Video Interview, Bruce Woolley, September 6, 2013
- CREW: We're rolling.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.
- First and foremost, this is just a conversation between the two
- of us.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Good.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You don't have to address the camera.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: No, no.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: If you get tongue-tied or lose your train
- of thought, stop, start again.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: That's cool.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: First and foremost,
- give me the correct spelling of your first and last name,
- of how you want it to appear on screen.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: OK.
- It's Bruce, B-R-U-C-E. And the last name is Woolley.
- It's W, two Os, two Ls, E-Y.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Two Ls, I didn't know that.
- OK.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Bruce, if we were to put some kind of title
- under you, what could we put?
- There's the GAGV Library.
- I know you're working with that.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes.
- Put a PhD with the name.
- Capital P, H, period, capital D, period.
- And just say historian.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Historian, yeah, that's what I was thinking.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK, Bruce, I want
- to start off, because a lot of people we've interviewed--
- we interviewed some old-timers that
- talked about what it was like to be gay, 1940s, 1950s,
- and what Front Street was like.
- We've interviewed a lot of people about the 1970s, '80s,
- to today.
- But there's that gap in the '50s and '60s, prior to Stonewall,
- that I want to get a sense of what
- it was like to be a gay person in that time period.
- Where did you go to find information
- about what you may have been feeling at that time,
- and, more importantly, the lack of information?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, well, most of that time period, of course,
- I was a kid.
- And I actually didn't come out until about a month or so
- after Stonewall, but I had been dealing with feelings,
- certainly, for some years.
- And, certainly, looking for information, and there really
- wasn't that resource.
- Certainly, there had been the Kinsey Report.
- That came out in 1948.
- That revealed that more than 30% of adult males
- had some sort of a same-sex encounter, or many of them.
- It kind of reflected the realities of the World War II
- period.
- That was out and available.
- And there were a variety of books, most of them
- highly negative on the subject of homosexuality.
- And, certainly, where they existed in libraries,
- they mostly were really locked up.
- And where you would find access to a book like that wouldn't
- be walking into a bookstore, or maybe Brentano's, that
- existed in Barnes and Noble, in Manhattan, for example.
- You wouldn't find those just out on a shelf,
- that you could easily pick one up.
- So having to ask someone, who might
- be highly un-approving for this, most people
- wouldn't do it, especially if they
- were questioning in any way.
- One of the earliest books that, certainly, I
- remember getting a lot of publicity,
- because it was actually reviewed in The New York Times--
- that was John Rechy's City of Night.
- And that came out in 1963 and in a paperback edition
- the following year.
- And that's when I got a hold of that.
- Saw it on a news stand, and I read that between my freshman
- and sophomore year of college.
- And gee, that's very, very dark.
- Very dark.
- It dealt with the seemliest of 42nd Street gay life
- at the time.
- And I thought, well, gee, I couldn't
- identify with a single person in that book in any way,
- and so I can't possibly be gay.
- And, I figured, I also wasn't a type
- of dirty old man in a raincoat.
- And I certainly didn't think I was a street prostitute.
- And I wasn't a child molester and all of that, so, eh,
- couldn't possibly be.
- But, certainly, I continued to have feelings,
- and wonder, and certainly enjoyed the scenery at the gym,
- and seeing some of the guys in the dorms.
- But just really not having a sense of connection,
- I certainly didn't know anybody else who might, possibly,
- have those feelings.
- You've probably heard lots of people
- say that they thought they were pretty much alone.
- And I knew things were different,
- but, of course, I dated women and went to dances and things.
- And most of us weren't having sex with anybody,
- whether we were gay or straight, back in the '60s.
- And so it just went on.
- I came up to Rochester, to grad school in 1967,
- to work on a PhD in history.
- And, doing that, I had papers that I
- was working on puritanism.
- It really is my specialty.
- That gives a lot of people a good laugh.
- And that Colgate Rochester Divinity School Library
- had a lot of material that I needed to use for my research.
- I had wonderful books on that topic.
- And also, that was one library where
- books intended for pastoral care were not under lock and key.
- They're just out on the regular shelves.
- So I was able to look at formal studies on homosexuality.
- And most of them, as you could guess,
- were highly negative on the topic.
- And there was one that particularly struck me,
- and it went on and on about false homosexuality.
