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,