Timothy Retzloļ¬
East Lansing resident Tim Retzloff has written a compelling dissertation on gay life in metro Detroit from 1945-85 for his doctorate at Yale that he received last month.
Jim Larkin of Between the Lines, the local LGBT publication, writes that Retzloff chronicles Detroit's key role in gay rights over the decades.
"Detroit has never been done - nothing on the scale as your San Francisco or New York - and I thought it important that it should be," Retzloff, told the paper. "It has played a pioneering role in gay liberation, particularly in the early 1970s when Detroit had the first city charter that included protections for gay people."
Larkin writes:
The document presents a fascinating look at multiple facets of gay life in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs during those four decades: police crackdowns when gays met in cars or popular meeting spots during an era when homosexuality was looked at as a mental illness; the burgeoning bar scene when gay bars more than doubled from 1965-1985; an all-women commune called Geneva House that served as sort of the nerve center for the lesbian community of metro Detroit for much of the 1970s; the popularity and acceptance of black drag performers; lively characters as Prophet Jones, who was featured regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, Time, Newsweek and Life magazines in the 1940s and 1950s.
