A Brief Introduction to Gay Liberation in Iowa: Research by David Weldon

A Brief Introduction to Gay Liberation in Iowa: Research by David Weldon

I believe in the aphorism, “you can’t know where you are if you do not know how you got there.” Much of how we got here is lost or buried in an archive and we are left with some notable, because they are so often repeated, incidents that were actually rather minor. I too, have limits to research, but within those limits are things I participated in, in small way, or witnessed. I come from the time when Gay was the matrix that contained us all; the white light from which the spectrum was broken, so I will continue to use that term as it is from slang meaning promiscuous and by extension “those who are free from the restraints of a repressive society on sex and sexuality.” And that was truly a description of the generation that brought forth liberation. A generation that not only sought freedom from the repression of sex and sexuality but all repression. We, Kennedy’s Children, kicked holes in every wall of the prison of conformism we had been indoctrinated into and tried to live free. Every liberation movement of the sixties was one of those holes into a more natural world, and freedom.

My research is limited by time, deaths, access to documents and proprietary restraints. I do not consider what is now presented to be any more than a cursory introduction, but everything is factual. Please look upon these documents as if they were letters your grandparents sent to each other during the war, and which you have just found, dusty and lost in an attic you are cleaning for the last time in someone’s life.

And for a look at the work of a real historian, here is a link to the work of Dennis Brumm of Ames and San Francisco.

Iowa State University/Ames Gay History