MAD-FEST

On July 29, 2022, the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project hosted MAD-FEST, a musical tribute to the renowned lesbian activist Madeline Davis, who passed away on April 28, 2021.

For over 50 years, Davis was not only central to the formation of a local LGBTQ rights movement, but was one of Buffalo’s most famous LGBTQ community members. She helped found the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, Buffalo’s first gay rights organization, and briefly served as its president. In 1971, she wrote and recorded “Stonewall Nation,” a song inspired by her participation in a gay rights march on Albany, which ultimately became the first gay liberation record. A year later, she became the first openly lesbian delegate to a major political party convention, where she petitioned the Democrats (albeit unsuccessfully) to include gay rights in their platform. Davis taught the first class on lesbianism in the United States at the University at Buffalo, and the oral history interviews collected as part of that course eventually formed the basis for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, a book Davis co-wrote with Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy about the history of Buffalo’s mid-20th century lesbian bar scene. In 2001, Davis founded the Madeline Davis GLBT Archives–one of the largest LGBTQ archives in the world, upon which the History Project relies for much of its research.

Held for a standing-room-only audience at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, MAD-FEST celebrated Davis’ legacy as one of Western New York’s foremost LGBTQ artists by inviting five contemporary LGBTQ musicians—MYQ Farrow, Leafy Trees, Kerrykate Abel Smith, Tia Brown, and Jay Aquarious—to cover one of Davis’ songs and then perform one of their own. Immediately following the concert, the History Project screened Swimming with Lesbians, a 2009 documentary that followed Davis as she worked to build and find an institutional home for her archive.