Reno Gay Rodeo Trick Rider. Photo courtesy of Ray Martin and Michael Yaeger.

Join us for our first-ever virtual Salon on Friday, March 20 at 6 pm on Facebook. The Salon: Reno’s Gay Rodeo will feature an online discussion about the historical Reno Gay Rodeo. We will join together remotely to talk about the advent of Reno’s Gay Rodeo, how it sparked the National Gay Rodeo movement, and what it meant to the queer community in San Francisco and northern Nevada.

To be a part of the conversation, visit our Facebook page at facebook.com/nevadahumanities, and join our Watch Party starting at 6 pm PST. Ask our panelists questions throughout the event. 

You can also watch Rainbow Rodeo, a documentary about the gay rodeo movement here.

Participants will include:

Lydia Huerta Moreno is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Race, and Identity and Communication at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is a feminist decolonial interdisciplinary scholar. Her work focuses on the ethics of representation in cultural narratives centered on migration, human rights, violence, and race and gender in film and social media. Specifically, she studies the power of representations in shaping affects and moral attitudes in Latinx, Mexican, and Brazilian cultural studies.

Emily K. Hobson is an associate professor in the History department at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first book, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left was published by the University of California Press in 2016.

Emily MacDiarmid is a recent graduate of the Reynolds School of Journalism. During her studies, she focused on documentary and media research, and has presented various research reports and visual projects regarding representation and cultural relationships. MacDiarmid joined Bree Zender and Carly Savaugeau as co-director and director of photography to develop Rainbow Rodeo, a documentary about the gay rodeo movement.  

Bree Zender is one of the co-directors of the short documentary Rainbow Rodeo, which details the history of the Reno Gay Rodeo. She is the Morning Edition host at KUNR Public Radio in Reno, and also a graduate student at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

The bi-monthly Salon series features a panel discussion with topics relevant to the humanities in Nevada. This program is part of the “Democracy and the Informed Citizen” initiative, administered by the Federation of State Humanities Councils. The initiative seeks to deepen the public’s knowledge and appreciation of the vital connections between democracy, the humanities, journalism, and an informed citizenry. We thank The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of this initiative and the Pulitzer Prizes for their partnership.