Introduction
A Message to Our Visitors:
This preliminary history of LGBT Bloomington was begun by students at Indiana University, specifically for the purpose of entering OutHistory’s “Since Stonewall” local LGBT history contest. And yet, our larger goal has never been to produce a "one-off" online exhibit, but rather to lay the foundation for an ongoing exploration of our community's history. Our project thus necessarily remains incomplete--in concrete details that will be finished at some point in the not too distant future, as well as in a more open-ended and philosophical sense. Our hope is that in the future, others will add to, correct, and rebalance the initial historical sketch we offer here.
Many individual exhibit pages that have been researched have not yet been uploaded; many illustrative images have yet to be incorporated into the individual pages; oral histories that have been conducted have not yet been transcribed; some entries are lacking citations, and some citations are not in proper form. Because many of the sources that were most readily available were related to activism originating at Indiana University, and because the students who conducted the bulk of this research were more interested in and familiar with campus life rather than town life, this history is weighted extremely heavily toward the university.
Even so, the contours of Bloomington's LGBT history are already coming into clearer focus. And this, for us, has been our primary accomplishment--we have surveyed a historical landscape that has never before been mapped in any kind of comprehensive fashion.
Uploading the backlog of completed research, refining the prose, and fine-tuning the site's form and scholarly apparatus will all continue to develop beyond the closing date of the "Since Stonewall" local history competition. The platform established here is intended as a solicitation for ongoing work, which will result in an increasingly robust site as time goes by. The detailed chronology of LGBT-related events, pulled together for the first time from an exhaustive survey of newspaper sources, is in itself a vital baseline resource for any future research.
We hope that you find the first fruits of our labor appealing and are inspired to continue the ongoing work of documenting Bloomington's queer history!
This exhibit is organized into six main sections, including this introduction. From Stonewall to AIDS explores local gay liberation and lesbian feminist culture between 1969 and 1981. AIDS, Activism, and Community Visibility covers the worst years of the AIDS epidemic into the early 1990s. Queer Bloomington examines the shifts that took place in the last decade of the previous century, while Queer Here and Now puts the first decade of the current century in its historical context. In an appendix, we have compiled An Annotated Chronology of LGBT life in Bloomington: 1969-2009, drawn largely from newspaper sources, and another appendix compiles Personal Profiles.
Introduction
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.
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 there 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.
Drag queens 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.
LGBT people in Bloomington hadn't begun 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 to be seen, like those two movies at the Towne Cinema, by those with the eyes to see them.
Bloomington: Anatomy of a College Town
Bloomington, Indiana, located fifty miles south of Indianapolis in verdant hill country, is a town of 70,000 year-round residents plus 40,000 students who attend the flagship campus of Indiana University. Without the university, which was established there in 1820, Bloomington would undoubtedly resemble its nearest neighbors—small farming and trading centers of no more than a few thousand souls. Instead, it is an outcropping of semi-urban sophistication packed into twenty heavily populated square miles that range around the magnificent limestone buildings of the university and the adjacent downtown business district. Bloomington is consistently rated one of the best places in the United States to retire to, or to raise a family, and because of the university it has many cultural perks usually associated with much larger metropolitan areas.
“Fifth Gayest Place in America”
Based on figures found in the U.S. Federal Census of 2000, Bloomington has recently taken to promoting itself as “the fifth gayest place in America”—a claim derived from the fact that Monroe County, of which Bloomington is the seat, has the fifth highest per capita ratio of same-sex households in the nation, at 1.55 per cent. The city has exploited this statistic for the sake of its tourism industry (the front page of the Bloomington Convention and Visitor’s Bureau website, for example, proudly features a rainbow-emblazoned link to its sister site, www.visitblooomington.com), and it has reaped the economic benefits: OutTraveler.com awards Bloomington the distinction of being the “#1 Surprisingly Gay Small Town Destination” in America.
The census figures are certainly hyped for all they’re worth, and the civic-booster marketing caters to a stereotype of gay and lesbian travelers as white, double-income-no-kids members of the affluent middle class, while largely ignoring countercultural queers, anti-capitalistic DIYers, trans and bi folks, the poor, immigrants, and people of color. There nevertheless remains a certain truth to the claim that Bloomington (at least for the white people who make up 95% of the population) is an enclave of progressive politics, smarty-pants academic types, hipster cafes, trendy indie music, funky shops, cheap ethnic eateries, gay-friendly upscale slow-food restaurants, and plenty of LGBT cultural visibility and sub-cultural buzz.
Bloomington holds an annual LGBT Film Festival at a lovingly restored artifact of Art-Deco Americana called the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre. It hosts the annual Miss Gay IU drag pageant as well as the Hoosier Daddy Drag King Competition. The BloomingOUT radio program has been a fount of information and analysis on queer happenings throughout the Midwest since its initial broadcast in 2003, and Indiana University boasts one of the best-endowed, though privately-funded, LGBT student services centers in all of American higher education. The queer ambience is enriched by such local institutions as the dyke-friendly Bleeding Heartland women’s roller derby team, the transgender-business-woman-owned Rachael’s Café, Quarryland Gay Men’s Chorus, and weekly drag shows at Uncle E’s (that’s short for Elizabeth’s), a popular gay bar on the edge of town.
