In watching the beginning of the documentary, Shoulders to Stand On, in class, I was able to gain a better understanding of the immediacy of Rochester’s involvement, as both the city and the University, in the start of the gay rights movement. I learned that the UR students’ creation of the Gay Liberation Front entirely reflected the already divided political atmosphere in the 1970s with the Vietnam War. This was further emphasized when an interviewee commented on the “combative language” with the use of the word “front” in the organization’s title. According to those interviewed, the fact that the movement happened in concurrence with the Vietnam war actually made their fight easier. I also learned additional ways in which Rochester was at the forefront of the movement, such that the country’s first openly gay radio show, “Green Thursdays,” and the oldest openly gay newspaper, “The Empty Closet,” began there.
In looking for the date for the University’s “From Perversity to Diversity” exhibit, I first googled, “Perversity to Diversity exhibit at the University of Rochester.” Initially, I found a book, Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being a Lesbian, by Biddy Martin, which was published in 1996. In the chapter mentioning the University’s exhibit, Martin said, “A few weeks before writing this I had the opportunity to see an exhibit entitled, ‘Perversity and Diversity’ on the campus of the University of Rochester.” With that statement in mind, and the knowledge that the book was published in 1996, I knew it was likely that the exhibit was available for viewing a few years prior to the publication of the book, but that wasn’t an exact date. Going back to my initial google search, I then found another link about an artist, Cindy Smith, who was the curator of the exhibit. In her website’s bio section, which details the many exhibitions she has created singularly and in groups, lectures she has given, awards and grants she has received, and exhibits she has curated, UR’s exhibit’s date was listed as February of 1991.
The link to Cindy Smith’s website is: http://www.cindysmith.org/bio/ (It’s necessary to scroll nearly to the bottom of the page before coming across works she has curated.)
-MF
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. A question this raises for me is that, if it was so monumental for such a dance to have taken place, how did the event’s organizers convince the U of R’s administration to allow the dance to happen? Was there more backlash, or support? Or, for that matter, did the administration even know about the dance as it was happening or did they only learn about it later?
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, I tried searching for all the past issues of the Empty Closet, which yielded a website containing 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.