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In a 1997 profile in the Affirmations newsletter, Glen Johnson pledged to contribute “time, money, and enthusiasm” to the Ferndale community center. Over three decades, Johnson gave time, money, enthusiasm and much more to Affirmations [...]
This summer marks a milestone anniversary, yet most people don’t realize there’s an anniversary to mark. A half century ago, Michiganders who united in a bond of sexuality and gender that diverged from the so-called [...]
Early coordinator of the Detroit Gay Liberation Front, a founder of the Metropolitan Community Church of Detroit, and a constant gadfly for change within the Episcopal Church, John Kavanaugh died Dec. 17 at age 82. [...]
On April 15, 1970, at a large demonstration held in Kennedy Square in downtown Detroit to protest the war in Vietnam, Jim Toy became perhaps the first person in Michigan to publicly come out as [...]
Fifty years ago this fall, pioneering activist Jim Toy co-founded, with Cyndi Gair, the Human Sexuality Office at the University of Michigan. Now designated the Spectrum Center, it was the first campus “gay office” in [...]
Jerry Abraham “Jai” Moore, a tireless advocate for civil liberties and social justice, and the last surviving officer of the Detroit Area Council of the Mattachine Society of the late 1950s, died May 22 at [...]
[Photo: Stuart Itzkowitz in Detroit’s Gay Pride March, ca. 1975] Pioneering Metro Detroit gay activist, psychologist, one-time diarist and retired Wayne State University lecturer and counselor Stuart Itzkowitz died Nov. 5. A resident of Grosse [...]
In eulogizing David Balas, Rabbi Michael Schadick noted that Jewish sages teach that those who pass away during the High Holy Days “are particularly special to God.” David Lloyd Balas, arts supporter, benefactor and three-term, [...]
“Ho Ho! Hey Hey! We won’t pay to be gay!” The chant, led by Vivian Thompson on a bullhorn and in unison with a couple dozen or so other protesters, announced the stance of Lansing People’s Pride as they marched on June 17th through Old Town, home to this year’s Michigan Pride celebration.
The Stonewall uprising had reverb. Multiple nights of rioting against police in June 1969 sent shockwaves across the country and sparked gay organizing on a mass scale. A new, radical group in New York called [...]
As I rework my dissertation into a book manuscript — cutting sections here, smoothing out passages there, tugging at paragraphs like taffy over there, finding the through line — I have been sneaking out and doing some last-minute oral history interviews. Even though many people have told me to stop, that I need to get the book done. I can’t quite help it.
So, for this year’s National Coming Out Day, bring out your dead. If you have deceased LGBTQ friends or relatives who may not have been out during their lifetimes, bring them out, even in some small way. Help them take their next step. Tell someone about them. Write up an account of their lives for some future reader (or perhaps a historian). Maybe, in the fashion of cemeteries planting American flags on veterans’ graves, place a rainbow flag at their final resting place.
When writer Beth Brant died on Aug. 6, 2015, she left behind a loving family and a vibrant literary legacy documenting her life as a Native American lesbian. A mother, grandmother and longtime Melvindale resident, Brant is remembered as a pathbreaking lesbian author, poet, essayist, editor, lecturer and literary activist.
Carl Mitchell in the 1950s Carl Mitchell, a former Detroiter and author of three memoirs that touched on different aspects of his gay life in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, died May 14 [...]
