The Henry Sheldon Museum invites you to our 2025 Annual Meeting at the Middlebury Inn. Hear updates from the staff and trustees, including the Museum’s new mission and vision, informed by our Shape the Sheldon community engagement series.

Following Museum business, Meg Tamulonis will present Pride 1983, a talk exploring the lasting legacies of Vermont’s first Pride celebration on June 25, 1982. The program will continue with a discussion led by HSM Mellon Public History Fellow Allison Cardon, featuring Joseph Watson, Bill Lippert and Cathy Resmer, each working to uncover, care for, and share Vermont’s LGBTQ+ histories and stories.

Light refreshments will be provided. All are welcome to attend. Current HSM members are invited to vote on board business.

Guest Speakers:

Meg Tamulonis is the volunteer curator of the Vermont Queer Archives. Her day job is Manager of Collections & Exhibitions at the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont. 

 Joseph Watson has been active in the queer community in Vermont since 1992 when he became a volunteer for Out in the Mountains, Vermont's statewide queer newspaper.  He served on the board of directors of the Vermont Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights from 1993-1996, and was among the founders of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force in 1996, working with that organization through 2010.  He's worked for the Middlebury College Libraries since 1993, first as Bindery Supervisor, then as Preservation Manager, and for the past ten years as a Special Collections Associate

Bill Lippert has lived as an openly gay man and activist since moving to Vermont in 1972. Lippert worked as a psychotherapist, and later, Executive Director, at the Counseling Service of Addison County, from 1973-1996, until serving in the Vermont House of Representatives, representing Hinesburg, from 1994-2023, and was Executive Director of the Samara Foundation of Vermont. Lippert participated in Vermont’s first Gay Pride in 1983, was on the founding board of Outright Vermont in 1989, and founded the Samara Foundation of Vermont in 1992, Vermont’s LGBTQ community foundation (now the Samara Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation). In the legislature Lippert was instrumental in crafting and passing Civil Unions in 2000, Gender Identity Non-discrimination in 2006-07, and was Chair of the House Judiciary Committee when full Marriage Equality was enacted in 2009. Lippert is passionate about documenting and preserving Vermont LGBTQ History. He is married to his partner of 36 years, Enrique Peredo.

Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at Seven Days as a freelance writer in 2001 and still has the Rolodex to prove it. As the paper’s first online editor, she launched Seven Days email newsletters and started the paper’s first social media accounts. Cathy has overseen Kids VT, Vermont’s parenting magazine, since Seven Days purchased it in 2010. She’s also an organizer of the annual Vermont Tech Jam and the creator of the Good Citizen Challenge, a civics and news literacy project for K-8 students. Cathy received the 2019 C. Harry Behney Economic Development Achievement Award along with the Seven Days publisher team. She helped found the Vermont Queer Archives, now housed at the Pride Center of VT. She lives in Winooski, VT., with her wife and their two kids.