An MTSU graduate student is venturing into a largely unexplored area of history — that of American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths — on a recent edition of the “MTSU On the Record” radio program.

Host Gina Logue’s interview with master’s degree candidate Nikita Shepard first aired Aug. 29 on WMOT-FM Roots Radio 89.5 and www.wmot.org. You can listen to audio of their full conversation above or a brief video excerpt below.

Shepard, a history major, is the inaugural recipient of the Don Kelly Collection Fellowship, an honor that offered a stipend and an opportunity to spend part of the summer conducting research at Texas A&M University. Shepard’s topic was the history of American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths.

MTSU graduate student NIkita Shepard smiles while reviewing historic LGBTQ newspapers in the Don Kelly Research Collection of Gay Literature and Culture at Texas A&M University this summer. Shepard is the first recipient of Texas A&M’s Don Kelly Collection Fellowship, which funded the research using the collection. (Photo courtesy of Texas A&M)

The collection includes more than 13,000 items, including first-edition publications, author-signed books, pulp novels and community newspapers, as well as other artifacts.

“LGBT activity as sort of an activist endeavor emerged in the 1970s,” said Shepard.

“While some people who were professors or academics were involved, a lot of people were just community researchers, people who would, after they got off work, spend long nights in the library, digging through archives and trying to find evidence.”

On July 10, Shepard shared portions of the research in a presentation at Texas A&M titled “We’re Here, We’re Queer and Our Parents Think We’re Studying.”

To hear previous “MTSU On the Record” programs, visit the searchable “Audio Clips” archives at www.mtsunews.com.

For more information about “MTSU On the Record,” contact Logue at 615-898-5081 or WMOT-FM at 615-898-2800.