In Memoriam: Madeline Davis Eulogy

It is with great sadness, that we report on the passing of one of the founders of the Women's Studies College and a huge figure in the LGBTQA+ community, Madeline Davis.

Reflecting on Madeline Davis's Immense Impact
Christine Varnado

Buffalo radical lesbian feminist legend Madeline Davis died peacefully at her home on April 28, 2021, with her wife of many years, Wendy Smiley, by her side. Davis played a leading role for over 50 years in Western New York's gay liberation movement and was one of the core educators who founded and taught in the Women's Studies College at UB, the institutional ancestor of the Women's Studies Department, now the Global Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. The department she helped to establish remembers her with immense gratitude as a founding mother of the academic discipline of lesbian studies, in which she designed and taught the first-ever courses in the U.S., through the Women's Studies College: "Lesbianism 101," and WSC 265, a course in lesbian oral history in which students interviewed lesbian elders about the pre-Stonewall bar scene. This course furnished the material for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, the groundbreaking 1993 work of oral history documenting Buffalo's vibrant working-class lesbian bar culture reaching back to the 1930s, which Davis co-wrote with Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, another founder of our department. Many institutional transformations later, WSC265 survives as GGS265: Sexualities and Cultures, a popular GGS class exploring the spaces and archives of queer cultural production.

As a folk singer-songwriter, Davis's 1971 album “Stonewall Nation” was the first gay liberation record. As one of the founding members of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier (a local chapter of the early gay rights organization), she spoke at the first gay rights rally in Albany, and began the magazine Fifth Freedom, the first queer community publication in this area. In 1972, she became the first openly gay delegate to a major political party convention, and the first to petition the Democratic National Convention to include gay rights in its platform. A librarian and archivist, Davis began collecting records, memorabilia, and evidence of queer lives and struggles in 2001, a collection which became the Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ+ Archive of Western New York – one of the largest and most comprehensive archives of American queer life, now housed at Buffalo State's Butler Library.

To learn more about Madeline Davis's legacy, get involved with our community partners, the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project, the Madeline Davis Archive and join the GGS community email list here.