Key Take-Away:
Recognizing and supporting LGBT spaces is important for the communities LGBT people exist in, which is everywhere
The way history is taught and presented can create or erase moments within minority history
Image Courtesy of Mikayla Rovenolt at The Ithaca Voice
Earlier this week, the American Historical Association Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History awarded the Ithaca College LGBT Center’s Ithaca LGBTQ History Tour the Allan Bérubé Prize for “outstanding work in public or community-based lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer history.”
This is important to talk about because while Ithaca is known as a progressive city with its “Ithaca is Gorges” and “Ithaca is Queer,” stickers the “Queer” part is rarely focused on for its rich history. Often when people talk about “Ithaca is Queer,” they are referring to Ithaca College or the general LGBT population because around 1.05 percent of households in Tompkins County are LGBT homes.
The, alleged, first gay student sit-in in the United States occurred at Morrie's Bar in 1968 and a year later, the Student Homophile League was formed at Cornell University. It was the second public gay student organization in the country. This is around the same time that the famous Stonewall Riot occurred. Not long after, in 1972, the first formal statement about bisexuality was made at The General Conference for Friends, a conference for Quakers and friends of Quakers held at Ithaca College at the time.
There is more that can be found on the Tompkins County History website. However, I would like to highlight one more event that is incredibly important. In 2004, a group of 25 local same-sex couples, known as the “Ithaca 50,” gained national attention for Seymour v. Holkomb. The case was defeated in the Court of Appeals in 2006, but “put Ithaca in the national spotlight as a community with a creative approach to supporting LGBTQ+ rights.” It challenged same-sex marriage laws almost 10 years before it would become legal in the United States.
When LGBT history is presented and discussed it rarely mentions the work put in by Ithacans, or others deemed “less important” than the bigger moments that popular culture tends to focus on. History reinforces the importance of Stonewall or the 2015 same-sex marriage legalization and the AIDS Epidemic.
What has been pushed aside and forgotten:
Marsha P. Johnson’s activism outside of Stonewall and her murder (the uptick in murders against BIPOC trans-women)
decades of hiding and fighting for same-sex marriage
laws against gay sex that lasted until 2003 in the United States
hate crimes and stigmas that have persisted against gay men because of misinformation around AIDS
Movies, unless they are biopics, also tend to erase BIPOC people for LGBT history and the 2015 Stonewall movie is an example of this. Marsha’s role is replaced with a cis-gendered, gay and white college-age man as the main “hero.” However, LGBT produced television shows are doing a better job of giving BIPOC LGBT people the time and space to share their stories and experiences.
While Ithaca has been important to the progression of the fight for LGBT rights in the United States, it also serves as a case study for the events and moments that mainstream, and LGBT, history have forgotten or deemed “smaller” than the moments that permeate popular culture. My question going forward is what do we do, as a community, to change the way LGBT history is taught and discussed so that it includes the “little” moments and not just the socially acceptable ones?
Note: The aforementioned Ithaca, NY LGBT Tour can be found at this site here.