- And, basically, it was saying that everybody checks out
- the competition in the locker room and whatever,
- but that doesn't mean anything at all.
- And so I thought, well, I guess that doesn't mean anything.
- Finding materials, books, studies,
- publications of any kind, just talking about homosexuals.
- You didn't hear about that sort of thing.
- And if you did, it was sort of whispered,
- and It wasn't a nice topic.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: I'll expand on that just a little bit.
- Because there is this one clip that I
- have from a film, from the late '50s, early '60s,
- about homosexuals.
- The film is of a teacher, in front of a class,
- talking about beware of homosexuals, basically.
- So there was actually films in our schools.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: They never showed us that.
- I was in New York City public schools.
- They never showed us anything like that.
- And I don't think that they felt that they needed to warn us.
- We all had been born, don't take candy from strangers.
- Don't get into somebody's car.
- But, gee, this was the baby boom generation.
- All these kids, there were rugrats everywhere.
- Who wanted another one of these around?
- There just wasn't.
- In retrospect, I am absolutely certain that many
- of my favorite teachers in grammar and in high school,
- and the principal of our grammar school,
- for the whole time I was there, were gay.
- And they were wonderful, wonderful people
- and did wonderful things for kids, to help them grow up.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to kind of reiterate
- that there's not a lot of information
- out there, pre-Stonewall, for people to find.
- But what information you were finding
- wasn't the most positive.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: No, absolutely not.
- Whatever shreds, and just the idea,
- that you wouldn't bring up the topic of homosexuality,
- you just didn't do it.
- And hearing about one of my friends in college,
- he had indeed come out and had talked
- with a very noted psychologist, who was on campus.
- And that had really backfired for him, badly.
- And I didn't find that out for 25 years, after the fact.
- It was.
- It was just the sort of thing-- you kept everything hushed up.
- And, of course, that's the problem for gays.
- In that, in order to protect themselves
- from the rebuke of society, they kept
- things quiet and underground, and even had, very much,
- their own encoded language.
- But by the same token, if you do that, then people think that,
- gee, there are hardly any.
- And those that exist have to be great exceptions
- and real freaks.
- And there's nothing in between.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Again, kind of staying pre-Stonewall, here,
- at the moment.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes, absolutely.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: In the research that you've done
- and things that you found, when can you
- tell me that there started to be a bubbling
- of a gay consciousness?
- A bubbling of what, eventually, would then
- become a gay rights movement.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, gee, the very earliest
- of things that had developed into anything
- was late '40s, say 1950, with Mattachine Society,
- out in Los Angeles.
- And with Harry Hay and his small group of friends,
- that originated that.
- And then there came to be Mattachine Societies
- in several cities around the country.
- In the '50s and the '60s, they had
- a couple of publications that ran for more than a decade,
- each.
- And that had a very, very secret distribution list of perhaps
- 3,000-4,000 persons.
- So that's, kind of, the extent of gay consciousness.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: I want to emphasize the point you just
- made, that there were these gay movement groups coming up
- to the surface.
- They were starting to print things,
- but it was still, very much, underground.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, absolutely, and it had to be.
- Because there was a court action in the first half of the 1960s,
- say round 1963, '64.
- And that concerned distribution in the mail of materials that
- might be considered obscene.
- And this court decision was that something
- discussing homosexuality was not, in and of itself,
- obscenity.
- So, after that, things that could talk about, or speak to,
- a gay life could actually be not only published, but distributed
- in the mail without having to be highly, highly secret.
- So that's really what they were up against.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: I know in some of the conversations we've had,
- and getting back to our first question here--
- any publications that did exist, they were behind the counter.
- They were under the counter.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, and you wouldn't be seeing this.
- You would have to--
- CREW: Someone just went in the office.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Someone in the office?
- OK.
- So set that up for me.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- In order to get a hold of publications--
- unless you just happened upon a news agent that
- had something available and wasn't terribly careful
- about how they displayed, or had a side area
- that you got access to, finding out about gay life
- was very, very much hit or miss.
- You'd have to, in some way, encounter someone
- who was willing to be forthcoming
- with you, for whatever reason.
- And then, you could possibly find out
- about where gay people met, what bars, what areas, where
- were things.
- And maybe there was a lot of living
- room societies, small groups, that
- would meet in private parties.
- And so you had to know somebody to know somebody
- to know somebody to get into any of this.
