AIR#18. Celebrate Pride Standing On Shoulders
Let's celebrate Pride visiting Shoulders to Stand On (STSO). It's an ongoing initiative to document and preserve the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Rochester, New York. It began in 2003 as a project of the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley[1] and was spearheaded by Evelyn Bailey (1946-2022), an LGBTQ+ activist, educator, and historian. Evelyn led a team of volunteers to collect, inventory, and find permanent repositories for materials documenting the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations. These materials are housed in the archives at Cornell University, the University of Rochester, and the Rochester Public Library, among other repositories (Bailey, 2018).
Rochester is a mid-sized city with an
oversized history of LGBTQ+ activism and community engagement. Before
Stonewall, the LGBTQ+ community in Rochester remained largely underground.
Individuals with insider knowledge gathered in bars
that catered to lesbian and gay clients, which were frequently raided by
the police. The community came out of the closet in 1970 when students at the
University of Rochester launched the Gay Liberation Front. One year later, the Gay
Liberation Front began publishing The Empty Closet, one of the oldest
LGBTQ+ newspapers in the United States. Over subsequent years, the Gay
Liberation Front split into two organizations: a student-led organization at
the University of Rochester and a public organization called the Gay Alliance
of the Genesee Valley.
[Photo 1: 19th Ward Gay and Lesbian Pride March Photograph, circa 1996, Box: 7, Folder: 18. Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley collection, 2017-028. Local History & Genealogy Division.]
In 1985, Rochesterians elected Tim
O. Mains, a local high school history teacher, to serve on the city
council. Mains made history as the first openly gay candidate to be elected to
public office in the State of New York. Mains passed away in 2021. His papers
are now part of the Shoulders to Stand On collection at Rochester Public
Library.
[Photo 2: Tim O. Mains [portrait]. Tim O. Mains Papers, 2025-006. Local History & Genealogy Division.]
The Shoulders to Stand On collections
reveal the intersections of the personal and the political, the local and the universal.
Rochesterians have actively participated in the national movement for LGBTQIA+
equality, from joining the Second
National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights to organizing Take Back
the Night rallies to rallying support for same-sex
marriage. Alongside their public activism, many of these individuals pressed
for broader religious acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people through organizations such
as
Dignity-Integrity and the Open Arms
Metropolitan Community Church.
[Photo 3: Open Arms Pride celebration. Open Arms Metropolitan Community Church Records, 2025-023. Local History & Genealogy Division.]
Like many communities, the AIDS epidemic left deep scars on the Rochester LGBTQIA+ community. The Rochester Area Task Force on AIDS (RAFTA) organized in the mid-1980s to provide AIDS education and advocate for continued research on prevention and treatments. Individuals sewed squares for the Names Project AIDS Quilt on the Washington Mall, which was displayed at Monroe Community College in 1984.
[Photo 4: Tim Sally with handmade quilt in memory of Dan Cappiello (San Francisco, CA), Box: 1, Folder: 10. Tim Sally Papers, 2024-059. Local History & Genealogy Division.]
In the early 1990s, a coalition of surviving
partners and parents who had lost loved ones to AIDS organized the AIDS
Remembrance Garden, which at the time was thought to be the only living
AIDS Memorial in the nation. It was organized simultaneously to and independent
from the National AIDS
Memorial Grove in San Francisco, both of which were predated by the
privately constructed Texas AIDS
Memorial Garden in Houston, Texas. These gardens continue to serve as
forerunners for AIDS memorial gardens around the nation, including the AIDS Garden Chicago (opened 2019)
and the planned East Bay AIDS
Memorial Garden in Oakland, CA.
[Photo 5: AIDS Remembrance Garden Dedication. Box: 1, Folder: 38. AIDS Remembrance Garden records, 2025-002. Local History & Genealogy Division.]
Rochester also has a long tradition of celebrating LGBTQIA+ life and culture. Organizations like the ImageOut Film Festival and the Rochester Gay Men’s Chorus continue to showcase the talents of LGBTQIA+ community in Rochester and beyond into the 21st century.
Before she passed away in 2022, Evelyn
Bailey transferred the initiative to Rochester Public Library (RPL), which
housed 45+ individual collections of LGBTQ+ resources as of June 2024. Since
2025, RPL has expanded STSO by documenting the experiences of LGBTQIA2+ people
with intersectional identities, including those of BIPOC, transgender,
nonbinary, and people with disabilities. RPL is currently developing a mobile
preservation station to collect oral histories and create digitized surrogates
of donors’ materials for a post-custodial digital repository. RPL’s Local
History and Genealogy Division is partnering with the Internet Archive and 5
other organizations on a project called Amplifying LGBTQIA+ Activism in Local
History Archives, which will digitize eight STSO collections and make them
available online through Community
Webs.
You can learn more about the Shoulders to
Stand On initiative by visiting the Friends and Foundation of
the Rochester Public Library.
Ron Martin-Dent
[1] Doing business as (DBA) Rochester Rainbow Union, formerly DBA Out
Alliance
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