Activism for the College Queer
A history of college activism for LGBTQ rights and its modern application
With the rollback of rights for transgender students, placement of anti-LGBT fear-mongering Mike Pence in the vice presidency, appointment of an anti-transgender activist to the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Rights, and so much more, there are plenty of issues for the LGBTQ community to be rallying against. Although this activism is happening, as a university administrator, I expected far more of it to be present on college campuses — and I found this to sometimes be conspicuously absent. There are definitive exceptions to this — many college queer organizations are currently doing excellent work advocating for gender inclusive restrooms and housing, for example. However, many young activists are struggling to identify which issues to tackle and how to tackle them, and even more LGBTQ students in my experience are not seeing any reason to get involved at all, believing all“major” issues (such as Marriage Equality) to be safely resolved.
While working on campus most recently as an Assistant Director of Leadership & Social Justice, I was responsible for developing programming and advising on issues related to diversity, inclusion, and intrapersonal growth. In other words, I was in a prime position to witness and support student activists. As one of often few openly queer people working on campus, I was particularly connected to LGBTQ college students. Although some have suggested that we are entering a “renaissance of student activism,” many of the LGBTQ students I have worked with have struggled to resist conservative administrations, coordinate in solidarity with other activist efforts on campus, and keep up their own independent academic, personal, and professional needs. As any college activist can attest, these are not simple challenges to defeat. However, they are also not impossible to overcome; in fact, college activism has historically been an arguably essential component of the many progressive movements.
I first became interested in the history of college activism while reflecting on my own experiences. As an undergraduate student in the early 2010s, my institution had two LGBTQ-serving student organizations: one social-themed club, and another activist-themed club. The social club saw plenty of activity while the activist club struggled to survive. My own campus activism efforts were hindered by poor communication between activists, a misunderstanding of what solidarity might look like, and differing opinions on what, exactly, might constitute activism. I didn’t generally prioritize LGBTQ issues, believing others were more important — and I failed to pick up on the ways my supposedly accepting institution was marginalizing many of its LGBTQ students. When I later moved into positions where I supported LGBTQ organization leaders, I frequently saw organizations split the way my college’s had been, and struggling with many of the same issues — but perhaps even further in decline. I wanted to support my students in finding the success I hadn’t, but I didn’t know how. I began to research and learn more about what had made the original LGBTQ student organizations successful in a way it seemed so hard to achieve today. I’m hopeful that the lessons I learned could be useful to present-day LGBTQ organization officers or officer-hopefuls uncertain how to make change on their campus.
Coming Out as Activism
An essential component of LGBTQ activism throughout our history has been a fight for visibility. While oppressive administrations, be they campus, national, or social, have often sought to delegitimize us or even just pretend we do not exist, activists (student, staff, and faculty) have refused to stay in the shadows. We have made ourselves as bright, colorful, and glittery as we can — impossible to ignore. Although visibility cannot be the only fight we pick, historically it has been one of the longest, particularly on campus.
LGBTQ spaces on college campuses in the early 1900s were covert. Through the 1950s, it was not unheard of for colleges to pose entrance exam questions probing the potential student’s sexuality and conformation to gender norms. Students with unsatisfying answers were denied admittance (Faderman, L., 1992). If a queer student made it past their entrance exams, they were not safe. A notable example of a college expelling LGBTQ students occurred in 1920 at Harvard when administrators began a secret court investigating all known associates of Cyril Wilcox, a gay student who had committed suicide. 14 men were ultimately forced to leave Cambridge for good. Students were outed to their families — and at least one student committed suicide rather than return home. Practices like this were not limited to Harvard — we know similar happened at University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, University of Missouri, Reed, Florida State University, Miami University, and more. Even students approaching graduation were refused their degrees. At New York University and George Washington University, the FBI was even involved with outing and firing gay professors. Investigations were invasive — at University of Michigan Ann Arbor, police even conducted surveillance on men’s campus restrooms.
The LGBTQ students who made it to campus were largely discrete, to a point. The nature of residence halls as gender segregated and private in some cases actually supported queer students in finding each other, and certain spaces developed a reputation or open secret as a recreational meeting space for queer students (Dilley, 2003). As one LGBTQ person later reflected, “I loved it, and I didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought about it. [But] I didn’t want to get caught at all, because it would just be too much,” (Dilley, 2002). These students were living at the same time as students around the country were being expelled and harassed for their sexuality and gender. Their own relative freedom may have prevented them from fully acknowledging the gravity of LGBTQ campus life. Having any kind of pride at this time was a revolutionary act — but students were not yet ready to formally organize against oppressive administrations. Indeed, despite the dire consequences happening to peers across the country, it seems similar today, many students may have underestimated the potential consequences to visibility. To build that kind of awareness, students would first need to find each other.
