Day: January 23, 2018

What struck me most about the portion of “Shoulders to Stand On” that we watched in class was profundity of the loneliness that so many of the interviewees discussed.  To suppress one’s self in most (if not all) interactions is a heavy burden to carry alone. Not knowing if you’re safe around even the people close to you, and relying on hints and a loose collection of coded phrases to connect with people like yourself is an incredibly stressful way to live. There are many reasons to form LGBTQ groups, from education to activism. But perhaps the most important reason, especially before the widespread use of the internet, is simply for community, for knowing that at the very least there is someone else who understands. While the Rochester Gay Liberation Front was of course an activist group, its function as a space for LGBTQ people to meet in relative safety led to social connections that were (are) crucial not only for organizational purposes, but for the general well-being of its members. In an environment or society where one’s anonymity or closetedness can mean the difference between life and death, knowing that there are others in your community, or on the airwaves of your local radio station, that feel the same things you do, and aren’t ashamed of who they are, can mean everything. Inspiration and necessity go hand-in-hand in rights movements. It is these human connections, this solidarity, that makes change possible.

The article “‘Perversity to Diversity’ exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” was published in the April 1991 edition of The Empty Closet. I found this information by visiting rochester.edu and searching for the title of the article, which directed me to a PDF with the month and year of the publication in its title.

“Shoulders to Stand On”

What I was shocked to learn about was the way that the University of Rochester was so central to the gay liberation front. It made sense hearing about the ways that the city of Rochester was instrumental to the movement, but I did not expect that our university made a notable contribution to the crusade. I was also shocked to hear that the buildings I frequent actually held historical significance, and played roles in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer liberation movement. From the meetings held in Todd Union to the Gay Festival and Dance in Frederick Douglass, the campus of the University of Rochester helped the movement grow and spread.

“Perversity to Diversity”

The first thing I did was google search “perversity to diversity the university of rochester”, and while my search turned up texts referencing the exhibit and the reactions from the public to the exhibit, I could not find the date of the article. I also tried googling the name of the author of the article, Susan Jordan, but nothing turned up. I then went to the University of Rochester library page, “River Campus Libraries”, and searched up the first line from the article by Michele Moore. I looked up “In late March my friend Ann Burlingham and I went to see the exhibit of gay and lesbian graphics” in the search bar, and I was faced with two articles, one from November 1995 and another from April 1991. Both articles were archived copies of the newspaper, Empty Closet. Empty Closet is a gay newspaper that originated at the University of Rochester. I clicked on the first article and searched for “perversity”, which is when I came upon the article. The copy of the article that we were given in class was published in April 1991.

https://digitalcollections.lib.rochester.edu/islandora/object/ur:5632

This is the link to the newspaper.

-ML

Shoulders to Stand On

When I moved to Rochester in 2014, I vaguely remember hearing about the historical presence of the LGBT+ community, but I never inquire more into the claim. Shoulders to Stand On was actually a very enlightening work that helped me understand more about the LGBT+ community here.  The information given about Front Street is particularly interesting because it compared the street to the likes to Bowery of New York City.  After living here for almost four years (with a semester of living in New York City), I haven’t seen anything in the community that has resonated NYC LGBT+ culture. The fact that it was eventually obliterated from the city speaks to the societal pressures placed on the LGBT+ culture. I also was amazed and somewhat proud of the University of Rochester’s role in welcoming gay and lesbian students. Much of the foundation for the Out Alliance, formally known as the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, began on our campus with the Gay Liberation Front.

“Perversity to Diversity”

In “Perversity to Diversity”, Susan Jordan objectively describes a controversial exhibit held in Rush Rhees Library from February 24th to March 27th. There is also a piece by Michele Moore which is her personal experience as a queer woman at the exhibit. The exhibit apparently contained LGBT + paraphernalia deemed too explicit and “shocking”. From Moore’s piece, the most controversial aspect was the depiction of safe sex which included dental dams, rubber gloves, and dildos wrapped with condoms. The exhibit also had a wall which allowed guests to share their personal thoughts. Some of these thoughts were positively reinforcing the LGBT+ community while others were derogatory towards the community.

