Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation

Early Non-Heterosexual Student Organizing at Midwestern Universities

Patrick Dilley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030046446
• eBook ISBN: 9783030046453
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Association for the Study of Higher Education Outstanding Book Award Winner, 2020

This book outlines the beginning of student organizing around issues of sexual orientation at Midwestern universities from 1969 to the early 1990s. Collegiate organizations were vitally important to establishing a public presence as well as a social consciousness in the last quarter of the twentieth century. During this time, lesbian and gay students struggled for recognition on campuses while forging a community that vacillated between fitting into campus life and deconstructing the sexist and heterosexist constructs upon which campus life rested. The first openly gay and lesbian student body presidents in the United States were elected during this time period, at Midwestern universities; at the same time, pioneering non-heterosexual students faced criticism, condemnation, and violence on campus. Drawing upon interviews, extensive reviews of campus newspapers and yearbooks, andarchival research across the Midwest, Patrick Dilley demonstrates how the early gay campus groups created and provided educational and support services on campus–efforts that later became incorporated into campus services across the nation. Further, the book shows the transformation of gay identity into a minority identity on campus, including the effect of alliances with campus racial minorities.

© The Author(s) 2019

Patrick DilleyGay Liberation to Campus Assimilationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04645-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Introduction to Early Gay and Lesbian Campus Organizing

Patrick Dilley¹

(1)

Educational Administration and Higher Education, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Patrick Dilley

Keywords

Jack BakerGay Liberation FrontGay Liberation

End Abstract

In the spring of 1971, Jack Baker was elected president of the student government of the University of Minnesota (Fig. 1.1). Baker’s campaign was structured around his being an outsider; specifically, he presented himself in a fashion that activists and scholars would later label “queer.” One of Baker’s campaign posters depicted him in a coy pose, sitting, knees drawn up to his chest, his feet in brightly colored women’s high heels, the caption: “Put yourself in Jack Baker’s shoes.”

Fig. 1.1

Jack Baker, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities initial student body president campaign photo, 1970. (From the Michael McConnell Files. Used courtesy of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota Libraries)

Jack Baker’s initial campaign poster for his first campaign to be student body president of the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. In this image, Baker consciously wearing high heels. The queering of his image was not reflective of Baker’s disposition or his campaign.

Baker ’s impetus to run for student office stemmed from his desire to challenge campus and societal rules of acceptance of gays and lesbians, to promote gay visibility while advocating for inclusion into the structures of campus and society.

He offered a platform based on student and minority rights… call[ing] for students to take an active role in policy decisions… [and advocating] equal roles for women and black on and off campus.¹

Utilizing the nascent gay and lesbian organizing in Minneapolis and the UM Twin Cities campus, which he had helped form and foster, Baker became the first openly gay elected student body president in the United States, perhaps the most visible symbol of inclusion into a campus culture possible.

Baker , however, was non-traditional beyond being gay. For one thing, he was older, a graduate student in the University of Minnesota Law School, living off campus. He and his partner, Michael McConnell, were in the midst of ongoing struggles to marry legally and to force the University to extend to them benefits offered to married employees. For Baker, then, one freedom of being gay seemed to be epitomized by inclusion into “straight” culture, albeit it on openly gay and equitable terms.

This ironic stance—a desire to be recognized on campus for being different from other student cultures, yet also to be included in the orthodox campus culture—epitomized early gay and lesbian student organizing on college campuses (although, oddly enough, not Jack Baker). The campus and social structures that formed the basics of membership into campus culture and society needed to allow non-heterosexual students a proverbial place at the table.

Such a desire for recognition and integration into campus was a central goal of many non-heterosexual college students, and college student organizations, in the twentieth century, but it was not the only goal expressed by such students. Indeed, the earliest gay and lesbian campus organizations sprung from a liberation ethos rooted in eliminating the very structures that favored normative behavior. As historian and 1970s gay activist Martin Duberman recalled,

Most of the radical young recruits to GLF had previously been in the closet in regard to their sexuality; they felt that now, in “speaking truth” about their own lives, they would forthwith be welcomed and would link arms with those telling truth about racism, sexism, and unjust war — with the result of creating a powerful political coalition that would refashion society as a whole.²

The desire to unchain aspects of identity from social and political control linked campus-based social activists, from black power to women’s liberation to the initial gay liberation organizations.

To “liberation” students, at least those initial organizers of campus gay and lesbian organizations, efforts such as Baker’s—attempting to effect change from within a social/organizational structure—were difficult to reconcile with their attempts to overthrow that structure; the systems of power that formed those structures would always necessitate a class (or classes) of excluded and exploited people.

Most of GLF’s members in the early seventies were militantly anti-authority, whether that authority was embodied in the church, the state, or the medical profession. They denied the right of the courts, the clergy, or the psychiatric profession to pass judgment on their behavior or to “guide” it into the mainstream; they wanted their differentness acknowledged, not suppressed, wanted harassment and violence against them to cease.³

The leaders of the liberation groups desired, it would seem, not a place at the table but rather to overturn the table. Gay Liberation was necessary specifically to dismantle those structures that relegated non-normative sexuality to the status of social pariah.⁴

And yet, many students who were part of the initial non-heterosexual campus organizations held less lofty goals. For them, having a Gay Liberation Front (GLF; or other group for homosexuals without an objective purpose on campus) meant they might find friends, romance, levels of community that seemed impossible with “straight” students. Some members wanted to help others “come out of the closet,” to have if not positive then at least less debilitating and derogatory images of themselves. A few, like Jack Baker, expressed a desire not to dismantle the American social order but to extend its ideals (and understandings) to a population newly identifying as a part of the body politic. Disagreements over the philosophies and identities of the gay liberation groups persisted; between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, members were divided between an approach calling for tolerance and/or inclusion into campus life and for efforts to deconstruct society as a whole, akin to the social liberation espoused by other student radical groups.

