LGBTQ Experiences in US History

Hello All! For my Gender and Women’s studies class, LGBTQ Experiences U.S. History, I am doing a post. This is a newspaper advertisement from the gay newspaper, The Empty Closet. The advertisement is for a prom at the Hilton Inn, and featured a live band, prizes, and a cash bar. The 3rd Annual Gay Prom was a semi- formal or formal event, and was a way for LGBTQ people to get together. I find this interesting because it was a way for people to meet and enjoy an event that they would have otherwise been excluded from. #LGBTQ #LGBTQexperiencesUSA #gay #pride

For my #lgbtqexperiencesusaclass, I am making a few posts about materials relevant to queer history and theory.

Harris’s book Queer Externalities examines how queer #representation in mainstream media (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will & Grace, Brokeback Mountain, etc.) may actually have harmful side effects on the #queer community. Mistaking acknowledgement by corporations for actual #equality, he says, only reinforces #homonormativity and political apathy due to a belief that we are better off than we really are. I found it surprising to see a criticism of queer representation, considering how little there already is, but I can’t disagree with the effects he discusses, provided his criticism is of how representation is done and how people respond to it, not of the fact of representation itself.

Harris, W.C. Queer Externalities: Hazardous Encounters in American Culture. SUNY Press, 2009.

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The reason that I chose this images is because it shows the statistics of LGBTQ+ youth and the leading causes of homelessness in our society. The chart shows the break down between LGBTQ as well as Transgender youth more specifically. I found this chart to be relevant to this class because the historical movement of the LGBTQ, purposely excluded trans individuals. I do, however,  wish that this chart showed stats from cisgender youth as a means to compare even further. Regardless, I feel that this chart is useful in identifying key issues within our communities.

#https://truecolorsfund.org/our-issue/

The images shown above are small corners of a quilt that was apart of the “NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt” which was displayed at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY in 1994. The AIDS epidemic began in 1981 and so far about 675,000 people have died in the United States alone from an AIDS related illness. The reason why this project is relevant to the class is because homosexual and bisexual males are the most affected by this disease. This image is interesting to me because it shows how large of an epidemic AIDS was, and how it not only affected the LGBT community, but also the many heterosexual people who knew someone affected by AIDS.

Information from:

HIV.gov.com

Avert.org

Rochester.edu

~BZ

Although my social media post was on the same topic, I feel it is useful to mention, again, the journal entries from UR graduate student Jay T. Stratton. He provides insight into the coming out experience as a student at our own university. In his journals he mentions how attending a meeting at the Gay Liberation Front was one of the pivotal moments for him to feel accepted in a community with little representation elsewhere. With this, he specifically described an encounter where he was answering phones at the GLF office. In this memory, he recalls how nervous he was that someone, not unlike himself, would call asking for help that he felt unsuited to provide. His premonition was correct, as another student did call, and as his story unfolds, Stratton reveals to us that he and this other student helped each other more in there few-minute conversation than any other experience he had had leading up to this point. As a reader of this experience, a student in this class, a member of the Rochester community, I could only hope that our cultivated exhibition could do the same for someone else.

Entirely unrelated to the class visit to Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, I have thought frequently about the inherent exclusivity of my major, English Literature. The canonical works read in classes like British and American literature are almost entirely works written by cis white men. This, however, is neither a reflection on the professors teaching the courses nor is it a reflection on those who study these texts, but it is a reflection on the accessibility to education and publication in the 17^th through 19^th centuries (and also to periods before and after those just mentioned). While there are plenty of examples of iconic works written by women and people of color, there is a much greater focus on cis white men, especially in the way literature survey courses are structured. Frequently, and unfortunately, in order to study outside the white male writers, it is necessary to take a course explicitly designed to focus on people who are not cis, straight, white men.

-MF

This image is the first page of an excerpt from Jay T. Stratton’s journal, a graduate student at the University from 1974-1980. He begins his journal with a fabricated phone conversation about how he would try to come out to a “straight friend that [he] was falling in love with.” The entry continues by explaining that his coming out experience is more of a “declosetization” because many people in his life knew he was gay, and many others suspected it. Later on in the entry he explains that his primary motivation for coming out was that he “realized that not being gay was messing up [his] life far more than being gay could.” Throughout the following entries, the reader is given a more intimate look into a Rochester student’s coming out experience in the 70’s and 80’s.

