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Retzloff, with his mountains of LGBT history research, began to realize that he needed to write a dissertation so that his research could find a home. “Part of my motivation,” he reflected, “was that it gave me an opportunity to write about history.” When he became a volunteer writer at Between The Lines in 1993, he was again able to fuel the passion that drove his life. It also guided him to write an institutional history of gays and lesbians at the three campuses of University of Michigan, his first paid history gig. That love led him to connect cars and the LGBT lifestyle in Flint in a published contribution to a 1997 anthology on LGBT history, despite the fact that he was a college dropout at the time.
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It was there, in the information-rich halls of libraries, that he was able to indulge his love of LGBT history. He worked at the Flint Public Library and later the UM-Flint Library, and continued to work full-time (later at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Library) even after returning to college on a part-time basis. Retzloff graduated from Flint Northern High School and went to University of Michigan-Flint, but when he came out, he felt isolated and alone like many gay people in that era.
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He just didn’t always know how he was going to get it to print. 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.ĭetroit, indeed, had no shortage of gay stories to tell from 1945-85, and Retzloff was committed to telling them. The result was “City, Suburb, and the Changing Bounds of Lesbian and Gay Life and Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1945-1985.” He conducted 108 interviews, went through 100,000 court records over a span of eight months and spent eight years at Yale University producing the 680-page dissertation that includes 100 maps and images.
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And he went over and beyond to provide that four-decade plus look at gay life before same-sex marriage was even whispered. from 1935-1940, before returning home to play in the bars in Detroit and suburban Hazel Park – “A testament to the raging popularity of men transgressing gender for nightclub audiences on the eve of World War II.” It was home to an all-male revue of female impersonators who toured the country from Denver and Seattle to Casper, Wyoming and Orange, Conn. “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.”ĭetroit was also home to a Catholic conscientious objector by the name of Brian McNaught who staged a hunger fast to call attention to the plight of gay Catholics in 1974, which drew national attention. “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,” said Retzloff, a Flint native and former Ann Arbor and current Lansing resident. Well, that and his keen desire for Detroit to have a gay introspective done on it, just as such other major cities as New York, San Francisco and Chicago have had done. It wasn’t a college degree or even a doctorate that led Tim Retzloff to compose his dissertation on gay life in metro Detroit from 1945-85, but rather his passion to write the dissertation that led him to get his doctorate at Yale last month.