Education

The Keystone Conference is a program for transgender individuals and their allies that has been held annually in Pennsylvania since 2009. The items in this collection include programs from previous conferences and vendor materials from the 2018 conference.

Created by Lorraine Kujawa, Cindy Mitzel, Mary Nancarrow, and several others in 1983, the Lavender Letter Newsletter was a calendar of events for, by, and about lesbian women to create community in the Central Pennsylvania area. The newsletter was distributed monthly until the mid-2000s.

Barry Loveland interviews Alex Reber, now 32, who relates fascinating stories of what it was like growing up as an only child of an Evangelical Christian family raised on a farm in Bethel, a rural town between Harrisburg and Allentown and becoming an important political LGBT activist in Central PA. His accounts at camp and high school reveal the difficulty of being gay and the interesting paths towards his independence. In Lebanon Valley College he was outed and blackballed at church, being called evil and having parents refuse to help him pay tuition. A gay couple started a foundation to help gay students complete college and Alex, a gifted child who received a scholarship, graduated a semester early. His tales about finding and working with a thriving gay community in Harrisburg are enthralling. He got an internship and became friends with Dan Miller, a leader in the gay community, in Dan’s accounting firm, Miller, Dixon, Drake. He tells in detail his work over ten years with Planned Parenthood, beginning with his own experience of being treated and shamed by a physician. He discusses his romance and marriage to his husband during the exciting time when marriage became legal in Pennsylvania. It was a momentous time. He explains what it was like attending the Equality March, primaries for Obama and Clinton, and his experience at the 2016 Democratic Convention. He recounts the inside stories of the contradictions and fun of local state politics— and stories about running candidates for state office and working on committees for the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. He is very involved at the Center, FAB, and getting LGBT people to run for office.

The GSH Newsletter is an outreach feature of the Gay Switchboard of Harrisburg. Noteworthy articles in this issue are:

• "San Francisco Olympics"
• "New Newsletter"
• "Students Talk Back" presents letters on human sexuality from Elizabethtown College students

This was announced as the last GSH newsletter. A new newsletter produced by MCC Harrisburg was expected to make its first appearance in December 1981.

The Gay Era was a newspaper that reported news of interest from around the United States, with a specific focus on the news surrounding the gay community in Central PA, and provided a central forum for gay communities that were spread out across Central PA. Noteworthy news in this issues:

• "State Council for Sexual Minorities Establishes Complaint Center" (p. 2)
• "Equality for Gays Voted at West Chester State" (p. 2)
• "Rural Caucus Meets in State College" (p. 7)
• "Villanova University's Gays Still Deep in Closet" (p. 7)
• "So There Are No Sexual Minority Materials in Textbooks" (p. 10)
• "Reasons for Repeal of Pennsylvania's Voluntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse (Sodomy) Statute" (p. 15)
• H.O.W. [Homophiles of Williamsport] (p. 17)
• " 'Prissy' Off-Stage in Marietta" (p. 22)
• "Rural Gay Resource List" (p. 23)