Shoulders to Stand On details much of the queer activist history in the city of Rochester, particularly the origins of the Gay Liberation Front at the University of Rochester, which eventually became Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley, and their newsletter The Empty Closet, which is one of the oldest continuously-published LGBTQ+ newspapers in the world. The documentary briefly discussed queer life before Stonewall; apparently many of the gay bars were owned by straight people, with prohibitions on touching and involving much police intimidation and demanding of bribes. I suppose my impression had been that most queer spaces had existed only as underground establishments then, so I found it quite surprising that not only were such spaces out in the open, but straight people were involved in running them, even if only to express power.
The “Perversity to Diversity” exhibit, hosted in Rush Rhees Library, displayed several artifacts relating to queer history and activism, apparently strongly declaring the presence of queer students on the University of Rochester campus. The exhibit included several controversial pieces, including a T-shirt displaying lesbian oral sex, an ACT-UP poster comparing the homophobic New York Cardinal O’Connor with a condom, a dental dam, rubber gloves, and a condom-covered dildo. To find the year of the exhibit, I first set out to find the issue of the newspaper containing the articles about the exhibit. A search for Susan Jordan, the author of one of the columns, showed that she was (and is) closely involved with The Empty Closet, so that seemed like a likely source. To narrow down the years, I found on the River Campus Libraries AIDS Education Posters page that the ACT-UP poster was made in 1989. The article also mentioned the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Friends Association (GLBFA), which after a bit of searching I discovered was a later name for the Gay Liberation Front and an earlier name for Pride Network, the modern LGBTQ+ student organization at the University of Rochester. I found on an old U of R calendar of events page that by 2001, the name Pride Network was being used instead of GLBFA, so the columns had to have been written before then. Since the exhibit was held in March, it seemed reasonable that an article about it would be published soon after, perhaps between March and May. Searching through the Empty Closet archives for those months and years on the River Campus Libraries website, I soon found the columns in the April 1991 issue, and concluded that the exhibit was held in 1991.
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