While it did not mention a year, I utilized the authors to find the resource from which this was published. After googling Susan Jordan, I discovered from the Out Alliance website that she became the editor of Empty Closet in 1989. The Out Alliance Website has archived editions of Empty Closet, so I took a chance and began going through scans of the articles. Since Susan Jordan became the editor in 1989, I began with that year to search for the right edition. Since it is a monthly, publication, I used context clues to help pinpoint the correct month. The two major clues were: “… the exhibit which opened at Rush Rhees Library on Feb. 24” and “The exhibit was scheduled to formally close on Mar. 27th”. From the clues, I searched months in proximity to after February and March due to the past tense. Lo and behold, the article was published on page one in April of 1991 .(http://www.lib.rochester.edu/IN/RBSCP/Databases/Attachments/Closet/1991/1991_APRIL.pdf)

Shoulders to Stand On

I found the film to be very intriguing. I did not know just how involved the students at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Community were within organizing for the Gay Rights Movement. It was surprising to see that most of the places where LGBTQ+ people would hangout in were owned my the mafia people here in Rochester. It makes it easier to understand why police would raid these places. Getting an explanation of the time period that the Gay Rights Movement started, helped to show why it was huge since their were other big movements going on as well. It was also interesting to see just how far the LGBTQ+ organizations of Rochester have come and everything that they have done for this community.  I remember going to the Picnic that was held during Rochester Pride and seeing just how packed GVP was and how everyone was having a great time! It really helped me to appreciate all of the work that people before us have put in to make this city more accepting.

 

Perversity to Diversity

Reading this article was very interesting as well. I was surprised by the kind of work that was being presented during the exhibit. I really connected to the section by Michele Moore, because of how she talked about seeing it as a safe space sine she was around all LGBTQ+ related work. It was a process though to try and out when the article was posted. I did a lot of simple google searching that led me to many interesting places. I learned a little more about how Pride Network was started and how the named has changed over time. I also found some interesting events that were held on campus involving LGBTQ+ Experiences such as the film screenings that they had for LGBTQ+ films which included “Head On,” “The Edge of Seventeen,” and “Skin Flick.” I ended up finding a site that had more information on Michele Moore such as that she was the Co-founder Rochester Bisexual Women’s Network (RBWN) from 1988-1991, because she talked about how the meetings for that group were a safe space for her. This is what narrowed down my time frame and then I saw that she talked about the Empty Closet and how she knew about the typeface that they used. So I figured that she must have been a writer for them during the time she was part of RBWN. I googled empty closet past issues and came across the archive of all of their previous articles and just focused on Feb-April articles form 1988-1991 since that is the time frame for the months that the exhibit was open. Overall, this really taught me more about some of the LGBTQ+ History that we have here in Rochester and I can’t wait to see what else I will learn!

Shoulders to Stand On is a documentary of a largely undocumented history of LGBTQ experiences and accomplishments in Rochester in the early 1970s. Beginning with the influence of the Stonewall Riots and the subsequent formation of The University of Rochester’s Gay Liberation Front, there is an emphasis on experiences within and around the University. The majority of this history was very much new to me, and watching traces of the LBGTQ community and its development on this campus four decades prior to my time here was really fulfilling. One especially meaningful part of this history I learned of was Gay Liberation Front’s development of the queer radio programs Lesbian Nation and Green Thursdays. Throughout the hosts’ discussions of their broadcasts, their primary emphasis of its importance was not its purpose as a creative outlet or a space for their personal experiences; it was providing something for lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth to feel less isolated and alone. Gay Liberation Front’s desire to positively affect others beyond their campus seems to have been clearly and significantly characteristic of the organization.

From Perversity to Diversity was an exhibit of gay, lesbian, and bisexual art, literature, and culture on display at The University of Rochester from late February to late March in 1991. The exhibit, described in the April 1991 edition of The Empty Closet, sparked considerable controversy because of the direct and explicit nature of some of the pieces on display, like a t-shirt of two women having oral sex. The exhibit also shed light on the disparity between straight and queer people’s ability to openly express themselves without fear, as well stated by Michele Moore in her article “Personal view: learning from a confrontation” in the same newspaper edition. The date of this newspaper edition — which I found by searching the title of the art exhibit in The University of Rochester library archives — is what led me to discern the date of the exhibit.

