victor Salvo

Victor A. Salvo, Jr. (b. June 28, 1957) is a long-time gay-rights activist from Chicago, Illinois who currently serves as the Executive Director of the Legacy Project [1]. The Legacy Project is a non-profit corporation created to develop, install, and maintain an outdoor LGBT 'museum walk' called "THE LEGACY WALK" that was dedicated on October 11, 2012 - "National Coming-Out Day" – in Chicago. The Legacy Walk's purpose is to celebrate the contributions Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people have made to world history and culture. The creation of the Legacy Walk is the culmination of a decades-long quest to bring knowledge of historically significant LGBT role models – which are redacted in nearly every text book that has ever been used – into the lives of LGBT youth, who are often socially marginalized and culturally isolated because they are taught that they are without historic relevance. Statistics show that lack of cultural connection leaves LGBT youth vulnerable to the despair - and violence - that springs from ignorance. Victor’s work is dedicated to LGBT youth who far too often endure being bullied only to end up taking their own lives. A survivor of suicide, and a victim of bullying himself, Victor has dedicated his life to giving LGBT youth a reason to carry on in spite of overwhelming odds.

EARLY LIFE

Victor Salvo was born in Chicago, early in the morning on June 28, 1957 - twelve years before the Stone Wall Riots in New York would proclaim that date to be the start of the "Modern Gay Rights Movement," giving the anniversary of his birth not only a particularly festive pastiche, but assuring that every birthday from 1969 onward would always be marked by a parade. The only son of Victor (Sr.) and Mary Salvo, themselves the children of Italian immigrants, he grew up in a home where only Italian was spoken out of deference to his maternal grandmother who spoke no English. He learned English as a second language (without the benefit of special classes to that effect) by watching TV and paying strict attention to the nuns at St. Alexander's Grade School who, by the time he had gotten there, had already helped his older sister, Anna Marie, in the same fashion.

Though his grade school education did not benefit from many advanced teaching tools and had no technical sophistication, he nonetheless was a very bright child who soaked up every lesson presented to him with such fervor that he went the entire eight years without missing a single day of class. His nearly perfect grades in all subjects revealed what appeared to be a happy, intelligent, good-natured child with great enthusiasm for learning, someone who would do well. What his grades did not reveal, however, was the underlying psychological torment he experienced on a daily basis at the hands of merciless bullies who called him "fem" and "faggot" and "homo" (words he did not understand) with abandon, shoving him into lockers and beating him up on the playground, always in full view of the nuns who would stand by, watch, and do nothing to help him. Given that he could not tell his parents what was happening to him, that he was taught the wisdom and authority of priests and nuns was beyond reproach, and knowing there was no one at the school who would help, he internalized his hatred of himself and his distrust of everyone around him – specifically the Church and his own family – and began to make his way into the world as a small child, already incredibly damaged before his life had even begun.

After finally surviving the two worst years of his adolescence – 7th and 8th grades – he graduated from grade school (perfect attendance record intact), resolved to beginning the next chapter of his life at Willowbrook High School not as a victim but as one of the most popular students that would ever attend there. Like so many young, damaged LGBT kids, he turned his self-loathing life into an unending comedy routine that earned him fast friends and every bit of the popularity to which he aspired. In the four years at Willowbrook he managed to sing in the school's Senior Choir, appeared in nearly two-dozen theater and musical productions, was Student Council President, President of the Thespian Society, Senior Class President, and even sang the National Anthem at dozens of basketball and football games. In spite of the dark "secret" of his homosexuality he managed, on the strength of his popularity, to go through four years at Willowbrook with only one recalled threat made against him for being a "faggot." Unfortunately for that perpetrator, the threat was overheard by the captain of the football team who assured Victor that he would never, ever have to worry about "that guy" again - and he never did. He graduated from Willowbrook High School with honors, looking forward to studying Architecture at the University of Illinois.

The summer after his graduation from high school he had his first mutually affirming sexual experience with another boy with whom he remained close friends for many years. Up until that time he still hoped that being gay was just a phase he would grow out of. This was underscored by the profoundly close relationship he had with his girlfriend, someone who today remains his closest friend. But once he had kissed a boy for the first time he knew that whatever it was – it was not a phase. His hormone-fueled joy of self-discovery was quickly dissipated by the returning echo of every hurtful slight ever hurled at him as a child ringing in his ears. The self-loathing he had so successfully tamped down in high school, through popularity, success, and numerous girlfriends – along with the quiet assurances that he was just going through a phase – all fell away from him. His shame and fear came boiling to the surface. Still with no one to talk to – but for his new boyfriend who mysteriously had no problem with being gay at all and thus couldn't understand his struggle – Victor began to view himself as permanently damaged goods – a sinner with neither the ability to transcend his horrible vice nor the capacity to enjoy it. He turned to his girlfriend for comfort – a young woman who set aside her own disappointment and confusion to help this young man, whom she loved very much, deal with what was going to be a very difficult time in his life; because, for Victor, the prospects of what he would be capable of achieving suddenly grew very dim.

