Caitlin Maher Dubnau Competes for State History Day Honors

Huntington junior Caitlin M. Maher Dubnau will vie for honors on Sunday in the State History Day finals at SUNY Oneonta in the Historical Paper category for her project titled “The Shot Glass Heard Around the World: The Stonewall Uprising as an Ideological Turning Point in the Gay Rights Movement.”

The teenager’s 2,500 word paper is a masterpiece of research and historical interpretation. Ms. Maher Dubnau is proverbial academic powerhouse, compiling a weighted grade average of approximately 104 during a recent marking period.

This year’s National History Day theme is “Turning Points in History.” This theme must be incorporated into all aspects of every project.

The Stonewall uprising refers to a series of riots over action by the New York Police Department in 1969 against the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.

“When I heard about this year’s National History Day theme, one of my first ideas was to write about the Stonewall uprising,” wrote Ms. Maher Dubnau in a process paper accompanying her project. “I have always been interested in Civil Rights and was already familiar with the topic of the Stonewall uprising. As I began to research it, I realized just how well it fit into the theme of turning points. While many think of the Stonewall uprising as the beginning of the gay rights movement, in fact, it was just a major turning point that thrust the struggle for equal rights into the mainstream. This was mainly because of the ideological shift that it caused within the movement. Where before the uprising the gay rights movement was conservative and assimilationist, after, younger and more radical activists began to demand greater change from the outskirts of society through more direct and abrasive strategies.”

The Huntington junior started research into her topic by studying first and second hand accounts covering the time period and the activism during it. “This helped me to get a feel for the historical backdrop of the decade,” Ms. Maher Dubnau wrote in the process paper. I thus began to research the more specific and detailed parts of my topic such as finding manifestos from gay rights groups that formed after the Stonewall uprising. I used Google Scholar mainly to find my sources and tried to balance the types of sources I was using, from interviews to newspapers to academic journals. Once I had compiled most of the sources that I was going to use, I wrote a detailed outline for my paper.”

The outline helped the teenager organize her thoughts and “edit my ideas” prior to the actual writing of the paper itself. “I then used this outline an all of my sources to help me write my paper,” she said.

Ms. Maher Dubnau summarized the historical argument she developed in her process paper. “Prior to the Stonewall uprising, the gay rights movement had been an ideologically conservative movement, which many less conforming LGBTQ+ people had felt uncomfortable joining,” the junior wrote. Because of its assimilationist goals, the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement, led by the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, focused more on conforming to heterosexual society rather than directly challenging it. The Stonewall uprising, however, changed many younger activists’ views on the role of the movement. Rather than assimilating and then fighting from within, the Stonewall era activists fought from the outskirts of society, welcoming in the most unconforming LGBTQ+ people into their movement and collaborating with other ideologically left group. This style of more abrasive activism forced mainstream society to take notice more than pre-Stonewall activism ever had.”

This “new, radical form of activism” during the Stonewall era gay rights movement “led to tremendous legislative and social victories,” Ms. Maher Dubnau wrote in the process paper. “It also set the stage for the current, post-Stonewall gay rights movement, centered around pride, which could never have begun if the Stonewall uprising didn’t radicalize the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement.”

The Huntington junior is expected to be a strong contender for honors at Sunday’s State History Day finals at SUNY Oneonta.