When we made our meeting with the archivist at Geneseo, Liz, I was a little nervous because Sean and I were really interested in doing our project on Rainbow Boys, but we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to find enough information. Thankfully, Liz allayed those fears, and gave us a ton of help and resources to turn to. I love meeting with the research librarians at Geneseo because I feel like they have a special gift for finding exactly what I need and I don’t know how they do it. Liz was no different; she had found all the information Sean and I had and then some.

 

Liz pointed us in the direction of the Webster Herald because it’s not only the town paper, but also the official paper of the Webster Central School District, which is where we initially found the complaint about Rainbow Boys. Unfortunately, because the case is from 2006, the archives aren’t available online in their website archives, so we’ll have to call the local libraries to check. Furthermore, we don’t even know if they did any reporting about the case, but it is still a place to start. Plus, Liz mentioned if we do find an article we might have it on microfilm in the Geneseo library.

Next, Liz mentioned she was similarly not able to find any meeting minutes for the school board, but suggested that we try contacting the school because all the records should be public. She also mentioned that there might’ve been a meeting of the Webster Public Library board that dealt with the issue so we could definitely look there as well, we just have to contact the library. Even if there is no meeting of the library board they might be able to point us in the direction of articles and archives they have on site.

Another source for information was the online databases, like MLA, Eric, and ProQuest that Liz showed us how to use. Through Geneseo we have access to a ton of databases and Liz had already done preliminary searches and turned up a few different things. She showed us to search with the key words rainbow boys, Alex Sanchez, ban, censorship, and challenge. We’re going to be looking through the databases over the next few weeks.

One of the last things Liz pointed us too was this magazine/newspaper that dealt with specifically gay news called Empty Closest. It’s one of the oldest newspapers reporting LGBTQ+ news and it is run by the Gay Alliance. We looked into it with her and found that the website has archives from the 1990s all the to 2015. Once we narrow down the time frame we want to look in we can search the archives for anything about Rainbow Boys or Alex Sanchez.

Meeting with Liz was really interesting and allowed us to basically confirm we’re going to report on Rainbow Boys. There are so many different outlets to look into, I’m looking forward to it. Liz was really interested in the topic and helping us, so we will definitely be reaching out to her in the future.