By April Vega, Managing Editor
The Women and Gender Studies program, in collaboration with Canisius’s Unity and YDSA clubs, the Office for Diversity and Inclusion and the DMLLC LGBTQ+ Speaker Series, met for an event hosted by the library on Wednesday to reveal a poster exhibition installed in the Peter A. and Mary Lou Vogt Gallery on the first floor. The poster series, GAY LIBERATION NOW!, details the history of the LGBTQ+ rights movement in our very own Buffalo.
Marge Maloney, a lesbian activist who began her work in 1969, spoke before the exhibit opened. She spoke about her work with the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier (MSNF), a central pillar of the gay rights movement in Buffalo, which was founded in 1970. The organization helped network to support members of the queer community and resist police harrassment of gay bars. Since the collapse of MSNF in the ‘80s, Maloney has helped to form other groups to protect members of the community from reactionary movements well into the present.
The posters in the gallery outline both Maloney’s work as well as that of numerous other local activists, including Bobbi Prebis, a political organizer whose work predated the MSNF, and Peggie Ames, a trans woman who provided other transitioning women with safe places to live as their true gender and filled a valuable niche in the realm of rural LGBTQ+ activism.
The exhibit will be posted in the library for the next several weeks. Be sure to check it out!
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