Ithaca Gay People's Center - 306 E, State St/MLK Jr. St
The building once located at 306 East State Street, known as the White Building and demolished circa 1990, was the second home of the Ithaca Gay People’s Center. The center’s origins date to the late 1960s with the establishment of the first gay student organization at Cornell. From the outset, Ithaca’s lesbian and gay (today, LGBTQ) community used printed materials in the form of newsletters, newspapers, leaflets, and flyers, to organize and disseminate messages of education, political action, and empowerment.The Cornell Student Homophile League, the second gay student organization in the United States, was founded in May 1968. By 1970, the organization changed its name to Cornell Gay Liberation Front to reflect the “out and proud” stance of the broader Gay Liberation Movement. They spread their message through their newsletter, Cornell Gay Liberation Front News.Cornell GLF initially met in 24 Willard Straight Hall, the student union located on Cornell’s central campus, and had an office in Anabel Taylor Hall, but students had few expressly gay spaces to socialize.Under the leadership of Cornell GLF, the Gay People’s Center was established at Sheldon Court, Room 221, on 410 College Avenue in April 1972 (the center later relocated to 306 East State Street in 1975). Open to students at Cornell, Ithaca College, and local residents, the Gay People’s Center became the place from which Cornell GLF enacted the four central facets of their mission: education, peer counseling via the organization’s “Gayline,” social opportunities, and political engagement. The Gay People’s Center was jointly financed by the University, Cornell GLF, and the Graduate Coordinating Council. This venture was not without controversy, however, and the center faced several acts of vandalism, including broken windows, and harassing phone calls.In 1972, Cornell GLF members Jane Gallop and Ken Popert, both active in the Gay People’s Center, co-authored a chapter on homosexuality for Sex Information for Cornell Students, a 68-page informational pamphlet published by the Office of the Dean of Students and Sex Education by and for Cornell Students (SECS). Gallop and Popert used progressive, empowering language such as: "You should realize that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING GAY. Keep telling yourself that until it sinks in. All who claim that being gay is a defect… do so out of transparently self-serving interest in maintaining the status quo… the defect does not lie in those who are gay, but rather in those who cannot rest as long as anyone is allowed to be different from themselves. Your sexuality is an integral and inviolable part of you. It is not like an article of clothing, to be worn or not according to the dictates of fashion."The Gay People’s Center was also home to Lavender Opinion, a short-lived, multi-issue community newspaper published monthly by Ithaca Gays for the Central New York Area. Approximately twelve issues were published over the course of 1974, each focused on national and regional lesbian and gay news, opinion pieces, creative writing, and local community activities and events including an Alternative Sexuality Counseling Group, the annual May Gay Festival, Women’s Festival, general meetings, gay workshops, picnics, film screenings, and dances.Jane Gallop, talking to The Cornell Daily Sun, noted that due to Ithaca’s geographic isolation in central New York, it was difficult for a gay subculture to form. She found it affirming to interact with other gay people because, in her words, “it makes you feel good that you’re gay. The opinions of straights matter less.” The Ithaca Gay People’s Center strove to provide a space where gay and lesbian Cornellians and local Ithacans could feel just that and furthered a sense of community through the printed materials they produced.LISTEN HERE
Nite Court - 215 N Aurora St.
In July 1976, the Gay People’s Center organized a boycott and picket of Nite Court, a bar located at 215 North Aurora Street, whose owner, Louis Cataldo, had a policy against allowing couples of the same gender to touch while dancing. On July 7, Cataldo, faced with a dance floor of primarily gay couples, abruptly cut the music, turned up the lights, and announced there would be no more “same sex touching” at his establishment. The center’s steering committee spread news of Cataldo’s activities and their planned boycott through a blistering series of informational flyers and leaflets. The standoff ended in February 1977 when the New York State Division of Human Rights found probable cause that the bar’s management had discriminated against gay people. The owners of Nite Court and six members of the Gay People’s Center signed an agreement in which the club agreed to admit all persons and allow them to engage in legally permissible activities regardless of gender.LISTEN HERE
Smedley's Bookshop, 1st location - 119 E Buffalo St
For a decade, beginning in 1984, the mixed commercial and residential building at 307 West State Street was home to the women’s bookstore Smedley’s. According to the 1976 Women’s Resource Guide to Ithaca, Smedley’s was “a feminist and socialist bookstore committed to women, politics, beauty, and fun. The titles range from the intensely personal to the widely social. They [the bookstore] are working toward positive alternative ways to make life more liveable.” Smedley’s first opened in 1976 under the ownership of a Marxist-feminist collective and was named after the journalist, feminist, and spy, Agnes Smedley. At that time, the bookshop was collectively owned and operated by Harriet Bronsnick (later, Alpert), Kate Dunn, and Camille Tischler. In 1981, the collective sold the business to editor and writer Irene “Zee” Zahava, who turned Smedley’s into a more all-encompassing women’s bookstore.
