Difference between revisions of "FROM STONEWALL TO THE AIDS EPIDEMIC: 1969-1981"

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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.
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Gay and lesbian life in Bloomington in the summer of 1969 responded to the same currents that moved similar communities nationwide. The Stonewall Riots did not result in a sudden break with past, but they did inspire a new wave of activism, and new forms of organizing, that gradually gathered strength. Within a year of Stonewall, Bloomington had a Gay Liberation Front organization; over the next decade it experienced many of the same successes and failures that characterized queer experience elsewhere in the United States: a new sense of pride and visibility, the first wave of community-based service organizations, contentious intra-community struggles over sexism and racism, disagreements about politics, and a serious right-wing backlash that overturned some early civil rights victories.
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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.
 
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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.
 
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LGBT people in Bloomington weren’t 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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[[Gay Liberation Front in Bloomington]]
 
[[Gay Liberation Front in Bloomington]]
  
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[[Famous Queer Visitors at IU and in Bloomington]]
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[[Christine Jorgensen Visits the IU Campus]]
  
 
[[Women's Spaces and Lesbians in Feminism]]
 
[[Women's Spaces and Lesbians in Feminism]]
  
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a room of one's own ad, editorial drawing
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[[Early Gay Awareness Conferences]]
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[[Bloomington's Early Queer Conferences and Gatherings]]
 
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invitation, kameny photo
 
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[[Gay and Lesbian Academe at Indiana University]]
 
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picture of martha vicinus, gay studies excerpt, homosexuality course
 
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[[Breaking Away: Film Analysis]]
 
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film poster
 
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[[Bloomington Human Rights Ordinance]]
 
  
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[[Cutter Homoerotics in Breaking Away]]
  
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[[Queer-centric Spaces]]
 
  
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coffee house ad
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<div style="text-align: center;">
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'''Navigation''' | [[The Midwest's "Queer Mecca": 40 Years of GLBTQ History in Bloomington, Indiana (1969-2009) | '''Home''']] | [[BEFORE STONEWALL: WHAT MADE BLOOMINGTON A GAY OASIS? | '''Before Stonewall''']] | [[FROM STONEWALL TO THE AIDS EPIDEMIC: 1969-1981 | '''Stonewall to AIDS: the 70s''']] |
  
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[[Queer Community Organizations of the 1970s]]
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[[AIDS, ACTIVISM, AND COMMUNITY VISIBILITY: 1981-1991 | '''AIDS and Community Life: the 80s''']] | [[QUEER BLOOMINGTON: 1992-2001 | '''The Queer Decade: the 90s''']] | [[QUEER HERE AND NOW: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE 21st CENTURY | '''Queer Here and Now: 2001-Present''']]
  
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new horizons poster/newsletter
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</div>
  
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[[Category:Indiana]][[Category:Stryker]]
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[[Category:Indiana]][[Category:Stryker]] <comments />

Latest revision as of 11:26, 1 May 2010

Gay and lesbian life in Bloomington in the summer of 1969 responded to the same currents that moved similar communities nationwide. The Stonewall Riots did not result in a sudden break with past, but they did inspire a new wave of activism, and new forms of organizing, that gradually gathered strength. Within a year of Stonewall, Bloomington had a Gay Liberation Front organization; over the next decade it experienced many of the same successes and failures that characterized queer experience elsewhere in the United States: a new sense of pride and visibility, the first wave of community-based service organizations, contentious intra-community struggles over sexism and racism, disagreements about politics, and a serious right-wing backlash that overturned some early civil rights victories.

Gay Liberation Front in Bloomington

Christine Jorgensen Visits the IU Campus

Women's Spaces and Lesbians in Feminism

Early Gay Awareness Conferences

Cutter Homoerotics in Breaking Away


<comments />

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