#lgbtqexperiencesusa  #comingout  #glf  #gayliberationfront

[Image courtesy of UR’s River Campus Libraries Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation]

-MF

AIDS Memorial Quilt

When our class visited the Special Collections, I was placed with my partner at the table for AIDS and AIDS Remembrance. Of the pieces at the table, the most impactful was the Rochester portion of the AIDS Memorial Quilt for the Names Project. The Names Project was a grassroots community artwork where people or communities could submit quilts honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. Rochester has a portion that was made in 1994, and we began to read all of the notes left on the quilt. While some wrote very general responses wishing those we lost eternal peace, others were more direct in referencing specific individuals and the memories associated with them. I quite honestly started to cry seeing some of the responses. One response left by a father telling his son that he will always love him even if he can no longer see him. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was actually on display at the University of Rochester before in April 1994 (http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/aids-remembrance-quilt-resurfaces-after-nearly-23-years-in-basement-219662/), and I believe that the sense of community created by this exhibition is incredibly useful to inspire and enact change. Once you are able to physically see the lives that were affected by AIDS, maybe it would push people to be more open to erasing the stigma around the disease and to fight for a cure.

Inclusion on Campus

While being here at the UofR, I have been exposed to people of many different and unique backgrounds, significantly more than back home in Tennessee. As a first-year, I initially thought that everyone was proportionately represented, but as I grew older and more involved, I realized that I was viewing society here through rose-tinted glasses. From a perspective at the beginning of my college career, I noticed that lack of minority and POC representation in PRIDE network, but since that has improved drastically to a truly inclusive organization. Outside of organizations, I have been in groups of protests and organizing efforts to change the campus climate, and unsurprisingly, these groups have lacked minority and POC inclusion. For instance, I was with the team that organized the push against the university when it came to the Jaeger case, and there was a severe shortage of minority voices in that group when it came to people of color. The issue is that sexual assault is blind to who you are and how you identify. It can happen to anyone, so the scarcity of inclusion of their voices led to a skewed reality of the issue. Luckily, there was a movement within the group once we recognized the flaws, but it unfortunately came too late in the process. The group fell apart. I think this issue occurs a lot to groups where there is a lack of self and group awareness. Those who identify with at least part of a majority identity are unaware of their comfortable nature of being surrounded by like-people, and continue to be blinded from seeking well- rounded representation.

I had known that the police raids leading up to the Stonewall rebellion had been going on repeatedly at all sorts of queer venues before the actual rebellion, but I was surprised to hear that during the raids, the police separated people into three separate groups of “Faggots here, dykes here, and freaks over there” (“Bitch on Wheels,” 32, in STAR). My surprise was not because I didn’t expect such a separation, but that I didn’t expect this perception to have gone back that far. It is still a current issue that people try to group trans people (more specifically binary trans people) away from (cis) men and women, even when they’re trying to be inclusive of trans people in general. I remember, for example, hearing about Joel Seligman using the phrase “men, women, and trans people” at one town hall, and he was fiercely criticized for it since it implied that binary trans people were somehow “other than” men or women. I wouldn’t be surprised if this structuring somehow relates back to the mindsets of the police back then.

Prior to this class, most of what I had known about Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera was that they considered themselves drag queens (although they were more likely trans women of color in today’s language), that they played a significant role in leading the Stonewall rebellion, and that they have been consistently written out of the picture in favor of stories of non-existent cis white homonormative men. I had also heard that there was a third usually grouped with them, but I cannot remember their name.

Sylvia Rivera was born into a troubled household. At the age of three, her mother committed suicide and tried to kill her as well to escape her drug-dealer husband, and Sylvia was sent off to live with her unloving grandmother. At the age of 10, she left her home and went to 42nd Street, already having gotten involved in sex work. Like most of the drag queens there, she was accustomed to the police harassment, but she managed to avoid actual prostitution charges (“Queens in Exile,” in STAR). It is often believed that at the Stonewall, she threw the first bottle sparking the riots (“The Soapbox”), but she says she only threw the second, and said, “Oh my god, the revolution is finally here!” after it was thrown (“Every Destructive Thing,” “Bitch on Wheels,” in STAR). After that, she continued participating in riots and other activist work, and she and Marsha P. Johnson soon founded STAR, and organization which sought to provide housing, food, bail money, and legal help for trans and other queer people who needed it.

SB