Community NY: Centering Diversity in Stonewall: 50 Years Out

On April 5, 2019, the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County opened a historical exhibition titled Stonewall: 50 Years Out. The exhibit commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 uprising at New York City's Stonewall Inn that sparked the gay liberation movement and explores the history of Rochester's LGBTQ+ communities. Most significantly, it does so in a way that centers the lives and experiences of people who have been marginalized within traditional narratives, both historically and in contemporary society.

The exhibition stems from a partnership that developed about three years ago between the library and the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley (recently renamed the Out Alliance). At that time, the alliance began transferring archive and manuscript collections from its library to the public library's Local History and Genealogy Division. The materials had been amassed by Alliance historian Evelyn Bailey during research for Shoulders to Stand On, a documentary film she produced in 2013. The film spurred interest in LGBTQ+ history and resulted in additional donations in the years that followed. By 2015 it had become clear that the Alliance did not have the staff, space, or appropriate storage conditions to properly house them, and Bailey approached the Central Library.

The first few acquisitions had been fully processed and described by the Central Library by late 2017, and staff began to discuss ways of promoting the collections' availability. At the same time, members of Rochester's LGBTQ+ communities were asking how they should commemorate the Stonewall anniversary in 2019. An exhibition in the Central Library would do both. In the spring of 2018, Local History and Genealogy Division manager Christine L. Ridarsky called a meeting attended by people representing a wide variety of expertise, ranging from library, archives, and museum professionals and university scholars to LGBTQ+ activists and community members. The result was a plan for a community-curated exhibit to be held in a space that was free and welcoming—the Central Library.

One challenge became immediately evident. Shoulders to Stand On had come to be

Title Graphic for Exhibition (courtesy of the central library of rochester and monroe county)

recognized within the mainstream gay and lesbian community as the official history of Rochester's LGBTQ+ community, but the film focused on the story of gay and lesbian civil rights, political activism, and institution building in the post-Stonewall era. In other words, it concentrated on the white, working- and middle-class individuals who were at the forefront of the gay liberation movement and on the organizations they established. Ridarsky wanted to challenge that narrative—or at least expand it—to be more inclusive. This meant finding ways of including people who were black and brown, people who identified as bisexual, queer, transgender, or otherwise gender nonconforming, and people with disabilities. But Ridarsky knew that as a white, straight woman, she was not the person to do that. She would need to recruit diverse people to sit on the curatorial team alongside those who represented the mainstream gay and lesbian story. This would prove challenging, and it would take many months of repeated outreach by Ridarsky and others to finally convince a few queer people of color that their voices were truly valued.

Together, the curatorial team was able to find a way to expand the "official" history presented in Shoulders to Stand On to incorporate African American and Latinx people and organizations into the traditional institutionally focused narrative. But they went even further. In an effort to highlight the diversity of today's LGBTQ+ communities and to center the people and stories that are traditionally overlooked, the library commissioned black queer photographer Adrian Elim to create twenty-five portraits. These fill much of the exhibit's back wall and are also scattered throughout display cases. Alongside each image is a personal story or poem provided by the subject that explains some aspect of their

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