From his office at the State House, Baker began the speech by acknowledging the damage of, and lives lost to, COVID-19 — what he called “the worst public health crisis of the last 100 years.”

Professors and students filled the George Sherman Union’s Conference Auditorium to embrace poetry and participate in the Favorite Poem Project. The project has been running for two decades now, encouraging more Americans to embrace the “vocal art.”

Walking along a path in Boston Common across from the Massachusetts State House, there are no visible remnants of Boston’s LGBT history. However, this was the very path where about 155 years ago, transcendentalist...