Centralizing Community
Not all students were equally respectful to their institution’s wishes to keep LGBTQ presence under wraps. Yearbooks in the 1920s at women’s colleges in particular show evidence of open love poems between women, the most notorious being published by the Oberlin Lesbian Society. Although the group’s name itself was nothing so radical — at this time, “lesbian” simply referred to a woman poet — the content of the poems was much more appalling. According to LGBT Historian Faderman (1992), culturally at this time, most campuses were typically aware of these students, but wanted to keep the existence of LGBTQ students at least plausibly deniable — groups like the Oberlin Lesbian Society challenged this and demanded their right to be seen by making more open and visible statements of affection. As in the broader LGBTQ movement, queer art has often played a role of bringing together LGBTQ students who would otherwise have remained apolitical and in the shadows.
For the most part, however, having any kind of organized public LGBTQ group on campus at this time was completely unacceptable. The only such groups permitted to exist were generally support groups intended to “cure” the participants of their “conditions.” The first known organization to challenge the status quo was the Student Homophile League at Columbia University in New York, established in 1969 (Dilley, 2002). A somewhat outdated term now, the “homophile” movement radically rejected the concept of “curing” homosexuality and were some of the first to identify LGBTQ people as part of a marginalized group rather than individuals experiencing some kind of sexual dysfunction. Although its president and founder, Stephen Donaldson, was able to convince administrators to formally recognize the League as an organization, Columbia University was at least initially not at all supportive of the group — on multiple occasions, administrators threatened organization officers with expulsion for their off-campus activist activity. On one occasion, administrators placed a new roster rule into action that attempted to forcibly “out” all group members or end the organization. (Beemyn, 2003).
Regardless, Columbia’s Student Homophile League successfully chartered and spread their message such that by 1970, over 200 similar organizations existed at campuses across the country. These groups made their mark advocating for their right to equal recognition, funding, and right to host events as other groups on campus while also promoting LGBTQ social issues on campus from the 1970s through the 1990s. (Dilley, 2002). Connecting with chartered Student Homophile Leagues also made the League a much larger and more valuable resource to the broader LGBTQ movement.
Group membership within each League expanded mainly when organizations had at least one very public and “out” member (Beemyn, 2003), but were sometimes also supported by distributing more anonymous newsletters and other publications on campus (Reichard, 2012). Once LGBTQ students were organized and visible, their existence began to expose both administration and student discomfort with anything queer. As these organizations were pushed back, the students within them seemed to have more and more motivation to fight back, despite their other commitments as students.
Challenging Others
Some of the earliest activism staged by groups like the Student Homophile League simply involved hosting Q&As with gay and lesbian students in public campus spaces such as residence halls and classrooms. These events clearly demanded some personal risk on the part of the panelists and were intended to provide curious and questioning students with an opportunity to dispel myths while also refusing again to be cast aside by those who would rather LGBTQ student organizations not exist at all (Reichard, 2012).
When LGBTQ organizations in the 70s and 80s faced push-back from other students in the form of harassment and defilement of their posters, they became more aggressive in their tactics — refusing to back down, students at West Los Angeles College began hand-delivering pamphlets to students across campus rather than posting their advertising passively (Reichard, 2012).
Some of the most famous campus activist efforts were born simply out of paying attention to what was happening on campus. For example, when it became common for Psychology departments to host exclusively anti-gay researchers to discuss the “disease” of homosexuality, campus organizers responded by holding counter-panels featuring pro-LGBT psychologists. This common practice is often credited for the removal of homosexuality from the DSM in 1979 (Dilley, 2002). Movements like this would not have been successful if the students who organized them had not been able to encourage straight allies and other sympathizers on campus to attend and support them.
Collaboration On Campus
LGBTQ students have not survived on campus alone. Even before any formal clubs or organizations were created on campus, records show that LGBTQ faculty organized gatherings for identifying students at their personal homes. Although highly risky — if the parties were uncovered, students faced expulsion and faculty risked their jobs — these parties were often the first significant experience a student had in finding community and exploring their identities. Social events have always been a part of LGBTQ campus culture, but they are not necessarily a useless or less activist one: meeting like-minded others meant that the parties also served as networking spaces for students who imagined a version of college where getting caught socializing with other LGBTQ students would not mean expulsion (Dilley, 2002).
Straight, sympathetic, students also played a strong role in early LGBTQ student organizations — although later revelations suggest not all of these “allies” were as heterosexual as they originally thought. Regardless, the presence of these students in LGBTQ student organizations limited administrators’ abilities to out and punish their queer students (Beemyn, 2003). Having these students involved made it safer for any student to be involved without necessarily having to take the risk of visibility — a risk not every student is privileged enough to take.
