The Midwest's "Queer Mecca": 40 Years of GLBTQ History in Bloomington, Indiana (1969-2009)

As late Friday night rolled over into the early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, nothing in Bloomington, Indiana would suggest that a riot was breaking out 675 miles away in New York City.

The rioting that began in the aftermath of a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, on Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, has been commemorated ever since as the “beginning of the gay rights movement” in the United States. Turning the story of Stonewall into a paradigm, however, and assuming that LGBT culture originated in coastal cities and migrated from their into the heartland, doesn’t do justice to the complexity of local LGBT life in rural and non-metropolitan locations, both before and after Stonewall.

Drag queen weren’t rioting in downtown Bloomington in the summer of ’69, but a few short blocks off that small city’s town square, with its Capra-esque courthouse and public library, the Towne Cinema was screening The Killing of Sister George, a film about an intergenerational butch-femme lesbian relationship, as well as The Gay Deceivers, a film about two men who pretend to be gay to avoid the draft.

LGBT people in Bloomington hadn't begun protesting their discrimination at the hands of the police or the business community, forming activist organizations, writing impassioned speeches about gay liberation, or arguing in feminist coffeehouses about the politics of lesbianism—at least not yet—but the signs of a distinctive Hoosier queerness were there waiting to be seen, like those two movies at the Towne Cinema, by those with the eyes to see them.

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Project Overview: Anatomy of a College Town

BEFORE STONEWALL: WHAT MADE BLOOMINGTON A GAY OASIS?

1969-1980: Gay Liberation to the AIDS Crisis

1981-1990: The AIDS Crisis to the Queer Revolution

1991-2000: The Queer Revolution to National Advocacy

National Advocacy to the Modern Surveillance State

Complete Timeline