Disturbing Undercurrents
Disturbing undercurrents nevertheless mar the celebratory façade of a “gay oasis” that official Bloomington seeks to maintain. The shocking murder on 27 December 2009 of Don Belton, a popular and highly respected faculty member of the Indiana University English Department, who happened to be both gay and African American, violently contradicted Bloomington’s self-image as an haven of tolerance and diversity. Belton’s confessed killer, Michael Griffin, a twenty-five-year-old ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran, grew up in the nearby countryside. As of April 2009, when this text was posted, the case had not yet gone to trial, but Griffin claimed to have killed Belton after being sexually assaulted by him and was expected to launch a “gay panic” defense. Belton’s many friends and colleagues assert that a far likelier scenario was that a confused young man with post-traumatic stress disorder, experimenting with his sexuality, freaked out and committed murder after a consensual sexual encounter.
Whatever the legal outcome of this tragic event, Don Belton’s murder underscores the vulnerability LGBT people in Bloomington can face in spite of their proud cultural presence and a decades-long history of visibility, activism, and community involvement. It underscores as well the deep “town and gown” divisions that can exist between lifelong local residents and outsiders who have no attachment to the area other than the university. This fundamental fissure in Bloomington’s social fabric often becomes the battle line where conflicts over class, race, sexuality, religion, and culture play themselves out, with sometimes horrific consequences. Moreover, university life can have its own homophobic and transphobic dimensions, especially among the numerous undergraduates who swell the town's population for nine months of every year. A macho sports culture, the dominance of fraternities and sororities, IU’s reputation as a “party school,” and a pervasive tendency towards social conformism all contribute to an environment in which LGBT people can easily feel as marginalized as they do accepted.
Acknowledgements
This project began in Fall Semester 2009 as a class project in Professor Susan Stryker’s “G206: Gay History, Queer Culture,” a regularly offered lower-division course in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University. A great deal more work was completed as an independent study project in Spring Semester 2010 by Evelyn Smith and Chris Kase, two especially talented students who were particularly enthusiastic about continuing to conduct research. Antonia Leotsakos made many additional valuable contributions while working as a research assistant to Dr. Stryker.
Students in G206 who contributed to this research include James Armstrong, Valerie Biondi, Erin Brady, James Conrad, Douglas Cooper, Anna Dykema, Scott Eberhard, Erin Engledow, Miranda Ettinger, Joshua Field, Alyssa Goldman, Bryn Hannon, Jurion Jaffe, Tara Johnson, Danielle Jonas, Jessica Lajoie, Lindsay Lauver, Allyson Lodics, Jeff McInnes, Brenna Moeljadi, Sarah Pennal, Alexandra Riley, Katherine Roberson, Jordan Schmid, Benjamin Siebert, Geoffrey Sperling, Dylan Swift, Sarah Taylor, Julia Turner, and Tay’ler Wells.
Doug Bauder, Carol Fischer and Solomon Hursey of IU’s GLBT Student Support Services Office all gave generously of their time—Solomon made available many important historical documents that he had scanned from the office files, as well as a fragment of his own spatial analysis of pre-Stonewall gay Bloomington, based on anonymous interviews with older gay men; Carol facilitated contact between longtime Bloomington LGBT community members and class members who wanted to conduct oral interviews with them, and Doug graciously agreed to be interviewed. Other interviewees included Robert Brookshire, Jean Capler, Helen Harrell, Victor Kinzer, Doug McKinney, Duncan Mitchell, George Pinney, Monte Simonton Jr., Katherine Brown Sterritte, Cynthia Stone, Martha Vicinus, Carolyn Marie Weithoff, and Linda Giovanna Zambanini.
Many information sciences professionals helped us get as far as we have: our deep appreciation goes to Dina Kellams, Carrie Lynn Schweir, and Bradley Cook of Indiana University Archives; to Lou Malcomb of Herman B Wells Library Government Information; to Shawn Wilson, Jennifer Bass, and Catherine Johnson-Rohr of the Kinsey Institute; to Michael Maben and Peter Hook of Indiana University Mauer School of Law Library; to Steve Backs and Christine Eykolt Friesel of the Indiana Room of the Monroe County Public Library; to Barbara McKinney of the City of Bloomington Legal Department; and to Regina Moore and Barbara Heather of the Bloomington City Clerk's Office. Thank you all for your knowledge of local history sources and your willingness to engage with student in their research.
Professors Colin Johnson and Mary Gray both shared their wisdom about rural queer culture--thank you both, for your specific help as well as for your inspiring commitment to making IU a place to study queer rurality.
And special thanks to Rachael, of Rachael’s Café, whose upbeat attitude and mad barista skills on the espresso pull kept us buzzin'!