Shoulders to Stand On details much of the queer activist history in the city of Rochester, particularly the origins of the Gay Liberation Front at the University of Rochester, which eventually became Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, and their newsletter The Empty Closet, which is one of the oldest continuously-published LGBTQ+ newspapers in the world. The documentary briefly discussed queer life before Stonewall; apparently many of the gay bars were owned by straight people, with prohibitions on touching and involving much police intimidation and demanding of bribes. I suppose my impression had been that most queer spaces had existed only as underground establishments then, so I found it quite surprising that not only were such spaces out in the open, but straight people were involved in running them, even if only to express power.

The “Perversity to Diversity” exhibit, hosted in Rush Rhees Library, displayed several artifacts relating to queer history and activism, apparently strongly declaring the presence of queer students on the University of Rochester campus. The exhibit included several controversial pieces, including a T-shirt displaying lesbian oral sex, an ACT-UP poster comparing the homophobic New York Cardinal O’Connor with a condom, a dental dam, rubber gloves, and a condom-covered dildo. To find the year of the exhibit, I first set out to find the issue of the newspaper containing the articles about the exhibit. A search for Susan Jordan, the author of one of the columns, showed that she was (and is) closely involved with The Empty Closet, so that seemed like a likely source. To narrow down the years, I found on the River Campus Libraries AIDS Education Posters page that the ACT-UP poster was made in 1989. The article also mentioned the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Friends Association (GLBFA), which after a bit of searching I discovered was a later name for the Gay Liberation Front and an earlier name for Pride Network, the modern LGBTQ+ student organization at the University of Rochester. I found on an old U of R calendar of events page that by 2001, the name Pride Network was being used instead of GLBFA, so the columns had to have been written before then. Since the exhibit was held in March, it seemed reasonable that an article about it would be published soon after, perhaps between March and May. Searching through the Empty Closet archives for those months and years on the River Campus Libraries website, I soon found the columns in the April 1991 issue, and concluded that the exhibit was held in 1991.

SB

One piece of information that caught my attention in the film, “Shoulders to Stand On,” was just how monumental it was that the U of R held a dance for same-sex couples in the 1970s. One of the documentary’s interviewees explained that the event was “a big deal,” going on to explain that such an event couldn’t even have occurred in the gay bars of the city of Rochester, for fear that the police may have shown up. Although such a dance would today be seen by most as an innocuous campus event, at the time, it seems clear that the dance was extremely controversial.

I determined that the exhibit, “Perversity to Diversity,” occurred in 1991. I began by directly searching the title in Google. As I expected, nothing relevant appeared in the results. Next, because the writer of the article indicated working for the Empty Closet, I tried searching for all the past issues of the paper. This yielded a website containing an archive of all the past issues between 1971 and 2005. (http://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/EmptyCloset). I recognized that the layout and font of the articles in the mid 1980s and later matched that of the article in question, meaning that our reading was likely published in the Empty Closet.

In order to avoid searching through every single issue of the Empty Closet to find our assigned reading, I looked up the publication date of the “Know Your Scumbags” poster, which we know was stolen from the exhibit. After I went through a few pages which were unable to identify a year, I found one that revealed the publication year to be 1989. (https://aep.lib.rochester.edu/node/44142). I also determined that Cardinal O’Connor (the man in the aforementioned poster) died in 2000 via a quick Google search (http://www.ewtn.com/memoriam/oconnor/life/). Assuming the poster would only use Cardinal O’Connor if he were still alive, the article must have been published between 1989 and 2000.

Starting with the the issue of the Empty Closet in 1989, I searched through every month’s issue until I found the exact article we were assigned to read on the first page of the April 1991 edition (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/IN/RBSCP/Databases/Attachments/Closet/1991/1991_APRIL.pdf). It was only after my search that I realized there was a button on the Empty Closet’s historical issues page that allowed you to search the contents of the articles, which would have saved some time. Even so, both methods led to the same publication date: April 1991. Because the article was most likely written the same year as the exhibit (when it was most relevant), I would guess that the exhibit also occurred in 1991.

