Author: HS

This picture was taken by a friend of mine and is of me at Pride in NYC in 2016.  Pride is one of the most important events for the LGBTQ+ community. I found this image to be interesting because it shows a topic/an event that has directly impacted my life. Being able to attend pride has made me so much more proud of who I am and of my community.

For my fourth instagram post, I used an image of George W. Bush from Queer Zines 2 in which he is photoshopped onto a body receiving BDSM type actions.  I find this image to be interesting because it goes against everything Bush thinks about marriage and sexuality, as is described in the quote I used in the post.

This image is a drawing from Queer Zines 2. It is of a penis being turned into a clown through the pubic hair and testicles. I find this image to be interesting because it makes its subject lighthearted. We often think of sexuality and nudity and penises to be so serious or bad. This drawing completely changes this norm and makes fun of our seriousness about its subject.

I learned many things from the film Major!—it was filled with information that I was previously unaware of. The biggest takeaway of the film for me was the information about the treatment of trans people in prison. My only previous knowledge of this topic came from Orange Is the New Black, which is obviously not an entirely accurate source or a good source. Learning about this topic was more sad than surprising. It was crazy to me that there are transgender women who have spent many months in solitary confinement when the maximum time spent there is supposed to be less than fifty days. The film left me wondering about the treatment of transgender people, mostly transgender women of color, in prison and about social action in general. There was a great point brought up by Major in which she stated that while places like San Francisco have laws to protect trans individuals, they are not always enforced.  She then said that there needed to be fines for police and other things implemented so that the laws are actually followed. This made me wonder why people always aim for laws before all else if they are not necessarily effective. Is it because they are the best way to initiate change? Or is it something else?

I selected the following image from the AIDS Poster Collection because I found it to have an intense shock value. The message that this poster sends is essentially that by not wearing a condom because you are so eager to have sex with a cute boy, you will die of HIV/AIDS. This message is incredibly crazy, which is why I chose it. To me, it is unbelievable that this message would be publically broadcasted. This relates to the idea of heteronormativity that we have talked about in class. Given that heterosexual sex and relationships are the norm, it is probably never stated that you can die from having straight sex. This poster is saying that you will die from having unprotected gay sex, which shows gayness as being far form the norm.

This image came from our visit to special collections. It is a picture of an advertisement from the New Women’s Times newspaper, which was published in Rochester beginning in the 1980s . This specific image is from the January 1982 edition of the newspaper. This image is interesting to me because it represents the social issue of women’s imprisonment, and more specifically the ways in which women of color and minority experiences are treated especially negatively in prisons. We have just read the Combahee River Collective Statement and this advertisement reminded me of some of the themes brought up in that reading.

One object that stood out to me was the first edition of The Empty Closet from 1971. This item stood out to me because it related directly to the documentary, Shoulders to Stand On, that we watched in class. It also stood out to me because it was written by the University of Rochester Gay Liberation Front which consisted of UofR students who attended in January 1971. The authors of this object were people directly in my shoes, which made it stand out to me. The inclusion of this object in a public exhibition would be extremely important to campus communities because it allows for students to see the direct impact that their university had on the gay rights movement. To me, it was surprising to hear that Rochester, and more specifically the university, played such a role in the early days of the gay rights movement. Seeing this object on display can inform people of the important history of the university they attend.

In my everyday life I experience a lack of inclusion that has left me unsatisfied in the University of Rochester Greek life. I feel that Greek life consists of mostly white, straight, and cisgender people. Though I am white and cisgender, I am not straight and often feel left-out in this regard. However, I feel that Greek life poses more problems to many other people, especially people of color. I have had friends express to me that they feel that Greek life is not a safe-space for them and that they don’t belong in Greek life. I even had a member of my sorority who lives on the sorority floor with me receive hate messages outside of her door. I wish that the UofR would do something to make Greek life more inclusive, but also feel that something needs to be done on a national level to even make inclusion in Greek life somewhat possible.

Though I grew up in New York City, am a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and have attended many pride parades right near the Stonewall Inn, I knew absolutely nothing about the Stonewall rebellion before today. However, what surprised me the most is that the Stonewall rebellion is considered to be a divisive event. According to Rebecca Vipond Brink, Stonewall has a “very divisive legacy […] in the LGBT community” because the “drag queens and transpeople […] on the front lines of the rebellion” are often forgotten about (Brink 2014). I didn’t even know that the events that occurred at Stonewall involved trans people, let alone that Stonewall is a divisive event for the lack of representation of these people. The significance of this fact for contemporary LGBTQ organizing is that it has likely caused the continued repression and lack of inclusion of trans people. In modern America, it seems to be that more progress is being made for gay rights than for trans rights- which is probably partially a result of the treatment of trans people in regards to Stonewall.

Prior to this class, I knew nothing about Marsha Johnson or Sylvia Rivera. Marsha Johnson has always been a familiar name, but I am unsure why. Marsha P. Johnson was a drag-queen and activist for the American LGBTQ+ movement. Johnson worked as an activist through a group called STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), which was “a multi-racial group of revolutionary street queens” (Nothing 5). According to author Ehn Nothing, Johnson, along with Rivera, “were not respectable queers” and were “poor, gender-variant women of color, street-based sex workers” (Nothing 6). Throughout her work with STAR, Johnson worked to provide housing, food, protection from police, and basic human rights to people living on the street. Johnson was sent to prison for her actions, where “A lot of transvestites were fighting amongst each other” (Johnson 21). After a pride parade in 1992, Marsha was found dead. Her “death was ruled a suicide by the police, while a vigilante campaign found that it was likelier murder” (Brink 2014).

This image is of a gay couple from the University of Rochester drinking milkshakes after the launch of the Empty Closet newspaper. This image is interesting for me because it not only portrays topics covered in class, but also takes place at our school. I love that I can see people who represent the Shoulders to Stand On documentary and further that I can see how my school has played a role in the Gay Right’s movement.

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.