Projects
Student, faculty, and community projects that have come out of GLAMA
CATEGORIES
AIDS in KC (Kansas City PBS)
From filmmakers Sandy Woodson and Emily Woodring, AIDS in KC spans the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the current organizers who continue to rally against the virus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How Kansas City Blazed a Path for Gay Liberation
Years before the Stonewall uprising, Drew Shafer started Kansas City’s first gay rights organization and published the first LGBTQ magazine in the Midwest. At one point, his Kansas City home was even the “information distribution center” for the entire gay rights movement. Episode from podcast series A People’s History of Kansas City.