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.