- So, again, anything that was published,
- the runs were so small that several thousand of any edition
- of anything, even nationally-- with things like The Mattachine
- Review or One Magazine, those in the '50s and into the '60s, or
- the publication The Ladder, the publications of The Daughters
- of Bilitis, the women's movement--
- any of this was very, very restricted publication.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Do you have a sense of when
- we broke through that barrier?
- We went from little, small distributions of periodicals
- that are hidden under counters to, at some point,
- now we have a national magazine like The Advocate.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, it's all later '60s.
- Because there was another court case
- that dealt with actual pornography,
- the publication of real nudes.
- And in the '50s, the early '60s, there
- were the muscle man magazines, the guys
- in posing straps and things.
- But the goodies were covered up.
- And starting in late 1967, '68, the full nudes
- could be published.
- And, from that point on, the studios
- that had been creating the posing strap pictures,
- they always did full nudes that they
- distributed to a very select group of wealthy patrons.
- They began to publish the magazines of nudes,
- and those had a fairly large, and for them, I'm
- sure, and lucrative distribution.
- And with that, a lot was beginning to change very, very
- rapidly in the late '60s.
- Just in society in general, becoming much more--
- I mean that 1967 is that summer.
- '67, that's the Flower Power summer in San Francisco.
- Having nothing to do with gays per se,
- but this sudden blossoming and opening up of free love--
- hey, gay people could relate to that.
- So, it's from that point on that there's a general opening
- up of discussion of reality about that young people have,
- and a lot of people have, an active sex life.
- And at the same time, an adaptation of civil rights
- movement demonstrations, the activities of those,
- was moving into a lot of different areas of life.
- Whether it was, certainly, being taken up by anti-war people--
- And so then, as soon as you get the reality of Stonewall,
- after that was the kind of very, very prim and proper picketing
- demonstration that had been done by the Mattachine Society,
- from time to time, with women in business dress
- and men also dressed for business, suit and tie,
- picketing for homosexual rights.
- That world, that's out the window.
- And you have real, scruffy looking, semi-hippie people out
- and raising cane, and beating up the cops, and Stonewall,
- and being seen in large numbers.
- And so from--
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Let's go back, before we get ahead
- of ourselves, because I want you to set that up for me.
- I want you to set it up for me that we had these things
- kind of bubbling up.
- We had the Mattachine Society, Daughters of Bilitis,
- and they started, kind of, waning out
- toward the end of the '60s.
- But we had other things starting to bubble up, as well.
- But then, all of a sudden, there was Stonewall.
- There was a spark.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Oh, absolutely.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: If you could, just throw that back at me.
- Set Stonewall up for me.
- And why that is such a significant part
- of gay and lesbian history?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Because three years prior to Stonewall,
- there had been some quasi rioting outside of some San
- Francisco bars, where there had been real police
- oppression there.
- And nothing great came of that.
- And of the Mattachine picketing in Washington DC in '65
- and '66, nothing really great.
- It got a little bit of news coverage.
- It got some, but there was no spark.
- And I think that just society, as a whole, and the country
- were becoming more unhappy with status quo,
- in so many different ways, that as the activities in Vietnam
- ground on and on, the news was miserable every night.
- And everybody knew somebody who had been injured,
- or had heard about somebody who had been killed in Vietnam,
- or people were about to be drafted, or were, and things.
- The whole climate went from one that was so buttoned down,
- through the '50s and the early '60s,
- that the Kennedy administration-- you could have
- someone who was a true Lothario in the White House,
- and nobody knew.
- It was all this sweetness and light thing.
- And by the late '60s, that kind of thing
- is going goodbye, forever.
- And so, if the Stonewall had taken place at an earlier time,
- there's real possibility it wouldn't have come to anything.
- It would have been a much smaller event.
- A lot fewer people would have come out of their homes
- and out onto the streets, and to see what all was going on
- and participate.
- But the time was ripe, and there was that spark in tinder,
- and it went.
- But it truly was a revelation.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You were here in Rochester in grad school
- at the time.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: I was.
- Well, I was home in New York City for the summer.
- And--
- CREW: Can you re-ask that question?
- KEVIN INDOVINO: OK.
- Where were you when Stonewall happened?
- What do you remember?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Of that?
- I was home in New York City for the summer.
- And, as a family, we sat around in the living room.
