A Virtual Salon: Reno's Gay Rodeo
Did you know that our community was home to the Reno Gay Rodeo during the 1970s and early 1980s? Joan Rivers was the grand marshal at one point, and the event sparked the National Gay Rodeo movement. Our first-ever online Salon features a conversation, discussion, and opportunity for the online audience to ask questions about the historical Reno Gay Rodeo. A diverse panel of voices explores how the advent of Reno’s Gay Rodeo sparked the National Gay Rodeo movement and unearthed other untold stories about the queer community in San Francisco and northern Nevada. This event was live streamed on Friday, March 20, 2020 at 6 pm PDT.
Participants 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 she 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.
A special thanks to Sundance Books and Music, our forever partners in the Nevada Humanities Salon Series.