BEFORE STONEWALL: WHAT MADE BLOOMINGTON A GAY OASIS?

Bloomington is a small place compared to major coastal cities, but as the 7th largest population center in Indiana, and the largest town in the overwhelmingly rural south-central portion of the state, it functions in many ways as an urban area, with a population that is much more diverse and internationally-derived than the surrounding area. In other regards, it remains typically rural. In spite of the town’s relative diversity, its population is drawn largely from a racially and ethnically homogeneous (white) hinterland dominated by evangelical Christian values, and it is relatively isolated from coastal cultural influences. All of these “push” and “pull” factors, combined with the region’s history and demography, converge to shape the parameters within which Bloomington’s LGBT community has taken shape over the past half-century.

Negative Pressures

The formation of Bloomington’s LGBT community over the second half of the 20th century cannot be separated from the broader and deeper history of the area. Its demographic composition has been shaped over the long term by a history of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and slavery. The social regulation of white gender variance and homosexuality is linked to this history of racism through the logic and practice of eugenics, as well as through the terror of white supremacist groups such as the KKK, condemnatory beliefs of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, and the xenophobia that sometimes characterizes geographically isolated populations.

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Ethnic Cleansing of Indiana

Third-Gender Roles in Indiana-Area Native Americans

Eugenic Logics: Queering the Color Line

White Supremacy and Religious Fundamentalism

Public Policing of Gender

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Positive Attractions

In conjunction with the “negative” social forces that erase or expel those whose forms of love, structures of desire, and expressions of gender differ from the dominant culture, college town life has long attracted queer folks to Bloomington, even though the town itself remains bifurcated by the same forms of social oppression that operate more hegemonically in its environs. Some of the “positive” attraction of Bloomington lies simply in the promise of social and geographical mobility associated with access to higher education, and in the looser social norms that characterize most sectors of the town’s cultural life. But some of the positive attractions of Bloomington, particularly its arts culture and its reputation for frank tolerance of sexual diversity, can be attributed to the influence of two men, Herman B Wells and Alfred Kinsey.

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The Curious Case of Herman B Wells

The Kinsey Institute

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Mixed Messages: Surveillance and Survival in the Cold War

Gay life in the 1960s culminated in the radical promise of Stonewall Riots in 1969, but the decade began in a much more politically ambivalent mood. The pre-Stonewall 60s in Bloomington were characterized by a discreet LGBT presence, where those in the know could meet other like-minded individuals, but punctuated by periodic panics and waves of arrests aimed at keeping homosexuality out of public view. Constant surveillance fostered the sense of paranoia that was so characteristic of the Cold War period.

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The Indiana University Board of Aeons Bathroom Entrapment Scandal

Discreet Presences