- We watched Metro Media News, because it came on
- at 10 o'clock at night.
- You didn't have to wait up until 11:00.
- And it was local, New York City, news.
- And there, they were covering these homosexual riots
- in Greenwich Village.
- So the coverage, then, would have
- been from the previous night.
- But they're talking about, well, it
- continues on through this day.
- And just seeing pictures of that many gay people
- out on the streets--
- well, yes, some of them looked a little bit different.
- But most of them looked like any, generally younger, people
- that you might see out around anywhere in the city.
- And that was really a revelation.
- And, at the time, I had just been drafted.
- I didn't have to report for another, almost, three months.
- But I knew I was going into the service.
- And one of the young men who was interviewed
- there was the kid who said, oh, he
- comes up from Fort Dix, every weekend, to party
- at the gay bars in Greenwich Village.
- And my grandmother looked and said, oh, they even
- have them in the army.
- And I thought, well, they may have even more.
- Again, that was about a month before I came out.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So you're in New York City that summer.
- Did you come back to Rochester, or did you--
- at the end of the summer?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, one of my closest friends in grad school
- was a guy who was also working on a PhD in history.
- But earlier, he had graduated from West Point
- and had been in the military, and then
- had his chance to do grad work.
- And he invited me out to San Francisco,
- where he was living and doing research for the summer.
- And so I was happy to go, and I thought,
- well, gee, he can give me good advice about what it's
- like to be in the military.
- And I had been there for several days,
- visiting with him and the guy that he
- was living with out there.
- And we, grad students, all shared places.
- We didn't think anything of it.
- And this guy had been in the CIA, we knew that, and was out.
- And he was going to school out there.
- And then Donne's West Point roommate
- showed up with a friend.
- They blew into town.
- And as they arrived, the guys all hugged and kissed.
- And I thought, well, this is really different,
- because, today, straight guys may give one of the, hey, bro,
- hug thing.
- But they don't kiss each other on the lips
- while they're hugging.
- And so I knew that I was in a little bit
- different environment.
- And the upshot of it was that, with this discovery,
- we all went out to the bars that night.
- And so it was this instantaneous sense of, oh, God,
- I found my reality and stuff.
- So I knew what my truth was before I was off
- in the service.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: When did you come back to Rochester?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, I was in the Army for two years
- and was back--
- well, I had to come back at the end of August.
- I had to come back to Rochester, briefly, to close up
- my apartment and to formally do a leave of absence
- from the university.
- So I was here very briefly but didn't prowl around.
- I was busy.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You wouldn't have
- a sense of Rochester's reaction to Stonewall?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: The gay life?
- No, not really.
- And there just-- no.
- There wasn't any commentary.
- And for most people, there just wasn't
- commentary about Stonewall.
- Where you start to feel the repercussions of that
- is as gay liberations fronts appeared on different campuses.
- And so much of the society's ferment was on campus.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Let's pick it up there, then.
- From what you've researched, not so much from what
- you experienced, very shortly after Stonewall,
- all of a sudden, we start having these gay liberation fronts.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Gay liberation fronts in different places.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Tell me about that.
- I've never even heard it before.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, you know that campus activism had really
- grown up around the Vietnam War.
- And we don't hear very much, haven't heard for decades
- now, about the SDS, the Students for Democratic Society.
- And this was a very politically left-leaning student group.
- It was a big deal on the U of R campus.
- A lot of the English and history department was SDS.
- You could be in Marxist thought, as we've
- seen in Russia, even today, that you
- can be all of this power to the people, except queer people.
- They don't count somehow.
- So it wasn't exactly that, but it was this kind of impetus,
- to have students really feeling that they can
- make a difference in society.
- And they're going to demonstrate.
- And they're going to make noise.
- And they're going to cause problems for anybody that's
- in their way, until they get their point across,
- very strongly.
- So there's this background.
- That sort of thing had been happening on campuses.
- That sort of thing--
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Let's back it up a little bit.
- Start picking up, again, this kind of progressive thinking
- among students.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, it isn't progressive thinking,
- it's radical.
- It is politically radical thought
- among a contingent of activist students on campuses all over.
- In New York City, Columbia was a hot bed
- of violent, radical demonstrations.
- To a lesser extent, a little bit less violent, but still very
- radical at Cornell.
- And that spread, certainly.
- U of R, everywhere, there was this.
