Abstract
By the mid-1990s, Midwestern campus non-heterosexual student organizations had achieved remarkable inclusion into collegiate culture, including athletics, student housing, and student government. They were recognized as a minority population, and they strived for increasingly assimilationist goals: marriage, military service, and recognition of being “just like everyone else.” Such goals and identities are at odds with those of the students who formed the early campus organizations, who stressed liberty from, if not outright deconstruction of, such goals. To make sense of these changes, I present a framework for understanding the history of non-heterosexual college student organizing in the Midwest. I then posit two sets of themes, examining the organizations’ efforts at building minority identities and the effects of the organizations’ actions and services on campus. I use that analysis to respond to current questions of whether Gay Liberation “worked.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Jason Etzen, “Sexuality Not a Problem for Northern Iowa Tennis Team,” Northern Iowan, November 12, 1993, 16.
- 2.
Justin David Suran, “Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” American Quarterly, 53, No. 3 (September 2001), 452–488, 463.
- 3.
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, 545.
- 4.
Bernstein, “Identities and Politics,” 545.
- 5.
Bernstein, “Identities and Politics,” 552.
- 6.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca (Ed.), Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2009), p. xii.
- 7.
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.
- 8.
Jessica Clawson, “Coming Out of the Campus Closet: The Emerging Visibility of Queer Students at the University of Florida, 1970–1982,” Educational Studies, 50, No. 3 (2014), 209–230; Patrick Dilley, Queer Man on Campus: A History of Non-Heterosexual Men in College, 1945–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
- 9.
Hal Tarr, “A Consciousness Raised,” pp. 22–39 in Tommi Avicolli Mecca, ed., Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2009), 29.
- 10.
David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006); Donn Teal, The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969–1971 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).
- 11.
See, for example, Frank Browning, The Culture of Desire: Paradox and Perversity in Gay Lives Today (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993); Jim Downs, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 2016); and Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
- 12.
See Vincent Doyle, Making Out in the Mainstream: GLAAD and the Politics of Respectability (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016); and Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Gender Nonconformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 13.
Randy Shilts, “Gay Campus Movement,” The Advocate, September 8, 1976, 6.
- 14.
See, for instance, Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 76–80; Maxine Leeds Craig, Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Mark Kurlasky, Ready for a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became an Anthem for Changing America (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013).
- 15.
See Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 16.
For more on typical administrative responses to non-heterosexuals dancing on campus earlier in the 20th Century, see William Wright, Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
- 17.
Ruth Lichtwardt, quoted in Patrick Dilley, Queer Man on Campus: A History of Non-Heterosexual Men in College, 1945–2000 (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002), pp. 175–176.
- 18.
Maia Ettinger, “The Pocahontas Paradigm, or Will the Subaltern Please Shut Up?” In Tilting the Tower: Lesbians Teaching Queer Subjects, ed. Linda Garber (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51–55.
- 19.
Bernstein, “Identities and Politics,” 548.
- 20.
Bernstein, “Identities and Politics,” 541.
- 21.
Patrick Dilley, “Queer Theory: Under Construction.” QSE: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 50, No. 3 (1999), 209–230; Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
- 22.
Douglas Sadownick, Sex Between Men: An Intimate History of the Sex Lives of Gay Men Postwar to Present (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), 191.
- 23.
Sadownick, Sex Between Men, 192.
- 24.
See Robert Rhoads, Freedom’s Web: Student Activism in an Age of Cultural Diversity (Philadelphia: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Tony Vallela, New Voices: Student Activism in the ‘80s and ‘90s (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
- 25.
David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006), 258.
- 26.
See Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Becoming Who I Am: Young Men on Being Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Jane Ward, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
- 27.
Judith Agusti, “Gay Illini Discuss Concerns on Weekly Basis,” Daily Illini, October 29, 1975, 14, 17: 14.
- 28.
Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed? (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 13–14.
- 29.
Warner, The Trouble With Normal, 113.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dilley, P. (2019). How Non-heterosexual Student Groups Utilized Liberation to Achieve Campus Assimilation. In: Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04645-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04645-3_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04644-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04645-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)