COLLEGE YEARS

All this happened as a preamble to leaving for college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Wracked by all the insecurities that follow any new freshman to college for the first time, Victor was doubly weighted down by the ache and fear and confusion of now having to add being a closeted homosexual to all of his other concerns. He threw himself into college life – taking up smoking and drinking and recreational drugs – but cracks in the veneer of his new "regular-guy-college-life" were already beginning to show. As fate would have it he met a new cast of characters who quickly ushered him into his first college "gay" experiences. With hormones raging he did the best he could to overcome his own insecurities, but never managed to blossom and embrace his new life. Instead the anxiety followed him wherever he went and began to spill over into his shared living arrangement with his popular roommate who began to grow uncomfortable with the realization that his roommate was probably queer. It culminated with a violent confrontation in their room, triggering an emotional cascade for Victor that ended with his first suicide attempt in November of 1975. It was the beginning of a prophetic obsession with suicide that would change forever how he comported himself and what he would expect from his life of ever-diminishing expectations.

He gamely struggled onward but it was a few years before he would revisit anything akin to a "gay life" at U of I, though eventually he did find one and managed to put some of his anxiety on a shelf so that he would be able to indulge his long-denied passions. Those were the closest to "fun and happy years" that he had ever had, and he often looked back on that time fondly. But churning beneath the party was a gaping chasm of sadness, loneliness, and self-hatred that no amount of sex, drugs or alcohol was going to fill. Two more suicide attempts followed in the five years he was at college. None did permanent damage – but each solidified the bond he had developed with the concept of death ending his troubles. Indeed reliance upon suicide – suicidal ideation – became the greatest, most powerful emotional and psychological crutch in his life... A theme. A darkness. A shadow. His own private secret. As a fatally flawed human being unable to shed the mantle of his homosexuality in spite of fervent prayers, counseling sessions with priests, confessions – even years-long abstinence – no matter what he did in his life it did not matter. Achievements were pointless. In fact any attempts at success in the face of God's Judgment of him having already been cast – was a blasphemy, an invitation to disaster.

So he set his sights on living as small a life as possible, committed to making sure that he never had a truly happy day, believing that somehow, a life of misery and penance was his only shot at "Salvation." With the words of his second-grade nun forever ringing in his ears... "Your place in Heaven will be measured by how much suffering you endure on the Earthly plain..." Victor resigned himself to a life wherein, at best, he would "get by" – but he would never, ever, thrive. Being damned already anyway, he resolved to put up with as much sadness and frustration as he could then, someday, when he couldn't take it anymore, he would kill himself and all of "this" would be done with once and for all. Death would become the centerpiece of his life's journey for the next three decades.

EARLY ADULTHOOD

The funny thing about being committed to a life of abject misery is that it is extremely hard to hold to such a conviction when God has, at the same time He stuck you with being gay, given you innate talents, gifts and insights, and filled your life with so many loving, accepting, and nurturing people – most all of whom were blessed with wickedly fabulous senses of humor. Thus when Victor left college, having graduated cum laude with a double major in Architectural Design and Community Development, he entered a new world where the first few years out were rocky, but the people he met filled his life with laughter. He struggled with being gay, and lived a mostly celibate life still for the first few years, until college friends began to move to Chicago to drag him out of his self-imposed exile from all things gay into the world of 1980s Gay Life in Chicago. For a brief period it was a heady experience without anything to fetter him beyond his own self-imposed limitations. As a result he managed to appear to everyone around him to be a fun-loving, popular guy who had no trouble pursuing his romantic interests. But deep down inside, a steady second-hand was ticking off a life that, in spite of all he seemed to have going for him, was never going to be allowed to go anywhere.