- And there was a constant thought that radical student groups
- are going to take over the administration building.
- That was a favorite thing to do.
- And there was such a demonstration
- and take over in 1970, on the River Campus, which, of course,
- I missed.
- I was in Korea at the time.
- So I missed out on seeing all of that kind of thing.
- So just the existence of that sort of activity
- suggests to gay students that, gee,
- the founding of an active Gay Liberation Front
- would be the kind of move to make
- and would be a very positive thing.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Can you give me a little soundbite
- about the name itself, Gay Liberation Front.
- Because that came out of other--
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Everything was a damn liberation front.
- You know that Patty Hearst, when she was kidnapped,
- that was by the Symbionese Liberation Front.
- Everything was a liberation front.
- It was just the way it was done.
- And so everybody was going to be liberated from whatever sort
- of thing.
- So it's Gay Liberation Front.
- You know, no more Mattachine now.
- The poor folks in the Buffalo Mattachine Society,
- that had done so much hard work, for so long, that kind of got
- plowed under by all of this GLF noise.
- And, certainly, Cornell had a very, very active, large Gay
- Liberation Front.
- And it was the existence of that group,
- so close to Rochester, that helped to spark and support
- the founding of the GLF, as it was hosted on the River Campus
- at the U of R.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: That brings up a unique question.
- I wonder if, because there wasn't
- a GLF in Buffalo or Syracuse, that we know of, I don't think.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: I'm sure that there was a gay group at SU.
- And the Mattachine Society, the group in town,
- really filled in for it and did wind up with UB and Buff State
- students.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Because one of the things
- I'm trying to get at is, is it surprising
- that a Gay Liberation Front could start on the University
- of Washington campus?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: No, certainly not,
- given the amount of activity that the SDS had engaged in
- for a good three years prior to 1970.
- No.
- The climate was right.
- It was just the kind of thing that students
- at that university did.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Kind of just moving beyond that, then.
- Well, let me get your perspective.
- When you did return to Rochester,
- and you returned to your studies at the U of R--
- when you left Rochester, there was nothing really--
- there was no really gay community here,
- other than what was underground.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, and the bars.
- Actually, there was plenty that I really didn't--
- I didn't see, because I didn't have gay eyes.
- And when you came back, and you knew--
- By this time, my West Point friend
- had decided he was remaining in San Francisco.
- He wasn't coming back.
- He wasn't finishing his PhD.
- He wasn't.
- He wasn't.
- But I could call him up and say, hey, what do you remember?
- Where was the-- where did--
- And so he told me about, oh, well,
- you need to check out Dick's 43 on Stone Street.
- He knew, already, that I liked dirty books.
- And he said that Worldwide News sells them,
- and that's just around the corner, on South Avenue.
- First day, second day, I was back.
- I had settled my apartment.
- And I drove on in to downtown, and came in Monroe Avenue,
- and arrived on the surface of the moon.
- What I had left, there were three story brick
- commercial buildings from the mid 19th century.
- And We're talking the whole area around Manhattan Square Park,
- the Manhattan Square, where The Strong Museum is now,
- all of that was just bulldozed flat.
- There was nothing.
- And I thought, my God, where am I?
- You know, all the tower office buildings, of course, they
- were all there.
- And I parked in Midtown, and that was all the same
- as that had been.
- Major shopping down there, and I went up,
- and I went walking just to see where it was.
- I was book shopping, but I wanted
- to walk past, and remind myself, where Dick's 43, Martha's, was.
- And they were building the ramp garage,
- the garage that had the spiral ramp that, ultimately,
- fell to grief.
- But that was being built on all of that property, and not only
- where the bar had been, but also where Worldwide News had been,
- also.
- I forget where I went in and just asked, where, I said,
- Worldwide News used to be right around here.
- And they said, oh, well it's down the street.
- You'll find it.
- So I walked down there and found it and all of the things
- that they sold, that I might enjoy.
- And I also located the New Art Bookstore in the Cook's Opera
- House, across the street from where they
- were building the ramp garage.
- That was new, too.
- So I could find some activity.
- And I also, in prowling around on the campus, getting settled,
- getting registered, getting settled back in--
- there was notice about the Gay Liberation Front on the campus.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So talk to me what
- you were experiencing emotionally,
- intellectually, when you saw that notice?
