Publisher Hell's Kitchen Final issue Spring 2005 | Year founded 1994 | |
Frequency Weekly during the Rochester Institute of Technology school year. Founder Sean T. Hammond, Kelly K. Gunter, Marc Trzepla First issue January 1995 (1995-January) | ||
Gracies Dinnertime Theatre (GDT) was a publication written by a group of Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) students that was in production from 1995 to 2005. In its 257 issues, it was notorious for its political incorrectness of race relations, bizarre end-time prophecies, baseless conspiracy theories, provocation of the established student magazine, Reporter, the Clinton and Bush administrations and in particular, RIT President Al Simone.
Perhaps GDT's greatest single contribution was the article "The Politics of High Tech Damnation," which examined the close, covert links between the CIA and RIT in the early and mid 1990s.
Less controversial content included a weekly chess puzzle and frank sexual discussion.
GDT's presence on the internet initially began as a text-only finger plan. By the fall of 1995, GDT had a web site hosted by one of its creators, making it one of the first student satire publications to have a web presence. In time, the hosting of the web site migrated to servers owned by RIT Computer Science House. Its final resting place came to be on the Hell's Kitchen server.
GDT spawned five sister publications which all published under the combined title of Hell's Kitchen. This was distributed for free on four universities in Rochester, NY and Rutgers University. Under this combined title, GDT received notable attention from the Independent Press Association, Rochester's daily newspaper The Democrat and Chronicle, and had a few articles reproduced via UWIRE.
The lasting influence of GDT on the RIT community can be seen in the silver stainless steel piece named Unity, created by Juan Carlos Caballero-Perez and Leonard Urso and installed in the quad between the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, the College of Applied Science and Technology, and the College of Engineering. Erected in 2008, the sculpture is visually similar to the logo used by GDT from 2000 to 2005.