Larry Mitchell Residence/Calamus Books Headquarters - 323 N Geneva St.
The transitional Queen Anne-Colonial Revival house located at 323 North Geneva Street in downtown Ithaca was owned by gay novelist and publisher Larry Mitchell from 1977 to 1983.In 1972 Mitchell purchased a plot of land in Caroline, New York, where members of the Staten Island collective camped over the summer. By 1973, the group, then known as the lesbian and gay commune Lavender Hill, jointly purchased 80 acres of land in the hamlet of West Danby, near Ithaca, and built a house. Gay and lesbian communes, according to historian Stephen Vider, “were formed as a way to solve the isolation and loneliness many gay people experienced in 1970s America.” Mitchell lived summers at the Lavender Hill property from 1973 until 1983, and other Lavender Hill members wintered with him on North Geneva Street. As a novelist, he became known for his unsentimental depictions of underground queer life in New York City’s Lower East Side and East Village. His first and most successful book, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, is largely based on his experiences at Lavender Hill. Part gay liberation fable, part radical manifesto, The Faggots “tells the story of a brutal empire in decline, where faggots, fairies, women, and dykes aim to survive, dance, create art, and have sex under the tyrannical rule of men.” The manuscript was originally conceived as a children’s book. As fellow Lavender Hill member Ned Asta, the books’ illustrator, recounts: "Living with Larry and knowing Larry, he was always writing in composition books by long hand. Originally, it had all these funny names. He thought it was a kids’ book and then he showed me what you would call a script, I guess, of the book. I said, 'Larry, this is not a kids’ book at all.' He said, 'Yeah, I know, it’s my philosophy.' "When no publishers, gay or otherwise, accepted the manuscript, Mitchell founded his own press, Calamus Books, which he initially ran out of several spare bedrooms in his 323 North Geneva Street residence. The North Geneva house is also where Ned Asta created the book’s illustrations in a second floor front room with a bay window that looked out onto the street. She remembers being influenced by the wallpaper, navy blue with intricate white teardrop designs she mirrored in her drawings.Lavender Hill member Mitchell Karp describes the commune and its influence on The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions like this: "I think what Lavender Hill held out was a vision of possibility. Almost utopian… I remember dancing naked in the rain in the summer. And being naked at the pond with hundreds of people. And a potluck, and thinking everything in my life since, it’s informed by that period. My then roommate, or landlady, Heather Dunbar, who I was staying with when she described Lavender Hill to me, she said, “These are people who live out in the country who turn rags into jewels and adorn themselves. And when they take to the dance floor, they create a sense of community that entices, that everyone wants to embrace and be part of.” Lavender Hill turned birthdays into festivals. We decorated cakes with flowers, and would turn the mundane into the extraordinary. Nobody epitomized that more than Ned. Ned would create sculptures in the woods that were delightful, artistic, creative visualizations that you would just stumble upon and think, “I've been visited by fairies.” All of the above made Ned the ideal person for Larry to ask to illustrate his book. She lived those characters, intuitively understood them, and did such a superb job bringing [them] to life visually."The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions went through three printings and sold ten thousand copies. In the early 1980s, Mitchell relocated Calamus Books to New York City where he ran the press out of his apartment on 2nd Avenue. He also co-founded Gay Presses of New York, an affiliated collective of small gay publishers that included Calamus Books, Sea Horse Press, and the JH Press. As the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic destroyed his readership and his eyesight deteriorated, Mitchell stopped writing in 1993, and the distributor of Calamus Books went bankrupt. He died of pancreatic cancer on December 26, 2012, at his residence at 410 North Cayuga Street in Ithaca. His papers, housed in Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection, are filled with letters from indebted readers of The Faggots, which, according to queer studies scholar Matt Brim, “secured Mitchell’s reputation as a champion of radical queer life and politics.”LISTEN HERE
Smedley's Bookshop, 2nd location - 307 W State St
