A History of Gay Student Services v. Texas A&M University, 1977–1985

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

Abstract

In 1977, student members of the Gay Student Services (GSS) sued Texas A&M University for denying their organization recognition. Not until the US Supreme Court denied the university’s appeal in 1985 did the case come to a resolution. The Texas A&M lawsuit comprised the longest court case in of a series of legal actions LGBTQ college students brought against public universities in the United States from the early 1970s through the mid 1990s. Part of a larger project that explores the history of these lawsuits, this paper focuses on the events at Texas A&M, long considered one of the most conservative campuses in the United States. Drawing on archival documents, newspaper clippings, archival audio and video files, and recent oral histories, this chapter will offer a history of the longest LGBTQ student organization lawsuit in the United States.

LGBTQ college students won every lawsuit they brought, and these cases comprised one of gay Americans’ first successful claims of their Constitutional rights. “They are incredibly important,” Nan Hunter, the founding director of the ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, told me during an oral history interview of the place of these lawsuits within the overarching LGBTQ legal rights movement. “For a long time those were basically the only cases we won.”

This paper will focus both on the legal developments and the experiences of LGBTQ students. In the late 1970s, new students were promised at orientation that there were “no drugs, no sex, and no homosexuals” at A&M. When three GSS members were posting flyers late one night in 1976, three large men held them at knifepoint and forced their removal. The university attorney often appeared on television to compare the GSS to “groups promoting bestiality and child rape.” A reporter covering Texas A&M’s commemoration of the 25th anniversary of its lawsuit in 2010 asked what the current president of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Aggies would say to his predecessors. He replied, “I would tell them thank you for not giving up…. Without them and their hard work, who knows how much longer it would have been for GLBT people to have the right to form organizations … on campuses … around the country.”

Authors

• Michael S. Hevel, University of Arkansas

• Chas Thompson, University of Arkansas - Fayetteville