Eventually, by the mid-1970s, the cry for political and social liberation for the most vocal activists on campuses subsided.⁵ Nonetheless, non-heterosexual students’ desires for connection, for socialization, and, indeed, for political change (albeit for inclusion, not destruction) remained. One way of understanding gay and lesbian campus organizing, then, can be viewed as a transformation from a policy of Gay Liberation to one of campus assimilation.

To understand that story, though, one needs to hear the voices of the people involved in the actions and ideations of non-heterosexual identity that made that transformation occur. Each campus has its own story: the efforts of non-heterosexual members of campus finding each other, expressing shared goals, and establishing the foundations of community (whether extant or ephemeral) were important to those students, to their campuses, and to our collective cultural understanding of democratic citizenry; those stories should be discovered and remembered, and, indeed, several fine, local histories of the beginnings of gay and lesbian student organizations have been produced in the past two decades.⁶ That historiography, however, is not my purpose here.

In this book, I trace this change as it occurred over roughly 25 years. Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation is a history, not the history, of non-heterosexual students organizing at Midwestern institutions of higher education. It is comprehensive in scope (from the earliest beginnings in the heady late 1960s) but not exhaustively inclusive of all campuses, either in the Midwest or across the United States.⁷ The campus histories I present here are themselves partial snapshots of those campus non-heterosexual organizations. I chose these organizations, these institutions, in part because of the extant data available for a historical study but also because the vignettes I present from these campuses combine for a generalizable history beyond just what happened at those particular institutions. Together, these vignettes form a bricolage of the history of non-heterosexual campus organizing (at least in the Midwest).

The campuses I studied were, for the most part, removed from metropolitan areas. Being apart from larger organized gay and lesbian communities seems to have forced the campus organizations to become self-sufficient and more encompassing than they might have in large cities; the early gay and lesbian college organizations served not just the campus but also the entire community beyond the campus gates. The graduation of students resulted in regular membership turnover for the campus organizations; at least through the late 1980s, it also fostered a sense of students recreating many of the earlier organization(s)’s services and projects.

Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation provides a structure for understanding the development of these particular non-heterosexual or “queer” collegiate communities. (Note: The nomenclature of the campus groups is rife for contemporary misunderstanding. Initially, “homosexual” was the term used by non-heterosexuals to describe or to identify themselves. That term was replaced by the late 1960s by the gender-inclusive “gay,” which by the mid-1970s became used primarily [although not exclusively] to refer to males, while “lesbian” became the appellation of choice for most non-heterosexual females. “Bisexual” and “transgender,” as identities, became more commonly differentiated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the inclusion of members identifying as such prompted much debate and discussion within the campus organizations, if for no other reason than to determine how to denote inclusion. The term “queer” was still anathema to many non-heterosexuals into the 1990s, particularly those who were born before 1970.) In this work, I attempt to use the contemporaneous names for the campus organizations and members, but when speaking collectively or analytically, I tend to use the term “non-heterosexual,” which I hope connotes distinction from heterosexuals without engendering or politicizing the individual people I discuss.

The scaffolding for this history is built from understanding events on individual campuses, in relation to contemporaneous cultural events playing out on those campuses. The ideas of the communities—the ideals, the ideology, the specific identities—were sometimes adopted, sometimes adapted, sometimes recreated seemingly ad nauseam to fit the desires and needs of each campus. By the late 1970s, student activists on those campuses drew from other gay organizations’ prior work in collegiate settings; such knowledge sometimes facilitated (and often hurried) the structuring of non-heterosexual organizing, so that by the early 1990s (the end of this book’s story), a set of institutional responses, “best practices,” organizational services, and campus politic solidified.

I base my narrative and analysis on research I conducted at university archives at 16 postsecondary institutions (University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Kansas, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri at Columbia, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Ohio State University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Missouri at Saint Louis, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), two national gay and lesbian archives (the ONE/International Gay and Lesbian Archives, housed at the University of Southern California, and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Studies, located at the University of Minnesota), and materials from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas. In addition, I draw from a number of institutional and personal websites concerning the history of gay student activities and organizing on college campuses. Further, I conducted oral history interviews with members of early gay groups from the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. From these sources, I culled a variety of materials, including photographs; local and campus newspaper clippings; organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, correspondence, and publicity materials; and official institutional documents and correspondence.

I focus on a limited number of these 16 universities in presenting the narrative of this history, primarily the University of Kansas, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, and Indiana University. All are extensive state universities with large student enrollments, along with well-documented non-heterosexual student activism and organizing. Additionally, I include briefer accounts of other state institutions, to compare and contrast non-heterosexual student organizing on those campuses, as well as to give a fuller portrait of campus issues facing non-heterosexual students. Some institutions have more than one entry per chapter, so that the reader might have a sense of the development of issues across campuses over time.

Losing sight of individual campus activities, individual people, is a risk for a historical overview. Including some people or incidents as examples excludes both confirmatory and contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. An Introduction to Early Gay and Lesbian Campus Organizing
• 2. Student Groups’ Formulation of Gay Liberation Identity in the 1970s: Part I
• 3. Student Groups’ Formulation of Gay Liberation Identity in the 1970s: Part II
• 4. Gay and Lesbian Student Groups Struggle to Serve Campus in the 1980s
• 5. Student Groups Assimilate Despite Campus Resistance in the Early 1990s
• 6. How Non-heterosexual Student Groups Utilized Liberation to Achieve Campus Assimilation
• Back Matter