In 1984, the bookshop moved from 119 East Buffalo Street to 307 West State Street. Under Zahava’s ownership, Smedley’s was not only a bookstore, but served as a gathering place, information center, and haven for all kinds of women. In addition to books, the small store sold every women’s periodical available at the time, women’s music, and featured a community bulletin board that acted as a vibrant women’s communication network.Cornell students often learned about Smedley’s from Biddy Martin, then an out lesbian assistant professor in the German department, who started a gay and lesbian studies reading group. Lisa L. Moore, a PhD student in English Literature at Cornell during the 1980s, remembers Smedley’s vividly:"On Friday afternoons I made my way down the infamously steep Buffalo Street hill—trudging if I was lucky, slipping on the ice and sliding down the precipice on my butt for half a block if I was not—to face a quiet weekend. Smedley’s Bookshop on State Street was my rest stop. The store was located in an 1860s wood-frame house like so many in that part of town. The owner, Irene “Zee” Zahava, lived upstairs, and she was always there. I don’t remember ever seeing an employee. I would come into the warmth of the store from the biting wind and freezing temperatures, stomp the snow off my fleece-lined boots, loosen my face-shrouding hood and drop my giant pink down-filled coat in the entryway. Thus unburdened, I would browse for an hour or so. I usually bought the papers in order to get the news about my new lesbian world: Sojourner, Off Our Backs (and later On Our Backs, its naughty younger sister), and Gay Community News for the Alison Bechdel cartoons. If I had some cash I might buy pleasure reading: novels like Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah or Andrea Freud Loewenstein’s This Place, an anthology of lesbian poetry called Naming the Waves."The feminist community that formed around Smedley’s helped nurture the political career of Roey Thorpe, an organizer and doctoral candidate in U.S. women’s history at SUNY Binghamton, who in 1994 became the first openly gay person elected to the City of Ithaca Common Council. Thorpe also taught a course on lesbian history geared towards community members, opposed to an academic audience, at Smedley’s. Her approach incorporated both social history and works of literature including The Well of Loneliness, Stone Butch Blues, The Price of Salt, Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker novels, local author Claudia Brenner’s memoir Eight Bullets (published by Firebrand Books), and writings by Joan Nestle, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Thorpe describes the influence literature and books had on her life as follows:"When I came out in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s, it was like a kind of silence. It was what it’s like to move through the world and have earphones on. Cover your ears and there was nothing. It was so hard to find any connection. And the only connections that there were were through music because there were some lesbian music labels. And there were books. It was really books and literature that made me feel there were other people out there like me, and that gave me a connection. For me, it wasn't only the affirmation of, yeah, there are lesbians. But it was also that there was a lesbian political analysis. There was a way of seeing the world in a transformative way that gave me a framework to understand the things that were happening to me, and also how I could react, and what I could say, and how I could think about myself. When I came out, the thing that was hardest for me was, I couldn't imagine a happy life. I didn’t have any role models for what a happy life might look like. It was still hard, even through literature, and through movies, or anything like that, to find anything that depicted a happy life. Not even Leslie Feinberg was going to do that. Nobody did that. And you had to make that. You had to make yourself, but at least there was the idea that I might be able to live a life. That I might be able to survive. The idea that there was something more, and that there was a way to understand what was happening to me was so important. There was also the courage of the people who were doing the writing. There were people that were willing to take that chance and put it on the line, and it made me think, “well, maybe I could do that.” I never was good at being closeted. It's just not my nature. It's not that it's courageous. It's that some people can keep a secret that way, and I just couldn't. Having a way to see other people and what they did with that was really, really important to me. I think literature gave me that."Smedley’s regularly hosted events featuring notable feminist writers who spoke at Cornell and then gave free community readings at the bookstore. As Zahava remembers of the poetry readings she hosted, “the poets who would come from out of town [to do readings at Smedley’s] were like rock stars. It wasn’t a poetry-being-shunted-off kind of thing. And especially Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. The poetry was very elevated.” Several of these writers, including Dorothy Allison, Cheryl Clarke, and Audre Lorde, were published by Firebrand Books. The local relationship between Firebrand and Smedley’s (Firebrand published authors whose books Smedley’s would then sell) was a microcosm of the larger Women in Print Movement. Feminist publishers, like Nancy K. Bereano, relied on women printers, distributors, and booksellers, like Zahava, to support their work. Smedley’s closed in August of 1994 with plans to transition the business into the Emma’s Writing Center for Women. “When Smedley’s first opened,” Zahava told The Ithaca Journal, “it really was the only source for a lot of things. Now you can get almost everything I carried at other bookstores in town.”LISTEN HERE
