THE LEGACY OF GLAD TO BE GAY

fter being aired, the original tapes were donated to the School of Social Work Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which agreed to keep them as an archive of the Madison gay liberation movement. In November 2006, however, the tapes were “They weren’t viewed very often, so we deemed them unimportant,” explained head librarian Jane Linzmeyer. Because issues affecting the LGBTQ community in Madison were rarely discussed in the mainstream news media during the period when the show aired, the loss of the archive is significant. Not only were the tapes primary source documents, but they also provided a rare video record of a small Midwestern city active in gay liberation. Much of the extant video and print archives of this period chronicle events in large coastal cities—one reason most histories of the gay movement focus on these areas.