Projects
Student, faculty, and community projects that have come out of GLAMA
CATEGORIES
This episode of A People’s History of Kansas City, KCUR-FM, by Olivia Hewitt and Mackenzie Martin tells the story of Barbara Grier and her involvement with The Ladder and as a co-founder of Naiad Press.
A Black queer community archive. {B/qKC} was founded through The Kansas City Defender, but is now an independent, fiscally-sponsored archival project. Project creator: Nasir Anthony Montalvo.
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.
Artwork inspired by materials from the GLAMA collections. Project creator: Ruben Castillo.
“’Barbara’s Way or the Highway’: An Analysis of Barbara Grier and Her Involvement with The Ladder, 1957-1972”, Kale Marie Michael, vol. 18, 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.