Grace Pryor | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Grace Pryor
Title: The Best Location in the Nation? Queer Community in 1970s Deindustrializing Cleveland
Major: History
²Ñ¾±²Ô´Ç°ù:ÌýPolitical Science
Advisor: Jordan Biro Walters
In 1970, Cleveland, Ohio, was the tenth largest city in the nation — with 35,000 more residents than San Francisco. Unlike San Francisco, historians have paid little attention to Cleveland’s LGBTQ+ community — and the queer scenes in much of the Midwest other than Chicago. Cleveland’s queer subculture in the decade after the famous Stonewall Uprising in New York City deserves greater attention. The growth of Cleveland’s queer subculture in the post-Stonewall world took place simultaneously with the city’s precipitous urban decline as the city’s industrializing economy faltered and its population declined. This Independent Study documents some of the specific organizations, gathering spots, and the milieu of queer Cleveland residents, primarily white gay men, during the 1970s as they navigated Cleveland’s deindustrializing landscape. I use queer publications, especially the local newspaper High Gear, and oral histories to reveal a community centered around a new wave of gay bars and nightclubs opening in the second half of the 1970s. Many of these bars and clubs took advantage of falling rental prices to concentrate in the emptied and deteriorating downtown thereby changing the city’s geography and its future. White gay Clevelanders also shaped the city through their residential patterns, including participating in the gentrification of Ohio City. This study includes maps of the geography of queer businesses in Cleveland, created in ArcGIS Online to show how and where predominantly white queer Clevelanders changed the shape of their city in the 1970s. This project hopes to bring more attention to some of the queer people who lived and loved in Cleveland, contributing a critical Midwestern lens to the study of post-Stonewall gay life.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
