While watching the documentary “Shoulders to Stand on,” I learned how important the University of Rochester was to, not only to the LGBT community in Rochester, New York but also to the rest of the country. The documentary was an overall history of Rochester’s LGBT movement. In one part of the documentary, it talks about how the Todd Union building on campus was used for the University of Rochester Gay Liberation Front meetings. These meetings had many LGBTQ people from the all over the city of Rochester come together to try to find ways to decriminalize being gay, both politically and socially. A newspaper called “The Empty Closet” was also started as a source of information for many gay people, which included coming-out stories, health information, and news about the gay liberation movement. A radio show called “Lesbian Nation” aimed to reduce the isolation of gay people by allowing those who were either questioning their sexuality or not comfortable and “out of the closet” yet, to have access to hearing the gay radio program and helped them to know that there are other people like them all around the country.
“‘Perversity to Diversity’ Exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” was an article written by Susan Jordan and Michele Moore. The article explained how the on-campus gay art exhibit was shocking to most students and incredibly controversial. The research that I did to track down the date of when the article was written, was found by searching “University of Rochester Perversity to Diversity exhibit” in Google. The first thing to come up were those words in a section of a book (page 93) titled “Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates” by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips. The line that helped me track down the date was when the author said “A few weeks before writing this…”, which I believe she was referring to the writing the book, so I looked to see when the book was published. It was published in 1992, so I assumed that exhibit must have come out in 1991, and that must have been when the “‘Perversity to Diversity’ Exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” article was written.
“Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates” by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips can be found at the following link:
https://books.google.com/booksid=NgGRGDxEdNoC&pg=PA93&dq=University+of+Rochester+Preversity+to+Diversity+exhibit&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjx9rqg9unYAhWnRt8KHdHCBL8Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=University%20of%20Rochester%20Preversity%20to%20Diversity%20exhibit&f=false
~BZ