Firebrand Books Building - 141-143 East State St (141 The Commons)
The Firebrand Books Building is located at 141-143 East State Street on The Commons, a pedestrian mall in downtown Ithaca. The building was constructed in 1872 for the prominent local publishing and bookselling firm Andrus, McChain, & Lyons (later Andrus & Church) and was designed by architect Alfred B. (A. B.) Dale. It is a four-story commercial brick row building with Italianate influence. From 1984 to 2000, its second floor housed the headquarters of Firebrand Books, a nationally recognized, multiple award-winning, small feminist and lesbian press founded by local activist, editor, and publisher Nancy K. Bereano.Bereano began her publishing career in 1979 as editor for the Feminist Series at Crossing Press, a small publishing house founded by Ithaca College English professors John and Elaine Gill, then located in nearby Trumansburg, New York. She published 17 titles over her four years at Crossing. Despite bringing notoriety to the press through her keen editorial eye and acquisition of titles by emerging feminist icons like Michelle Cliff, Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and Pat Parker, Bereano was fired in October 1984. Crossing incorrectly claimed the Feminist Series was not making enough money, and Bereano’s dedication to the publication of lesbian books was “uppity.”One month later, she founded Firebrand Books in Ithaca with financial support from family and friends, most notably the well-known lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Bereano took up residence on the second floor of 143 East State Street (listed under the address 141 The Commons). The prominent location of The Commons made the building an ideal choice for Bereano who, true to the name of her press, wanted to make her mark on the publishing world.In a letter to writer Dorothy Allison, dated October 12, 1984, Bereano explained: "The name has been decided upon: Firebrand Books. It has an honorable linguistic history dating back to the 13th century; I like the sense of controlled fierceness it conveys; I can use a dragon (a much male-maligned creature) as a logo. After I leave Crossing on November 19th (it is doubtful that they will negotiate anything with me), my new address will be Nancy K. Bereano, Firebrand Books, 141 The Commons, Ithaca, New York 14850."Firebrand soon became a leader of the publishing revolution that occurred during the Second Wave Feminist and Women in Print movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The press produced work in a wide variety of genres by ethnically and racially diverse authors including Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Cheryl Clarke, Leslie Feinberg, Jewelle Gomez, Audre Lorde, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. In addition to full-length books, Firebrand also published a series of informational pamphlets called “Sparks” and semi-annual catalogs, released every fall and spring. The catalogs were packaged and mailed by volunteers from the Firebrand Flames, a local women’s softball team sponsored by the press.As Bereano says of her immersion in the world of feminist and lesbian publishing:"I believed in the significance, the importance, of doing this work. I saw a blossoming of lesbian culture. I was entering into it. I had a history—not a personal history, but a lesbian history—that I really wanted to learn about and honor. And there was a lot of work to do to get stuff out there. It was a period of time where women had manuscripts that they had had in their drawers for years that they couldn't imagine possibly getting published. It was very fertile. It was all tingley, all over the place. Many magazines, many, many publishers, just a lot of excitement. And this became my work. It's like all of the stuff that I had done for organizing, all of the skills that I had learned about getting people to a demonstration and planning backwards and what you needed to do, that's how a book got produced. Do you know what I mean? It was just different stops along the way. But in terms of thinking about it, that was how a book got into bookstores. And I was, you know, I was a reader. I had been an English lit major. So yeah, it was me, there was a growth in me concomitant with the growth in the press."In 1996, Bereano was recognized with the Lambda Literary Publisher’s Service Award for her contributions to LGBTQ and small press publishing. Due to the changing economics of the book trade, Firebrand closed its doors in 2000 after sixteen years in operation. Stephen Landesman, writing about Bereano’s retirement for The Ithaca Journal, described Firebrand Books as a “widely renowned press” and “one of the most prestigious lesbian, gay, and feminist publishers in the world.” On October 5, 2022, the Ithaca Common Council unanimously voted to designate the building at 141-143 East State Street as a local historic landmark. It is officially known today as the Firebrand Books Building.LISTEN HERE
The History Center in Tompkins County - 110 N. Tioga St.