The most powerful allegiances made by LGBTQ organizers, however, were with other social activist groups on campus. Alliances such as the one between Cornell’s Student Homophile League and Afro-American Society allowed students to share tactics as well as numbers of bodies present at events while also encouraging their groups to learn more about each other’s issues. (Beemyn, 2003). In fact, many LGBTQ organizations began to parallel and follow black organizing — for example, the Gay Liberation Front was modeled after the Black Liberation Front was created came the Gay Liberation Front, and the slogan “black is beautiful” similarly inspired “gay is good” (Beemyn, 2003; Dilley, 2013). These efforts would not have been successful if LGBTQ organizations only took from antiracist activists — but the most successful organizations were intentional about showing up in solidarity on racial civil rights issues. Allegiances with broader progressive activist groups like the Student Democratic Society also expanded membership and diversified Student Homophile Leagues to include more women — often women who came out as lesbian shortly after organizing alongside the Student Homophile League. When the Student Homophile League movement began to falter in activism and focus mainly on parties and hooking up in the mid-70s, for example, it was these intersectional allegiances that would bring in new faces ready to take new risks, and expose new issues in need of addressing (Beemyn, 2003).
Translating the Past to Present Action
Although I had originally imagined that students not taking LGBTQ issues seriously as threats was a modern-day issue, history shows this issue is nothing new. When a LGBTQ student organization have taken more risks with visibility or allied with other progressive movements, they have been able to expose campus resistance and ignite public interest in their cause.
A history of campus activism shows us that the institution can never really be on our side — the institution does not want to make waves, arrive in newspapers, stir trouble with donors: it would prefer us silent and invisible where we cannot cause trouble. The institution exists to maintain itself — a motive most easily fulfilled when it follows, supports, and even encourages the status quo, whatever that may be. LGBTQ college students should be demanding the freedom of expression, legitimate inclusion and acceptance, and institutional change they deserve. This might mean campus commitment to deconstructing student, staff, and faculty prejudices against queer people, construction of gender inclusive policy and spaces on campus, financial and staff support for queer activism and queer-led institutional development, allocation of mental and physical healthcare resources to queer people on campus, protection of staff and faculty right to speak open and freely on queer issues, and more.
To survive the Trump administration, LGBTQ campus activism will have to evolve — but it can also first revisit its roots and ensure these basic lessons are being learned. If you are part of a campus LGBTQ organization and you are not sure how to make a difference, ask yourself:
- How visible is my organization on campus? How easy is it for interested students to find?
- Does your organization host any significant, fun and/or artistic events that would attract outside attention?
- Are at least some officers visible and “out” on campus?
- What publications, online and offline, help advertise your organization to the local community?
2. How is my organization exposing threats to LGBTQ students on campus?
- Does your organization participate in any kind of educational outreach? What outreach is needed?
- How does your organization respond to, or plan to respond to, threats, harassment, or other forms of resistance?
- If my organization is NOT receiving any push back, are we truly supporting and representing the most marginalized members of our community (trans and gender non-conforming students, queer students of color, queer survivors of violence, HIV+ students, etc)?
3. How does my organization collaborate and foster connections with others?
- Are there other LGBTQ+ organizations — campus, local, national, or even high school — in the area you could connect with? If so, what is your relationship with these organizations? Do you meet and discuss priorities? Do you support each other’s initiatives?
- Is your organization in solidarity with other progressive social movements on campus? Do members of your organization show up in mass to support #BlackLivesMatter and other civil rights organizing on campus? Do they show up openly affiliated with your organization?
- Are you “missing” any constituencies in your organization? (for example, queer people of color, queer people with disabilities, queer women, etc). What outreach can you do to groups with these members to support them? Is your programming inclusive of these students and their priorities?
These three questions are only a starting point based on where past LGBTQ college activists have struggled and prevailed. Examining the history of LGBTQ campus movements can help us differentiate our unique struggles from the struggle of the movement — and more quickly identify the resources we need to surmount them.
References
Beemyn, B. (2003). The silence is broken: A history of the first lesbian, gay, and bisexual college student groups. Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2), 205–223.
Dilley, P. (2013). Queer man on campus: A history of non-heterosexual college men 1945–2000. New York City: Routledge.
Dilley, P. (2002). 20th century postsecondary practices and policies to control gay students. The Review of Higher Education 25 (4), 409–431.
Faderman, L. (1992). Odd girls and twilighth lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America. New York City: Columbia University Press.
Reichard, D. A. (2012). Animating ephemera through oral history: Interpreting visual traces of California gay student organizing from the 1970s. Oral History Review, 39 (1), 37–60.

