The Trouble With Liberation: How Campus Gay Revolution Became Assimilation

• In Event: 61.020 - Looking Back, Moving Forward: LGBTQ Research in the History of Education

Abstract

A desire for recognition and integration into campus culture and activities was a central goal of many non-heterosexual college students – and gay and lesbian student organizations – in the Twentieth Century, but it was not the only goal expressed. The earliest non-heterosexual campus organizations sprung from a liberation ethos rooted in eliminating the very structures that favored normative behavior. Gay Liberation was necessary specifically to dismantle those structures that regulated non-normative sexuality to the status of social (and campus) pariah.

Similarly, the leaders of the gay and liberation campus groups desired not a place at the proverbial table but rather to overturn the table. And yet, many students who were part of the initial non-heterosexual campus organizations held less lofty goals: finding 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, at least less debilitating and derogatory images of themselves. A few 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 campus groups persisted; between the late 1960s and early 1970s, members were divided between an approaching calling for tolerance and/or inclusion into campus life, and efforts to deconstruct society as a whole, akin to the social liberation espoused by other radical student groups. By the mid-1970s, the cry for political and social liberation on campuses subsided, but non-heterosexual students’ desires for connection, socialization, and political change (albeit for inclusion, not deconstruction) remained. Their activities on campus shifted from a directly political focus to one of campus accommodation, including efforts to change campus policies and services for non-heterosexual students while creating their own structures to provide the services the groups were requesting. One story of gay and lesbian campus organizing, then, can be viewed as a transformation from a philosophy and policy of gay liberation to one of campus assimilation.

In this presentation, based upon archival research and personal interviews, I focus on the position statements and activities of the initial non-heterosexual student organizations at selected U.S. Midwestern universities. Through newspaper interviews and accounts, institutional records, group correspondence (including advertising, fliers, and letters), and some participant interviews –I juxtapose the stated ethic and rhetoric of the organizations to their concurrent (and resultant) activities on campus.

Author

• Patrick Dilley, Southern Illinois University