Dr. Jeffry Iovannone
Jeffry Iovannone, coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies program, will give a lecture at the third biennial E. H. Butler Library Archives and Special Collections Charles Rand Penney Speaker Series, “Rust and Stone: Stonewall 50,” at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State on Saturday, Nov. 2.
In this lecture, based on his book project about gay liberation in Buffalo, Dr. Iovannone uses the Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York to complicate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Riots.
Through an analysis of the founding of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, Buffalo's first gay and lesbian civil rights organization, Iovannone challenges the significance of Stonewall within the history of the American LGBTQ rights movement, arguing for a holistic narrative of LGBTQ history that takes into account the lives and experiences of LGBTQ people in Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo.
Finally, Iovannone discusses how Buffalo State’s Madeline Davis Archive provides a blueprint for LGBTQ social change outside of coastal American cities today.
The lecture will be held in the Elizabeth C. Tower Auditorium of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave., and is free and open to the public.
The speaker series is held in association with the Burchfield Penney Art Center and SUNY Buffalo State’s Bengal Allies.