Victor's unspoken commitment to his own lack of success doomed him to a series of jobs that would use his talents and solid work ethic, but leave him with little in return. As his friends pursued their various careers to great effect, Victor languished behind, always a curiosity to many who thought of him as one of the most talented and smartest of them all. No one knew that Victor had ceded control of his life; that he was being governed by a predetermined, if undefined, fear-driven master plan that prevented him from ever doing anything from which he would personally gain any benefit. He could work for causes; he could volunteer his time; he could sacrifice no end for something outside of himself – he could do anything – so long as he did not benefit from it. It was during this period, when his father was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, that he slipped into a clinical depression, entered therapy, and was eventually diagnosed as Anhedonia [2].

To distract him from his father’s impending death, he began to dabble around the edges of gay activism. This lead to a life of commitments to numerous political campaigns, charities, and volunteer experiences that would come to define him for many people. His first major contribution came in 1987, just a few years out of college, when he Co-Chaired the Chicago/Illinois Contingent to the National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights. It proved to be a prophetic turn for him because it not only placed him squarely on the slate of up-and-coming Chicago LGBT leaders of the time, but his presence at the March allowed him to be among the first people to see the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. It was while on the Quilt for the first time that he conceived of the Legacy Project [3].

TO THE PRESENT

The years that followed were full ones – beginning with early forays into electoral politics, then into various LGBT political activities balanced against a concerted interest in AIDS-related activism, followed by work in support of LGBT businesses and a weekly "perspective" column featured in the LGBT press. But throughout all the intervening years the concept of the Legacy Project and how it could be made manifest as a physical exhibit was never far from his mind [4].

In 1998 Victor was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame [5]. It was a celebration that included many family and friends, one that became a turning point for him in many ways. Shortly after being inducted, forced to recognize that his family had joined his many friends to celebrate his achievements, things began to fall apart for him psychologically and emotionally. One month after his induction he suffered a nervous breakdown. In spite of decades of achievements and accolades it was ultimately his inability to reconcile his family's support for his successes (as an openly gay man) with the hidden darkness of his own self-loathing that trumped what should have been a triumphant moment. The demons first thrust into him in grade school, the messages that he was damned, that he could not achieve, that he could never – MUST never – know success – that his family would never ever celebrate his life if he came out of the closet – all came crashing down upon him as though the laws of physics had suddenly changed. The fragile underpinnings of his self-esteem were knocked out from beneath him when it became clear that all the lies that had filled him with such darkness, that all the messages of self-hatred he had told himself were simply, utterly, untrue. Thus began a long journey of healing that continues.

Ironically, in that same personal watershed year for Victor – 1998 – the Northalsted Streetscape was dedicated in Chicago featuring twenty (20) "Rainbow Pylons" that designated the area as the nexus of the Chicago's LGBT community. A year later, while reading a TIME Magazine Special Issue about the Top 100 Scientists of the 20th-Century, Victor happened upon the story of gay British mathematician, Alan Turing, whose successful work to crack the Nazi's "Enigma Code" during World War II eventually brought down Adolph Hitler, earning Turing his now-commonly accepted nickname "The Father of Computer Science." Turing was arrested for admitting to having had a sexual liaison with another man, for which he was sentenced to chemical castration. Two weeks before his 42nd Birthday, he bit into an apple he had laced with cyanide and ended his life.

The realization that Turing had been a gay man who had altered the course of history – yet was forgotten by history after killing himself to end his torment – stopped Victor in his tracks. All he could think of was that he had been inducted into a hall of fame and here was a man – Turing – whom nobody knew anything about. The realization was shocking and humbling. What little personal self-satisfaction he had been able to eek from his own 1998 induction was shattered by the overwhelming sense that it was Alan Turing – not Victor Salvo – that should be in a hall of fame. In that instant the creation of the Legacy Walk went from being a pipe dream to becoming an obsession – and Victor's commitment to doing something with his life that truly mattered finally trumped his decades-long preoccupation with ending it.

Salvo’s reaction to Turing’s story coincided with the realization that the Legacy Walk – a concept that had never found a home – could be housed on the Rainbow Pylon streetscape of North Halsted Street. In late 1999 Salvo contacted friend and mentor Art Johnston to discuss his idea. A brunch was arranged with Johnston and acclaimed LGBT History scholar Dr. George Chauncey, who was at that time at the University of Chicago. Salvo was advised to educate himself about the subject matter of LGBT contributions to history, because he would need to be more than a cheerleader for the project if he expected to be taken seriously by the academics whose support would be needed to ensure the integrity of any LGBT history installation not aligned with a major academic institution or cultural center – especially an audacious and permanent outdoor exhibit without precedent.

