05/24/2026
In 2018, the History Project created the walking tour She Walked Here, inspired and based on the groundbreaking book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, authored by Liz Kennedy and Madeline Davis. The tour was launched in a huff and puff of community events, but the final event was a workshop with Liz Kennedy on the methods of collecting q***r oral histories. A few days before this, Liz Kennedy and her legendary partner Bobbi Prebis came to Buffalo and took one of the tours with us. Meeting them in this way was enough nervous excitement to cause us not to remember a single word that the brilliant Liz said that evening at Grindhaus.
Last night we heard the news that Liz had passed away (just a few months after Bobbi). Liz was one of the primary inspirations for the work that the History Project does today. She was the head one of the founders of UB's Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies (then one of the first Women's Studies departments in the country.) In Liz's time, the program had working class women and especially q***r women without graduate degrees teach undergraduate courses. Needless to say, the department was constantly under the attack of the university's leadership, and both students and faculty were always organized to protest, crowd hallways and fight together. It was during this time that Madeline Davis taught her course in le***an studies (the first in the country), which formed the foundation for their joint monumental project -- Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.
Boots of Leather was perhaps the first scholarly book to take le***an oral histories seriously, and the first to center a working class le***an history. Liz, Madeline, and their collaborators collected dozens of interviews with pre-Stonewall bar femmes and butches, and it took twenty years to complete the book, which remains a classic. Le****ns and q***r historians the world over have Liz and Madeline to thank for their thorough documentation of butch-femme culture. And we at the History Project owe them for not having to start our work from scratch, but build on the tremendous foundations they had created.
Liz was a brilliant researcher, but never comfortably sat in academic institutions. She continued to fight for what is right at the expense of her own job, and ultimately left Buffalo to chair the University of Arizona's Gender and Women's Studies department.
She is missed by the History Project, her family, and the le***an communities she created in Buffalo and all over the world.
