(gentle music) - Clement Haupers was the director of a WPA art project, a mural project.

He coordinated a lot of Works Progress Administration art projects throughout the state of Minnesota.

Haupers is fascinating because this is a person who rejected any kind of identity.

I mean, it would be close to impossible to use any word but queer in a modern sense to describe him, because he did have a long lasting relationship with a woman, but he was well known to have relationships with men as well.

- Clement could never, in the 1930s, had been openly gay in Minnesota, but he could in Mexico.

So his lover was down in Mexico and he painted a picture, and supposedly that picture hung in his entryway to his home, his hallway, all of his life.

- Haupers' experience tells us that there were people who lived in both of these worlds.

There were people who lived in queer worlds and straight worlds in ways that suggested that there were no firm boundaries between these things.

Today, these boundaries are pretty well policed.

I mean, you know that there's these stark divides between what is LGBT and what is straight.

Even within LGBT, we get very granular in our details about who is what.

- One of the interesting things has always been, and it still happens today, the gender of your partner determines your sexual identity.

And it also assumes that you don't have any identity when you're not in relationship.

Or what if you are a polyamorous person and you have more than one gender as partners?

So it doesn't work.

- And there are folks who are trying to break that up and who are trying to mix it all together now, but that was pretty predominant in this time period, and Haupers is a person who I think really illustrates that.

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