Victor spent the next ten years reading thousands of pages of LGBT history to learn all he could about a subject in which he was by no means an expert, no matter the depth of his passion. He began to compile biographical data from dozens of books, bookmarking stories he thought would be compelling for LGBT youth to learn. Many of the people were famous, but most were extremely obscure. He chronicled the experience of searching for answers in an expansive article (Dead Ends and Discoveries: The Search for Our LGBT Ancestors) that has captured, for many, the essence of what it feels like to try and research LGBT contributions from outside of academic circles – especially when so many of those contributions have been redacted from conventional history tomes.

THE LEGACY WALK

After decades of quietly working on the Legacy Project as a private interest, he decided to reveal his plans. In 2009 he began laying the groundwork for the corporation that would oversee creation of the Legacy Walk. After his proposal was conditionally approved by the Northalsted Business Alliance (NBA) in the spring of 2010, he embarked on six months of intensive interviews with over 100 business and community leaders, academics, elected officials, and funders. He returned to the NBA in October 2010 with over 50 letters of endorsement from a spectrum of stakeholders including the Governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, and the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. His proposal was approved by the NBA with the caveat that the City of Chicago needed to fully sign-off on the process. Confidant that an agreement would be reached eventually, Salvo and two activist friends – Lori Cannon and Owen Keehnen, whose support he had enlisted to help launch the Legacy Project – went to the media to announce their plans for the world’s first outdoor LGBT museum. The first articles began to appear in mid-October of 2010.

Two long years of planning, research, relationship building, legal wrangling, website development, multimedia creation and fundraising followed, leading up to the long-awaited October 11, 2012 Dedication of the Legacy Walk – 25 years to the day it was first inspired. The inaugural dedication featured eighteen (18) bronze memorials celebrating British dramatist Oscar Wilde; Puerto Rican educator Dr. Antonia Pantoja; Two Spirit People; modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey; activist Barbara Gittings; military hero Sgt. Leonard Matlovich; Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas; British mathematician Alan Turing; transgender activist Christine Jorgensen; sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey; civil rights mentor Bayard Rustin; artist Keith Haring; patriotic icon Dr. Margaret Chung; murdered San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk; Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan; Mexican artist Frida Kahlo; social justice pioneer Jane Addams; and renowned author James Baldwin.

Phase II of the Legacy Walk was dedicated one year later on October 11, 2013. The five new plaques added included playwright Lorraine Hansberry; senior activist Ruth Ellis; LGBT Rights pioneer Frank Kameny; poet Walt Whitman; and founder of the Gay Games Dr. Tom Waddell. Phase III of the Legacy Walk, dedicated on October 11, 2014, added poet Audre Lorde; composer Cole Porter; Olympian Babe Didrikson; Fr. Mychal Judge; astronaut Dr. Sally Ride; slain Ugandan activist David Kato Kisule; and a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots. Presently thirty (30) bronze memorial markers make up the half-mile installation.

THE LEGACY PROJECT EDUCATION INITIATIVE (LPEI)

The bronze plaques on the Legacy Walk are supplemented by LPEI education materials consisting of lesson plans, study guides, reading resources and links, and multimedia. The LPEI program, which was inaugurated in April of 2013, is co-sponsored by Illinois Safe Schools Alliance. Both organizations work to bring high school GSAs to the streetscape to participate in guided tours and day-long symposia about the contributions of LGBT people to world history and culture. The program is also sought out by the education departments of several local colleges and universities who bring pre-service teachers specializing in special education and early childhood development through a rotation to be exposed to one of the only programs offering age-appropriate materials for teenagers. The program is a central component of a comprehensive approach to anti-bullying that uses LGBT contributions to history to counter the ignorance that fuels intolerance.

CONCLUSION

LGBT people have created and inspired magnificent art and sculpture; served with distinction in the military; discovered technological breakthroughs; penned renowned literature and music; started charitable foundations, won Olympic Gold Medals and helped shape world-diplomacy. The bronze memorials of the Legacy Walk ensure these contributions will never again be forgotten. This ongoing, dynamic exhibit continues grow annually, ensuring there will always be new “classes” of individuals whose contributions will live on for future generations to see. The LPEI program, the multicultural database, and the Legacy Walk itself – all facets of the Legacy Project – are the fulfillment of Victor Salvo's life-long dream to make sure that young LGBT people will never again feel isolated and untethered and unimportant; and that they come to know that LGBT matter – and have always mattered – even if no one has ever bothered to tell them. For it is only by making sure that our young people can embrace their amazing past that they can be assured of knowing they, too, will have a future.

To contribute to the work of The Legacy Project click here. You can contact The Legacy Project at info@legacyprojectchicago.org.