- Previously, on campus, there was no Gay Liberation Front.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: There was a--
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Now, all of a sudden,
- you're coming back to campus.
- And now, all of a sudden, there's this gay group.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, I knew that they existed.
- From time to time, my doctoral advisor
- would pack up a few of the Campus Times
- and ship them to me, so that I felt in contact.
- And so, in looking through that material,
- I knew that the GLF existed.
- And I was able to find their office, up on the second floor
- of the student union.
- So, I knew where that was.
- And, certainly, coming back, I was a very different person
- from the kid that had left.
- Now having been overseas, without any contact
- with the home, with the states, except for mail.
- Very good mail contact, but there was no phone.
- There was no traveling home.
- There was no nothing for more than a year.
- I had been exposed to some very different people,
- very different people.
- And I came back and was just changed, and a lot stronger,
- in many ways.
- Not with a whole lot of practical gay activity,
- but just a, hey, don't bother me, kind of thing
- and some attitude plus feeling very strange about being back
- in the US.
- Because a lot of things were, and felt,
- different in the United States from when I had left.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: What about your involvement, then, when
- you did come back with the GLF?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Because they weren't on campus long,
- when you got back.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: No.
- The group-- it was their second year.
- Because they didn't really get started up
- until late in the fall semester of 1970.
- So they had been active in the spring semester of '71
- and then had gotten an issue or two of the Empty Closet
- out, during the late spring, early summer,
- after the school year was over.
- So it was a new thing on campus, but there
- were a lot of people really active and interested
- in things.
- So the office was staffed, often by volunteers,
- whether they were community or were students.
- They had regular office hours.
- You could know when there'd be somebody in that office
- that you could go and talk to and meet and things.
- I wasn't at all shy about going there to do that.
- There was talk about the coming of another bar,
- of gyms, downtown.
- And there was a period of hiatus,
- between when he had first opened on Court Street
- and when that closed.
- It was an unfortunate location, because the Washington Park,
- there by St. Mary's Church, at the time,
- was known as Needle Park.
- It was where druggies--
- and it just was a bad address and a bad combination
- of night time stuff.
- So he was working on a gym that was being pulled together
- for its location on North Street, now Liberty Pole Way.
- But it hadn't opened yet.
- So there really wasn't--
- I guess, Dick's lounge had opened on State Street,
- but the word was out that that was for older people.
- That's not our kind of place.
- Martha doesn't like kids.
- You know, blah, blah, and stuff.
- So I wasn't that anxious to go drinking, anyway.
- And I was terribly, terribly busy
- trying to recoup intellectual capacity, I guess you'd say.
- Yeah.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: But then again, just back to your involvement
- with the GLF and what eventually became the Gay Alliance.
- In those early days, to the extent of your involvement,
- just talk to me about the kind of things that were going on,
- the kind of conversations that were being had.
- What were the issues that were being talked about?
- What was the purpose of the GLF, to put it that way.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, see, the part of it--
- there is little wonder that there came
- to be a real split in 1973.
- People who attended GLF meetings,
- and who are interested in the Gay Liberation Front, really
- had two very divergent sets of needs and goals.
- And one group was politically activist
- and really wanted to be able to change things, society.
- And they were going to.
- And they, to my perspective, they
- were the gay version of the SDS.
- And people that I had known in the history department, most
- of whom, by this time, had kind of moved on whatever way.
- But here was the gay version of that.
- And other people were seeking gay identity, whatever
- their truth was, to find out what it's like to be gay.
- How can I really live a fulfilled life?
- And I want to meet other people.
- And I want to see what's up and have activity.
- And there's where there really were conflicting interests.
- And I was in that latter group.
- I really was interested in meeting other people
- and in just being able to learn more about what was happening,
- what you might do, what's fun, where--
- even just hanging out, in the precious little free time
- I really did have, with other gay folks.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: This is a question
- that I didn't e-mail to you.
- It just, kind of, comes to mind.
- I know you didn't grow up here, but we
- came from the University of Rochester Gay Liberation Front,
- Rochester did, to a community that
- has been very, very influential and progressive
- in the gay rights movement, in politics, social justice,
- corporate, even medical, when the whole AIDS
- crisis came about--
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: From your point of view,
- what do you think it was about Rochester
- that positioned us to be such a strong advocate
- for the gay community?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, I think that Rochester had
- a long history of having a--
- a reasonably affluent and large gay community.