The Cornell Local History Research Library and Archives are a department of The History Center in Tompkins County and are located on the first floor of the Tompkins Center for History & Culture. Our collections contain nearly 100,000 photographs, over 1000 linear feet of archives, genealogy files for over 2,000 Tompkins County families, and 3,500 books relating to the history of Tompkins County. The Cornell Local History Research Library, named in honor of Ezra Cornell, is a place for discovery about Tompkins County's past. Use of the research space and access to archival materials is free to all Tompkins County residents ($10/day for out of county residents). Contact us in advance to see the archival collections used in the research and development of this tour, and to listen to oral history interviews with Nancy Bereano. Or stop in to explore our current exhibit! Learn more at thehistorycenter.net/exhibit-hall.Related Archival Collections:Tompkins County LGBT Collection V-65-1-5 courtesy The History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca, New York2019 - HERSTORY: Generation to Generation Women’s Oral History Project, The History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca New York.2019 - Local Sisters of Change Oral History Project, The History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca New York.Archival materials from The History Center referenced in this tour: Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 3, April 1974; Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 4, May 1974; Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 6, August 1974; Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 7, October 1974; Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 8, October 1974; Lavender Opinion, Vol. 1 No. 9, December 1974. Community Activism Collection V-58-1-3 (1,2) courtesy The History Center in Tompkins County, Ithaca, New York“Gays Dispute a ‘Court’ Ruling,” Ithaca Journal, July 10, 1976; Jim Meyers, “Nite Court vs. the Gays,” Ithaca Journal, September 4, 1976; David W. Reece, “Nite Court: Straightening Out,” The Phoenix, September 27, 1976; Doris Walsh, “Nite Court, Gays Sign Agreement,” Ithaca Journal, February 8, 1977; “Sex and Equality,” Ithaca Journal, February 8, 1977.Kanani Kauka, “A Life’s Work: An Interview With Firebrand Books Publisher Nancy Bereano,” Lambda Book Report, May 1997, 8; Stephen Landesman, “Firebrand founder speaks up: Gay publishing industry has changed, Ithacan says,” The Ithaca Journal, May 9, 2001; Trudy Ring, “Lesbian-Feminist Press Firebrand Books' Former Home Now a Landmark,” The Advocate, October 11, 2022. https://www.advocate.com/news/2022/10/11/lesbian-feminist-press-firebrand-books-former-home-now-landmark; Lynette Yetter, “Local Lesbian Landmark: The Firebrand Books Building,” Sinister Snapshot, February 10, 2023. https://us3.campaign-archive.com/?u=25e4728bbc8585d94bbed9b57&id=c83314c8ca. Wendy Skinner, “Bringing new energy to council: Alderwoman Roey Thorpe works for change,” The Ithaca Journal, January 21, 1994; Roey Thorpe, interview by Jeff Iovannone, April 19, 2023.Skinner, “Feminist bookstore’s spirit will live in writing center,” The Ithaca Journal, August 26, 1994.
