a texas lawmaker tweeted about a university's gay history archive on friday. by saturday its webpage was gone, and he says the archive is next.

via the Dallas Observer, The Dallas Morning News, Chron and the Dallas Voice.

It took the University of North Texas about a day. On Friday morning, state Rep. Brian Harrison, a Republican from Midlothian, posted screenshots of the landing page for UNT's LGBTQ archive and wrote that "THE TEXAS GOVERNMENT CONTINUES PROMOTING TRANSGENDERISM!!!" By Saturday the page returned an error, and Harrison was posting the screenshot of that too. As the Dallas Observer reported, Harrison himself then pointed out that the error page briefly told visitors the page "doesn't exit." It has since been fixed. The archive's webpage has not.

What actually disappeared is a web page. The archive itself, begun in 2012 with a collection from Dallas's Resource Center and built with groups like The Dallas Way, is still there: flyers, newspapers, photographs, more than 15,000 items by the count on a separate UNT page that is still up. Chron checked archived versions of the site and the library database and found that only the page Harrison had screenshotted was removed.

Harrison is not pretending that is the goal. His Saturday post said UNT "must end the program, not just a website." He told the Morning News on Tuesday, "It needs to be gone." In a statement to both the Observer and Chron, he offered the rest of us a compromise: "If someone wants to study transgender literature, fine, but do it with your own damn money."

This is the same playbook that, per Chron, got a Texas A&M professor fired last year and ended with the university's president, Mark A. Welsh III, resigning. It is also a close cousin of the Texas city that killed a church's Pride festival without saying why. UNT has not answered any outlet's questions about why the page came down.

Steve Atkinson, president of The Dallas Way, pointed out to the Observer that UNT also keeps a Methodist collection, and nobody thinks it is trying to turn people Methodist. "It's absolutely craziness for the state rep or anyone else to say that our history shouldn't be there," he said.