Abstract
In this chapter, I provide an introduction to early gay and lesbian campus organizing at Midwestern universities. Jack Baker, the first openly gay person elected student body president, is a focus of this chapter, as is the ethos and philosophies of the early Gay Liberation Front movements and members of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Notes
- 1.
McConnell, Michael, with Jack Baker, and Gail Langer Karwoski. The Wedding Heard ’Round the World: America’s First Gay Marriage (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 109.
- 2.
Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed? (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. xvii.
- 3.
Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed?, 13.
- 4.
I draw my understanding of the early gay and lesbian movement from a number of contemporaneous sources (primarily print journalism), along with memoirs and, particularly, historical examinations of the times. Memoirs I studied include Arthur Bell, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Liberation Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971); Arnie Kantrowitz, Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1977); Karla Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 1999); and Allen Young, Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2018). The historical analyses and depictions most influential on my understanding include Mary Bernstein, “Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement,” American Journal of Sociology, 103, no. 3 (November, 1977), 531–565; Mary Bernstein, “Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement,” Social Science History, 26, no. 3 (Fall, 2002), 531–581; David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney , Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jim Downs, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993); David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006); Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of a Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981); Tommi Avicolli Mecca (Ed.), Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 20009); and Donn Teal, The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969–1971 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
- 5.
See Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Books, 1987); Robert A. Rhoads, Freedom’s Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Tony Vella, New Voices: Student Activism in the ’80s and ’90s (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
- 6.
Brett Beemyn, “The Silence is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12, no. 2, April 2003, 205–223; Jessica Clawson, “Coming Out of the Campus Closet: The Emerging Visibility of Queer Students at the University of Florida, 1970–1982,” Educational Studies: Journal of the American Educational Studies Association, 50 no. 3, 2014, 209–230; T. Evan Faulkenbury and Aaron Hayworth, “The Carolina Gay Association, Oral History, and Coming Out at the University of North Carolina,” Oral History Review, 43, No. 4 (2016), 115–137; David A. Reichard, “Behind the Scenes at the Gayzette: The Gay Student Union and Queer World Making at UCLA in the 1970s,” Oral History Review, 43, No. 1 (2016), 98–114; David A. Reichard, “‘We Can’t Hide and They Are Wrong:’ The Society for Homosexual Freedom and the Struggle for Recognition at Sacrament State College, 1969–1971,” Law and History Review, 28, No. 3 (August 2010), 629–674; John D. Wrathall, “What are you after?”: A History of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexuals and Transgender People at the Twin Cities Campus of the University of Minnesota, 1969–1993, in Breaking the Silence: Final Report of the Select Committee on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Concerns, University of Minnesota, November 1, 1993, 48–58; and Oberlin College Alumni Office, Into the Pink: An Oral History of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students at Oberlin College from 1937 to 1991 (Oberlin, OH: Amherst College Library, 1996).
- 7.
Determining what campus community hosted the first gay student organization is problematic: does “first” refer to the earliest “unnamed” gatherings, or the earliest group that publicly named itself and designated itself as aligned to a particular campus, or the earliest group that received recognition of doing so, either through the press or, more officially, campus administration? It appears, so far as researchers have been able to establish, that the groups that could claim at least two of those distinctions are the Student Homophile League (SHL) at Columbia University in 1967, followed by SHL chapters at Cornell University and New York University in 1969. In addition, Homosexuals Intransigent! formed at the City University of New York in 1969. For more on the history of those organizations, see Beemyn, “The Silence is Broken.”
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Dilley, P. (2019). An Introduction to Early Gay and Lesbian Campus Organizing. In: Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04645-3_1
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