TIM RETZLOFF: Much of Detroit’s gay life in the late 1960s revolved around an expanding nightlife. MICHAEL LUONGO: What was gay life like in Detroit in the late 1960s? Later, he spoke with Gay City News about Detroit’s LGBTQ community during this pivotal time in the city’s history. When Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit” - which looks at a 1967 police raid on the Blind Pig, a black social club, that led to widespread disturbances, known locally as the Rebellion - was released this past summer, Retzloff participated in a forum organized by LGBT Detroit () along with the group’s executive director, Curtis Lipscomb, and Detroit’s LGBT police liaison, Officer Dani Woods, to discuss the queer community’s reactions to the movie.
Retzloff grew up in Flint, about 50 miles northeast of the university, and now lives in Lansing, the state capital, with his husband Rick. How queer politics, demographics tracked a big city’s yawning racial divide
He also curates the website Michigan LGBTQ Remember, an online gallery of queer Michiganders from the past (/), and writes a companion blog on Queer Remembering (queer-remembering.blog/). His writings on Michigan’s queer past have appeared in the anthology “Creating a Place for Ourselves,” the journal GLQ, the collection “Making Suburbia,” and Between The Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper, where he had been editor.
