Dr. Jeffry Iovannone will present this lecture, based on his book project about gay liberation in Buffalo, New York. Dr. Iovannone uses the Madeline Davis LGBTQ+ Archive of Western New York to complicate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Riots. Through an analysis of the founding of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, Buffalo's first gay and lesbian civil rights organization, he challenges the significance of Stonewall within the history of the American LGBTQ rights movement, arguing for a holistic narrative of LGBTQ+ history that takes into account the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people in Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo. Finally, he discusses how Buffalo State’s Madeline Davis Archive provides a blueprint for LGBTQ+ social change outside of coastal American cities today.
Dr. Iovannone completed his Ph.D. work in American studies at SUNY at Buffalo and is currently a full-time lecturer in interdisciplinary studies as well as the coordinator of the Women and Gender Studies Program at SUNY Fredonia. He has extensively mined Buffalo State’s Madeline Davis and associated LGBTQ+ collections for his previous, current, and upcoming research and publications.
A reception will follow the talk and Q&A.
Free parking will be available in the Burchfield Penney Art Center lot.
This is the third biennial E. H. Butler Library Archives and Special Collections Charles Rand Penney Speaker Series, presented in association with the Burchfield Penney Art Center and Buffalo State’s Bengal Allies.
For additional information, please contact Dan DiLandro, head of archives and special collections in Butler Library, 878-6308.
