This is the second year the University of Rochester has participated in the Pride Parade.
The Pride Alliance at the University of Rochester is a proud participant and sponsor of this parade
and it demonstrates the universities commitment to diversity, particularly in this instance with the LGBTQI community.
We couldn’t do it without the help of a lot of people like Eileen Fay
who’s standing over here who will come over. Eileen Fay, and she’s a committed
member of the team who’s helping to make this happen.
So, I’m holding some pamphlets. This one is from the admissions office about the
University of Rochester’s commitment to diversity and acceptance of everybody.
Then, I also have this from the University of Rochester Rare Books and archives.
I work there with Eileen, and it’s “The Empty Closet,” which is a LGBTI pamphlet that they used to publish,
and now is a community effort. I got the idea since “The Empty Closet” was founded
here by a student group called The Gay Liberation Front. If we could hand out copies of
the first issue, so these are the two brochures we’re going to be handing out.
It’s the front and back covers. There’s a QR code on the back;
if you scan it with your smart phone, you can go to the online archives and see the whole issue as well as other issues.
I worked with the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley to put online the back issues of “The Empty Closet” newspaper.
We have a full run of the newspaper here in Rare Books and Special Collections,
and they use that to actually get it microfilmed, and then, the microfilm was scanned to create the online versions.
That was started in December of 1970, and the first issue came out in January of 1971.
It was published at the University of Rochester until June of 1973.
The publication shifted to the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley as the publishers,
and you start to see the change on the leader head, and it starts to change
format and become something which is much more like a newspaper.
And it is, as the mast head says, the New York’s oldest gay newspaper is now,
in fact, one of the country’s oldest gay newspapers continually published.
It’s really quite a remarkable history not only for the Rochester area, but for coverage
around the country of gay rights issues and health issues. It’s not just a local newspaper.
It’s actually, as far as pride parades go, they have a reputation of being very flamboyant,
but it’s actually pretty tame. There’s a lot of churches and politicians. But it is interesting
as it does show you how many politicians and how many churches we have in Rochester that are progressive and accepting.
It also demonstrates, I think, how accepted the GLBTQ community is because churches and politicians are pretty mainstream
and traditional institutions, and we have this acceptance of the community and the parade demonstrates that.
A production of the University of Rochester.
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