- So much of it unseen by the public,
- but, gee, very, very present.
- Going way back to the 1920s and before--
- there was a safety and, to some extent, a welcoming society
- here.
- And maybe that was because Rochester
- didn't have the kind of smokestack industries
- that Buffalo and Syracuse had.
- It also didn't have the very British uptightness
- that Toronto had.
- Certainly, into the first half of the '80s, people in Toronto
- came to Rochester for a good time,
- because Toronto was so quiet and dull.
- So that kind of history, with looking at our research,
- looking in the Bertillon Records, the police records--
- for the first three decades of the 20th century,
- you find almost no arrests of gay people.
- You had to be truly, truly outrageous in order
- to get yourself in bad shape with the cops in Rochester.
- And that, I'm sure, was not the case everywhere.
- There also were some of Rochester's society matrons
- who regularly entertained, and wanted to have,
- numbers of sophisticated and intelligent gay men
- at their homes.
- So the doors of very prestigious Rochester residences
- were open to gays.
- And there were certain hangouts, for instance,
- the Town and Country Restaurant in downtown.
- That was one of the finer eateries downtown,
- and the bar there had very upper-crust gays
- mingling with straight Rochester society very, very easily.
- So that kind of atmosphere set seas.
- Now, no one wants to ever picture things
- as being a nirvana for gay people.
- It was nice and lovely, so long as you
- minded all your Ps and Qs and kept everything quiet
- and well behaved.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: As a historian and as a researcher,
- how do you research the history of a people who,
- for many, many, many generations, until recently,
- have kept their history hidden?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, see that's the real catch-22.
- It's trying to find out things, and that's partially
- why it is so vital for us to record
- the remembrances of our gay elders before they're gone.
- And I keep thinking, as I've been doing work
- with Shoulders To Stand On--
- I keep thinking about, drat, I wish
- that I could ask this one and that one and the other,
- these people that I knew, who were older and had experienced
- the '30s, the '40s, the '50s in Rochester,
- all kinds of questions.
- They could tell you all about what it was like.
- And they're gone.
- And there's no way, because, certainly, it
- would be such a valuable and rare find to discover
- that anybody wrote stuff down.
- You wanted to keep things hidden.
- And if you did have letters or other materialsm
- if you died and family came in and discovered,
- they'd say, oh, glory, Uncle Walter was queer.
- And they'd throw this stuff immediately into the trash.
- Not their trash, they'd go around the corner
- and put it in somebody else's so that nobody
- would be discovering this awful, awful truth.
- So recovering our past is very, very difficult.
- And that's why we looked in police records.
- We really did think that we'd find the arrests of gays.
- We thought we'd discover where gays hung out.
- Where did they get in trouble, afoul of the law?
- Well, no.
- There wasn't that to be discovered in Rochester.
- So then, one of the things I did for the '50s and early '60s
- was to look in a tasteful rag called WE, W-E, Magazine.
- That was a political/police blotter publication
- that came out every two weeks, from the late '40s
- until the early 1980s.
- And it dealt in all of the kinds of news
- that the regular press would find a little distasteful.
- And so, yeah, we found gay people.
- One of my favorite headlines there is, "Queers At Sears,"
- and a couple of weeks later, "More Queers At Sears."
- And that was guys getting afoul of the law and propriety
- in the men's room at Sears.
- So it's fineness, yes.
- We existed in WE, and, more recently,
- finding some articles in a later, very liberal,
- publication called The Rochester Patriot, just a little bit
- about us.
- But, otherwise, it's really tough
- to find documentation of gay people.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: When you were searching the police records
- and public records--
- because we've heard from countless people
- about the speculation that they had a homo file.
- In the '70s, they were taking down
- people's license plate numbers, and that kind of thing.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah, I wouldn't doubt that.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You weren't finding any evidence of that.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Well, I was looking in slightly
- before 1910, the teens, the 20s, the 30s.
- I was looking in that time period.
- And, believe me, back then, you didn't want
- to be Italian in Rochester.
- That, we found.
- That was shocking.
- You could be a child molester, and that
- was a slap on the wrist.
- That didn't count for much.
- But you had the gays show up hardly at all.
- That, certainly, I heard during the '70s.
- Because, I would say, from the fall of '71,
- I was here in upstate, right on that.
