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.