It’s time for Sue Gilbert to come clean. At least, that’s what she told me in an email leading up to this interview. Gilbert played a supporting role in the growth of Iowa City’s drag and Gay Pride scene in the ’70s — and, thanks to a bizarre and surely predestined string of circumstances, planted […]
LGBTQ history
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Keith Haring left his mark on Iowa City. Thirty-five years later, it will go on public display for the first time.
From kindergarten through sixth grade, I spent countless hours staring at a wall in the Horn Elementary School library, daydreaming while an adult read a book to the class. Far more compelling than a fire alarm or a poster of LeVar Burton, I would fixate on a massive mural mounted on the wall of the […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Amid an anti-LGBTQ culture war in Iowa schools, the GSA is a safe space — with constitutional protections
If you’ve seen a student-organized drag show or queer rights protest over the past couple decades, odds are a GSA is behind it. GSAs — gender-sexuality alliances — serve as both social clubs and advocacy orgs for LGBTQ students, those questioning their identity and straight, cisgender allies in middle school, high school and college, and […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘We all suffer from the loss of them’: How the AIDS crisis shaped the next generation of LGBTQ activism in Iowa City
This is the final article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. In the early 1980s, Rev. John Harper was a fresh-faced graduate student at the University of Iowa and a semi-active member of the Gay People’s Union. He’d heard about some disease affecting gay men in New York and […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘No one believed that it would ever come to this place’: Fear and hatred clouded efforts to care for Iowa’s early AIDS patients
This is the second article in a three-part series examining the legacy of HIV/AIDS in Iowa City. Read part one here. It’s October 1980, and Jack Stapleton is treating a 19-year-old girl diagnosed with a rare lung infection: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Stapleton, then an internal medicine intern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, became interested in […]
Posted inCommunity/News
During the ‘wild, bucking ’70s’, Iowa City’s lesbian and gay communities were often at odds. A crisis brought them together.
This article is part one in a three-part series from Adria Carpenter exploring the history of HIV/AIDS activism in Iowa City. Part two and three will be published in the weeks to come. In the early 1980s, Rev. John Harper was a fresh-faced graduate student at the University of Iowa and a semi-active member of […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Sharon Malheiro, attorney who helped win marriage equality for Iowans, has died
Sharon Malheiro, an attorney whose career of fighting “for the underdog” spanned decades and who secured some of the most significant civil rights victories in Iowa, died on Sunday night. Her death was announced on social media by One Iowa, the nonprofit advocacy organization for LGBTQ Iowans she co-founded in 2006. “Sharon’s legacy of service, […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘Basix is staying here’: Beloved Cedar Rapids LGBTQ bar gets a new owner
Two weeks ago, when Andy Harrison announced his plans to close the iconic Belle’s Basix on Feb. 1, he said there was still a chance to save Cedar Rapids’ only LGBTQ night spot. “If someone decides to buy the business then it will carry on as they [see] fit,” Harrison, who has owned the club […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa City’s first LGBTQ safe space
On May 1, 2009, a charter bus rolled into downtown Iowa City, packed with lesbian and gay couples from Missouri (and a rabbi or two). A few weeks earlier, Iowa had become the first state in the Midwest to recognize same-sex marriage. The busload of couples had come to the Hawkeye State to get hitched. […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Ten years of marriage equality and 150 years of women lawyers: Important Iowa anniversaries in 2019
That Iowa has been a leader in establishing basic rights, which other Americans later take for granted, almost always comes as a surprise to non-Iowans. But this year marked major anniversaries for at least two instances in which Iowa showed that kind of leadership. The 10th anniversary of the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision in Varnum […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Remembering Varnum v. Brien, the case that brought marriage equality to Iowa
How a divorce helped kick-start marriage equality in Iowa By Paul Brennan The path to marriage equality in Iowa started with a divorce. Kimberly Brown and Jennifer Perez traveled from their home in western Iowa to Vermont in 2002 to be joined in a civil union, a substitute for traditional civic marriages Vermont created for […]
Posted inCommunity/News
‘It rocked my world’: Catching up with the Grays, one of the first lesbian couples married in Iowa
Decades before Lois and Karen Gray became one of the first same-sex couples in Iowa to legally marry, they were Iowa farm girls, courting each other on the campus of Grand View College (now University) in Des Moines. In the mid-1980s, in fairly quick succession, the women became friends, then roommates, then girlfriends. This evolution […]
