Buffalo native Bobbi Prebis was an early advocate for LGBTQ rights in the U.S. Her death last week leaves behind a track record of advocacy that dates back more than 60 years.
Her vocal and ardent support went hand-in-hand since she identified with the butch lesbian lifestyle, said Adrienne Hill, executive director of Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project. She said that Prebis once mentioned, "people worried about coming out, but I was never in."
“She was very unapologetically butch. She, you know, even back in the '50s and '60s, people would look at her and see a lesbian right?" Hill added. "Which is its own level of bravery, like, she could not hide, so what was she trying to preserve?”
Prebis was part of the lesbian bar movement in post-World War II America, but that became more difficult with political pushback in the 1970s.
Prebis also was one of the first women to work at Bethlehem Steel. That experience with organized labor also proved valuable when advocating for the Queer community, Hill said.
“She — I think, long before anybody else in the community felt this way — had a strong conviction that gay people had a right to public space and that this harassment was wrong," Hill said. "And so, she even tried as early as like 1963 to organize the community against these shutdowns and against police harassment.”
She adds that even Prebis’s 50-year relationship with partner Liz Kennedy developed, at least partly, out of finding her identity as a lesbian.
They first met when Kennedy was a University at Buffalo professor interviewing subjects for the book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, though they didn’t start dating until several years later in the 1970s.
Kennedy co-authored the book, which highlighted the lesbian community’s evolution in Buffalo.
Hill credits Prebis's death as the end of the pre-Stonewall Bar Era. The "Stonewall Bar Era" separates before and after the pro-LGBTQ Stonewall Bar opened in Brooklyn in 1966.
But her death also marked the last person still living who was interviewed for Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.
"She was the youngest person, I believe, to be interviewed for that book, and the last living person who was interviewed for that book," Hill said. "In a very real way, you know, we think of the sort of pre-Stonewall Bar Era as having been ages ago, but in a very real way, it just ended last week with her death."
Prebis and Kennedy had lived in Arizona in more recent years, though they maintained ties within the Buffalo community and continued making trips back to the area.