-AG

There were two things in the documentary Shoulders to Stand On that really stood out to me. The first is that the city of Rochester was one of the cities at the forefront of the gay rights movement that took place in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The Gay Liberation Front held events such as picnics and dances that provided a space for queer men and women to be themselves and to meet other people going through similar situations. Further, the city of Rochester public radio station also had what could have been the first station in the United States where both gay men and lesbian women could talk about and be public with their sexuality. The second thing that I learned from the documentary was that the University of Rochester was the place where the Gay Liberation Front started. The movement was started by University students and extended to the city community. I was happy to hear that, at least for the most part, the GLF had the support of the institution, allowing them to host meetings on campus and even a allowing them to host an on-campus dance. These two things made me proud to be a student at the University of Rochester and a citizen, at least for four years, of the city of Rochester.

 

I was able to find the date of the ‘Perversity to Diversity’ article fairly quickly with the help of Google. In order to filter out most of the searches I used quotations around the title to find web pages with the exact title as opposed to pages that contained the words in the title. With this result the first item that came up was a PDF titled “1991_APRIL,” a clear giveaway of the date the article was written. To confirm, I scrolled to the second page of the PDF where the date was inscribed at the top of the page. From the article itself I was able to pick up some clues about the date that it was published. The article mentions the AIDS epidemic and it shows how controversial contraception was at the time. In fact, the article mentions that some of the most controversial pieces in the art show contained “safe-sex paraphernalia.” With these clues, I probably could have deduced that the article was published in the 80’s or 90’s but it would have been difficult for me to pinpoint an exact date.

Shoulders to Stand On is a moving documentary focusing on the history of the queer community in Rochester. One of the topics discussed was the picnics hosted in Genesee Valley Park by the Gay Liberation Front, the foremost LGBTQ organization in the city at the time. Originally conceived as a meeting place for queer people, it quickly became a fundraiser, with an admission of $3 and subsidies from gay bars. Besides raising money, it was a land marker for the community because many queer people came into the open for the first time.
……

The “Perversity to Diversity” exhibit was on display in the Rush Rhees in March 1991. The first step I took in finding the date was to google the name of the article in quotations, to no avail. Then, I tried searching the Empty Closet issues on the rare books and special collections link on the library page on Blackboard, also without much luck. I thought perhaps I could find a time frame and look through the issues one at a time, so I googled “Perversity and Diversity University of Rochester.” The only useful information I found was references to the exhibit in two books, one published in 1992 and the other from 1996, so I knew the article was from before 1992. Ultimately, this information was unhelpful as I narrowed my search. Eventually, it occurred to me to search for mention of the exhibit in the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester’s local newspaper. I found an article published on March 27, 1991 which discussed the exhibit. I noted that March 27 matched the date that the exhibit was to close according to the article we were given. With that information, I used the brute force method to look through  Empty Closet issues from 1991. After trying February and March with no success, I discovered the article on the front page of the April 1991 edition of Empty Closet.

One thing I learned from Shoulders to Stand On is that Rochester was surprisingly relevant in the early days of LGBTQ+ movement. I wouldn’t have guessed that we had/have such a large queer community and that we were so involved in creating resources for queer people. I was especially interested in the radio show, Green Thursdays.

I think that the exhibit described in the article “‘Preversity to Diversity’ exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” is from 1991. I came to this conclusion through a few steps of research. First, it was clear that this article came from the University of Rochester’s the Empty Closet based on the content and what we had learned in class through the video we watched. So I Googled one of the authors, Susan Jordan, and her profile on Out Alliance said that she became the editor of the Empty Closet in 1989. This means that the article was likely written around that time. I then Googled the other author, Michele Moore. From this search, I got no results that provided me with useful information. My next step was to Google “perversity to diversity exhibit University of Rochester.” This yielded a result titled “Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian” which stated in the fourth chapter that the exhibit was from 1991. I then double-checked the information that I had discovered by clicking on the next link of the Google search results. This link was titled “Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates” and was from 1992. This solidified my belief that the exhibit was from 1991 because it makes sense that the author would have written an article about the exhibit in the following year.