By Susan Jordan
The Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley has had five locations over the past 40 years – beginning in 1970 as the Gay Liberation Front at the University of Rochester. In 1973, when the GLF became the GAGV, the new group rented its first office on Brown St. in Bullshead; then for about 16 years was at the Genesee Co-op on Monroe Ave.; then starting in 1990 at the first community center in a storefront at the corner of Elton St. and Atlantic Ave., and finally in 2004 at the current location, the Auditorium Center on E. Main between Goodman and Prince Sts.
Todd Union, University of Rochester. Patti Evans was a U.R. sophomore in fall 1970, and Bob Crystal was a senior at Cornell. The late Bob Osborn, Larry Fine and others started the Gay Liberation Front on the U.R. campus on Oct. 3, 1970, inspired by the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in June 1969, which had led to the founding of the GLF on three campuses: Columbia, Cornell and the University of Rochester. A separate activist group in NYC that arose after Stonewall was the GAA or Gay Activists’ Alliance.
Both Bob and Patti (who was living in NYC) were present on the second night of the Stonewall riots. Patti said, “It was a peaceful candlelight demonstration the night after the riots… Then I heard the sound of breaking glass. The police stormed us like an army.”
Bob said, “People came to New York in the summer of ’69 and then went back to their campuses and talked about Stonewall. I was at Cornell and joined GLF there. There was back and forth communication between the three colleges, so when I moved to Rochester in summer 1971, it was natural to join the GLF at U.R.”
Patti said, “I got ‘recruited’ by Bob Osborn at the Riverview (the former women’s bar). I soon started leafleting myself. I became very active in GLF. We got to the point where we were getting 100 people on Sunday nights in Todd Union – we had frequent dances with free beer and live bands, so lots of people came, including people from the city.”
Bob added, “‘Townie’ men became the ‘Gay Brotherhood,’ while the women started GROW (Gay Revolution of Women), which rented an office in the Genesee Co-op on Monroe Ave., and GLF was still the campus group for a while longer. The name ‘Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley’ was carefully argued over. The Gay Brotherhood and GROW decided that the GAGV would be an umbrella group that could include the three different groups. We townies had been told we couldn’t come to GLF meetings on campus because student funds paid for campus student groups.”
Patti said, “Obviously we had grown beyond the campus. It was time to move on.”
Bob said, “One night at Jim’s bar Mark Hull offered to rent us a space in a building he owned on Brown St. After we moved off-campus, the GLF didn’t last long. Most of our materials went to Brown St., but the Empty Closet stuff went to Joe Baker’s home, where he edited the paper.”
812 Brown Street. The first Gay Alliance president, Whitey LeBlanc, said, “In 1973, after the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Brotherhood became the Gay Alliance, we rented an office behind a burned-out drugstore on Brown St. in Bullshead, not in the drugstore building but in what I recall as a dentist’s office – or a combination of vacant facilities. There’s nothing left of that building at all except a vacant lot.
“We entered the building from the back, off Kensington St. — back entrance as usual! The office had electricity but no heat, so we used electric heaters. There was one room adequate for the 40 or so people who came to meetings every Sunday night, and a couple of small rooms used as office space. We had the Speakers Bureau, a political action committee and some other programs.
“We had a lot of vandalism at Brown St. I don’t know if the local kids knew we were gay, or if it was just random stone throwing. So we moved to the Genesee Co-op, where the women’s group GROW (later the Lesbian Resource Center) was located. They suggested we move there and we thought it was a great idea.”
The Genesee Co-op, 713 Monroe Ave., an attractive renovated 19th century firehouse, was the home of the GAGV after leaving Brown St. in April 1974 and before moving in 1990 to the storefront on Elton and Atlantic. The Alliance rented a small brick-walled room on the second floor (which eventually became the Empty Closet office) and later also rented the Sunken Room, where popular coffeehouses were held on Friday nights. It was a step up from the derelict building on Brown St., but Paul Scheib, who was on the Gay Alliance board in the 1980s, remembers the Co-op site as less than perfect.
Said Paul, “It was intimidating to come here for meetings after dark, because it wasn’t well labeled, you had to go down the alley past the dumpster, and sometimes the light over the door was off. The message was basically, this is where ‘people like you’ have to go. It was especially hard for people who weren’t out yet or were just coming out and trying to connect with other gay people. It was either the bars or down a dark alley past the garbage. All of that was a big reason to push for our own space on Atlantic…. This alley hasn’t really changed much since 1989!”
179 Atlantic Ave. at Elton St.: Evelyn Bailey said, “We looked for a new building at the instigation of (Bachelor Forum owner) Arnie Pegish. At the Genesee Co-op in the Sunken Room, we did have an office. We were broken into a couple of times. The Co-op was also going to do renovations to make the building handicap accessible and the tenants would have to pick up the cost. Arnie said that until we got a building of our own we would always be at the mercy of a landlord and never be able to have an independent presence in the Community. So Claire Parker said, ‘Well, Arnie, find us a building.’
“He did, down the street from the new Bachelor Forum location. We could not get a loan from a bank, so Tim Tompkins gave us a loan to buy the building. We paid off the loan in 18 months.
“A heated discussion followed about putting the name on the door — needless to say, with the Alliance having its own building, we needed to identify ourselves. As Board President at the time, Claire said. ‘The greatest gift you could give me, on leaving the Board, is to put the name on the door.’ We did.”
Putting the word “Gay” on the building did not cause major problems. At one point a troubled local youth threw a stone through the front window, and once some bigots threw red paint – but although they were just a few feet away, they missed the building and the paint landed on the Elton St. sidewalk.
By the turn of the century, after over a decade of occupation, the building had become too small to contain the growing staff, the groups that used the building as a meeting place, and the rapidly expanding Youth Group, which had no designated area of its own within the building. It was time to move on and the Atlantic Ave. community center was sold to ArtWalk.
The Auditorium Center, 875 E. Main St.: The Gay Alliance moved in 2004 to offices on the fifth floor of this enormous, fascinating building, erected in 1929 by Freemasons, which also houses the Auditorium Theatre, currently the Rochester Broadway Theatre League’s venue for touring Broadway productions. The Youth Center has its own very large, high-ceilinged room on the first floor, now flanked by the Community Room and the GAGV Library in the Prince St. lobby. The staff office and the Nopper conference room are both located on the fifth floor.
