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