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