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Lycoming College’s 51st Ewing Lecture will host Eric Gonzaba, Ph.D., for a talk entitled, “The Night the Gays Made: American Gay Nightlife after Stonewall,” on Tuesday, March 24, at 7:30 p.m., in the Trogner Presentation Room of Krapf Gateway Center. A reception will follow, and the event is free and open to the public.
Gonzaba’s talk will explore the blossoming of gay nightlife across the United States beginning in 1970, and invites listeners to consider how bars, baths, and other nightlife spaces were central to how everyday gay men experienced freedom in the aftermath of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. While histories of gay liberation often emphasize activism, court cases, and political organizations, this lecture shifts attention to the far more common experience of American gay men whose primary encounter with gay community took place after dark.
Informed by digital history methods that make a national perspective now possible, the talk draws on hundreds of thousands of listings from historical gay travel guides. Gonzaba shows that gay nightlife was remarkably widespread across the United States, not an isolated urban anomaly but a generalizable feature of post-1970 gay male life. Though often embraced by gay men as apolitical spaces, nightlife sites became centers of conflict over race, gender, policing, and public health. Rather than framing nightlife as either liberation or excess, this lecture argues that post-Stonewall nightlife offered a negotiated freedom that was limited, contested, and meaningful. It reveals how gay liberation was built not only in protest marches or at the ballot box, but also on dance floors, at bar counters, and in the geography of the urban night.
Gonzaba, associate professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton, is a historian of race, sexuality, and nightlife in the United States. He leads several award-winning public digital humanities projects.
In 2014, Gonzaba founded Wearing Gay History, an online archive and museum that explores global LGBTQ+ history through T-shirts; in 2016, the project received the National Council on Public History’s top student prize. In 2019, he co-launched Mapping the Gay Guides with Amanda Regan, Ph.D., a digital mapping project that uncovers overlooked queer geographies through historical gay travel guides. The project received the 2021 Emerging Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute and an honorable mention for the 2020 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities from the American Studies Association.
From 2021 to 2024, Gonzaba served as chair of the LGBTQ+ History Association, the nation’s oldest organization of queer historians, and he co-chaired and hosted the 2024 Queer History Conference. His work has been generously supported by the Point Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
Ewing Lecture Series
The Ewing Lecture Series was established in 1973 to honor Robert H. Ewing for his 27 years of teaching and service at Lycoming College. A revered teacher and friend of the College, his life was characterized by a deep religious faith, a passion for history, and a strong devotion to a liberal arts education. These qualities touched the lives of all who came in contact with him and led his many friends to establish this annual Lecture Series to bring distinguished historians to campus to share their work with the Lycoming community.
History at Lycoming College
Lycoming’s history department offers an intensive and enriching curriculum that helps students cultivate valuable insights about current events through a deep knowledge of the past. The multitude of exciting study abroad and research opportunities, such as fellowships, summer research grants, and a two-semester research project during senior year, puts Lycoming’s history program on par with some of the most rigorous history programs in the nation.