- You heard ugly things about the sheriff's department
- and the police things.
- I never experienced any harassment.
- I never felt that, but I certainly heard about it.
- Yeah.
- But it is something that if we have time,
- and if we can get into some of the boxes and boxes and boxes
- of public records out of political office,
- the mayor's office, and others downtown,
- that are public record to try to sift and see
- if you could find--
- but there's no search aids.
- You just know it's a box full of all of this crap.
- And someday, somebody will find some evidence,
- if it wasn't destroyed.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: So switching gears here a little bit,
- we've kind of touched up on this a little bit, already.
- But I just want to really emphasize it,
- that today, we are really at a critical point
- of capturing the history that we're able to find,
- the history that we're able to recover,
- and the importance of that.
- The importance, particularly, with today's technology,
- digitization, and all of that.
- We're almost, really, at that threshold
- of validating this as history.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yeah.
- Oh, yeah.
- In a time when people are putting
- all sorts of their viewpoints up on YouTube,
- you know, they have four minutes of fame on that.
- But we can.
- We can distribute information.
- We can store it.
- We can figure out how to keep it,
- and then we have to keep moving it into new forms of records.
- But once we've got it, we've got it.
- And we can preserve our history.
- But the important thing is that--
- no matter what way it is, whether it's
- on film, whether it's audio, whether it's in printed format,
- or hopefully in all three ways--
- that it's undeniable that we're here.
- There's large numbers of us, argue
- whatever you want about how large and how many
- or what percentage, but we're here and we're queer.
- And there's a lot of us, and there have been all along.
- And maybe we do need to think about recording some of what
- we can remember of having been told about this.
- And, yeah, some of that is hearsay.
- And people's remembrances of exactly
- which date and whatever, I've found
- that I have to be very, very careful
- and corroborate all of this, but that we've been around.
- But if you don't have a formal history, you don't exist.
- You don't exist.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: That's kind of what my next question was going
- to be, that this is a very important time, critical time,
- to even realize that this is history.
- 40 years ago, when Gay Alliance was started,
- or when the GLF started on campus,
- they weren't thinking in terms of history.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: --no, and preserving things.
- And it's why we only have a couple
- of copies of the first issue of The Empty Closet.
- Through certain of the dates, we've
- got so little evidence, physical evidence, of all of what was.
- Because it's the same with anything that's ephemera.
- You know, posters or just notices of all sorts,
- it's meant to be read for a week or two and then ripped down,
- and goodbye, forever.
- But it's our proof of what was and when it was.
- So we've been searching in campus papers.
- We've been searching here and there.
- We've been asking people.
- Now is an opportunity, as some of the people,
- who are in their 20s and 30s, back then,
- are maybe thinking of retiring and downsizing.
- Don't throw out all of what you think is trash from your attic
- and from your cellar.
- Do a little sifting, and let us look at it,
- and then, maybe, throw it out.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: I want you to reiterate for me what
- you said just previous to this, which
- is that if we can't recognize and record our history,
- we don't exist.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: We don't exist.
- I mean, even think about it.
- It's another--
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Say to me, though--
- remember, the audience isn't hearing my question to you.
- So give me a full statement of what you said.
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: Yes.
- There's great danger.
- Think about the people who are doing
- this, that really valiant fight, to make certain
- that the Holocaust is not forgotten.
- It's that sort of thing, that there
- are people who are so ignorant or, possibly, so filled with
- hate that they want to do anything to deny the existence.
- So if there are people who would publicly
- deny the existence of something like the Holocaust
- during the '30s and the '40s, then there
- are people who are going to deny.
- Oh, there's just a few of these freaks
- around, and they don't count, and things.
- Well, we have a history.
- This is who we are.
- This is what we really do and contribute
- to society in all different ways,
- and in so many different ways, for decade after decade
- after decade in our society.
- And that's the important lesson, that we're here.
- We always have been.
- As I said earlier, in retrospect,
- having gained gay eyes, I realize
- how many absolutely wonderful and inspiring teachers
- I had in grammar and high school, who were gay.
- They were gay men and lesbians, and they were wonderful to us
- kids.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: Is there anything
- we haven't covered that you were hoping to?
- BRUCE WOOLLEY: I think we're good.
- Yes, I don't know how much time has passed on this.
- You hear me gabble away about this.
- KEVIN INDOVINO: You can stop rolling,