"We Didn't Think It Would Be Well Received": The Gay Alliance of Students' Legal Victory Over Virginia Commonwealth University

• In Event: LGBTQ+ Histories of Education: Where in the World Do We Stand?

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this presentation is to consider the importance of LGBTQI+ student lawsuits, with specific attention to the founding, lived experience of members, and legal battles of the Gay Alliance of Student (GAS), a groundbreaking LGBTQI+ college student organization at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). In doing so, it adds to the small but growing literature on the historical importance and contributions of LGBTQI+ student organizations, and the even smaller literature on the lawsuits that some LGBTQI+ groups had to pursue to secure rights that university leaders attempted to withhold.

Framework, Methods, and Sources: Informed by queer theory, which interrogates prevailing sexual norms and the role of power in perpetuating or dismantling those norms, this study explores the oppressive efforts to stop one of the most important early college student LGBTQ rights organizations in the nation and its members’ resolve to dismantle the prevailing heteronormative system. The study is based on historical methods and primary source archival and related research. Substantial materials were gathered from the Virginia Commonwealth University Archives and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Especially important among these were the latter's holdings of GAS advisor Stephen Lenton's papers. These were supplemented by oral histories with five of the early members of the organization, as well as numerous contemporaneous newspapers (including the Commonwealth Times, Richmond Dispatch-Times, and Our Own Community Press). Data also included legal filings and the district and appellate court decisions.

Results: The GAS case was one of the first reported cases of its type and, as the first in the nation to reach the appellate level of the federal judiciary, set precedent in five states under the jurisdiction of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. This presentation situates this landmark case in its institutional and urban contexts and demonstrates the influence of the larger political environment on institutional decision making. It demonstrates the toll that the effort took on the student leaders of the organization, the legal arguments that were made in both the original case and the appeal, ultimate bases for the decision requiring VCU to recognize GAS as an official student organization.

Significance: Studies of LGBTQI+ college student organizations are important as they help to document and explain key shifts in how sexually minoritized students experienced higher education. Studies of LGBTQI+ lawsuits, such as this one, highlight institutional intransigence, student agency, and the turn to the courts to attain rights routinely afforded to others. They are further important as they are some of the first legal challenges that LGBTQI+ individuals won and play a key role in the longer legal history culminating in the striking down of anti-LGBTQI+ legislation and the legalization of gay marriage.

Authors

• Michael S. Hevel, University of Arkansas
  Presenting Author

• Timothy R. Cain, University of Georgia
  Presenting Author