Museum drag show spotlights Humboldt County's queer history

The Clarke Historical Museum turned Pride Month into a live history lesson Saturday, June 27, when Drag Me to the Museum brought five local drag queens, kings and monsters into the Emmerson/Victorian Room for performances, living histories and mini-exhibits on Humboldt County’s queer past. Performer Gliterous Cliterous was among the names on stage, giving the museum’s galleries a different kind of civic record than the one usually found in cases and labels.

The museum said the program paired drag with a set of historical displays that included a pop-up in the Emmerson/Victorian Room on drag in the Victorian era, framed around three drag queens and three drag kings from that period. A special Two-Spirit exhibit on loan from the Wiyot Cultural Center was part of the evening as well, along with photos and costumes on display. Local listings said the event ran from 6:30 to 9 p.m. and cost $40, with admission set at $30 for museum members and $30 for people in drag.

That mix of performance and archival material lands in a county where the paper trail for queer life is still thin. Humboldt Historian editor Charlie Hilton said most local history sources center LGBTQ+ organizations rather than individuals, which helps explain why a museum setting mattered so much. By putting drag inside a historical institution, the Clarke treated queer experience as something to document, interpret and place inside Humboldt County’s public memory, not as something peripheral to it.

The event also fit into a broader local network of queer institutions that already shape how history and identity are discussed here. Cal Poly Humboldt’s Eric Rofes Multicultural Queer Resource Center says it was established after Eric Rofes’ death and continues his organizing legacy around queer, anti-racist and feminist activism. Queer Humboldt describes itself as an anti-racist, anti-settler-colonialist resource center serving 2S/LGBTQIA+ people and groups in Humboldt County and Indigenous lands, and its North Coast Two-Spirit Project focuses on nourishing Two-Spirit leadership and Indigenous queer relatives on the northwest coast. At the Clarke, those threads came together in one room, with the museum’s exhibits, performers and attendees turning queer memory into something visible in Eureka and worth preserving across Humboldt County.