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.

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