Category: Campus

Duplicity: The University of Missouri Confronts Gay Lib, 1971-78 (Thesis, 2016)

Following the Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969, a wave of gay rights expressionism swept the United States and, in particular, its college campuses. On the University of Missouri’s campus in 1971, that phenomenon manifested itself in the form a Gay Liberation club filing for official recognition from the school. What followed was a bitter, drawn-out legal effort by the college to block Gay Lib from ever meeting on campus or being given designated status.
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Building Bridges: An Anthology of the War on Prostitution and the Greater Women’s Movement in Kansas City (Thesis, 2017)

This research looks at Kansas City’s War on Prostitution in 1977 and the larger women’s movement of second-wave feminism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The War on Prostitution makes the women’s movement in Kansas City unique because it brought together non-like-minded feminists despite their differences in ideology. A product of both oral history and traditional historical research, this work draws upon a large variety of primary sources including newspaper articles from the Kansas City Public Library, archived materials pertaining to women’s groups from the LaBudde Special Collections Archive at University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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Show Me My Rights: Queer Activism in Kansas City and St. Louis, 1977-1993 (Thesis, 2022)

Radical queer (a term not in use at the time, but now more frequently employed) activists seized national headlines in the second half of the twentieth century with their fiery tactics, from so-called “die-ins” in the middle of church services to disrupting city council meetings. While many headline-grabbing protests took place in coastal cities typically characterized as queer havens, queer activists in the Heartland worked tirelessly for liberation from oppression. Queer historians in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to advance this coastal narrative, arguing that urbanization and large populations were necessary preconditions for queer activism. As they began searching elsewhere, scholars discovered evidence of thriving queer communities throughout the United States.
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Heteronormativity as a Rhetorical Tool to Reclaim Public Spaces and Engage in Community Building: A Study of The Ladder and Mattachine Review (Thesis, 2023)

This project is the result of extensive research at the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid- America (GLAMA) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I engaged in a rhetorical analysis of The Ladder and Mattachine Review. These two publications were created and edited by two of the most prominent Homophile organizations in the 50s and 60s in the United States—Daughter of Bilitis and Mattachine Society.
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Interstitial Passages: Re-enactment of Queer Bodies of Color in Art and Literature (Dissertation, 2023)

My project explores the connections between literature and visual art to re-enact and re-imagine queer bodies of color in liminal spaces or porous passages as a means of contesting invisibility, exclusion, and displacement. I engage in the literature of James Baldwin and John Rechy and the conceptual art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres to conceptualize symbolic and physical in-between spaces where racial and gender alternative projects of community, same-sex desire, and love are possible.
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The Ordinance Project: Commemorating Kansas City’s LGBTQ Landmark Legislation (Dissertation, 2021)

This project documents the efforts of Kansas City activists, organizers, and politicians who successfully fought for the passage of a municipal nondiscrimination ordinance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ordinance outlawed discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations based upon a person’s sexual orientation or HIV status.
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Navigating Change in the Homophile Heartland:  Kansas City’s Phoenix Society and the Early Gay Rights Movement, 1966-1971

Article published in volume 109, issue 4 of the Missouri Historical Review (July 2015).
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Welcome to Womontown

‘Welcome to Womontown’ is a publication exploring the history of an 80s and 90s lesbian community in the Longfellow neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Womontown was a community that challenged the system, defied traditional gender norms, and created a self-sufficient environment free from patriarchal influence.
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Making History:  Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights

Built by students in the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s public history program, the exhibit explores the activism of gays and lesbians in the decades before Stonewall, including Kansas City’s surprisingly pivotal role in helping to launch America’s gay rights movement. Focusing on ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things, the exhibit explores how history is made.
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Homosexuality in the Heartland: Alternative Print Media from 1970s Kansas City

The 1960s and 1970s were full of cultural, political, and social change in the United States in which activism for civil rights became widespread. These decades are remembered as a time when ideas about counterculture permanently changed, a time when African Americans fought for equal recognition, when young Americans who did not want to conform to the ideals of their elders created their own culture, and when average Americans stood up against what they believed was an immoral war. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, and the Kent State massacre are events often discussed from this period. However, one area of American activism is often overshadowed: the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual (LGBT) community and its fight for equal rights.
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