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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.
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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.