The Woolley-Marks Papers are not a record of some private embarrassment, but rather the brave statement of two women important in the history of higher education in this country. As professional historians, we respectfully and urgently request that the Papers be treated with the same care and openness that have characterized the handling of such Papers as those of Edith Wharton and Franklin Roosevelt or any number of other manuscript collections which contain sensitive material which have been used responsibly by scholars to give us history of great value (as cited in Fields, n.d.).

In 1976 historians at Mount Holyoke College petitioned President David Truman, asking that restrictions on access to the papers of the college’s most pivotal president , Mary Woolley (1901–1937), be lifted. Truman and his immediate predecessor, President Richard Gettell (1957–1968), were concerned that two sets of Woolley’s papers would rekindle a controversy at the college that stretched back four decades (Fields, n.d.). One set, the records of the Committee of Nine, traced the actions of the Board of Trustees in appointing President Roswell Ham (1937–1957) as Woolley’s successor, making him the first man to lead the college. Woolley , who had reinvigorated the national reputation of Mount Holyoke during her 36 years of leadership, was surprised and outraged at the decision. She left South Hadley on 27 July 1937, never to return to the college. Then, in 1975 after extensive correspondence between President Woolley and English professor Jeannette Marks surfaced, President Truman directed that archival staff allow those recently acquired materials “be seen by no one” (cited in Fields, n.d.) However, Anna Mary Wells, Mount Holyoke ‘26, had already had access to the collection and in 1976 requested permission to cite the Woolley papers in her forthcoming biography of Marks and Woolley . When the initial request was denied, Wells became an unlikely pioneer in the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) issues in the history of higher education . As she noted in the foreword to Miss Marks and Miss Woolley, opening the box containing the Woolley-Marks correspondence “radically altered” her approach to the dual biography, as well as “the feeling of the college authorities about it” (Wells, 1978, p. viii).

The historians at Mount Holyoke who petitioned the president for access to the Woolley-Marks correspondence were ahead of the curve in arguing that histories of sexual minorities occupy an important place in academic scholarship, and should be addressed with openness and respect. Jonathan Katz had just published his landmark Gay American History (1976), and Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1978) had not yet been translated into English. The battle over access to the Woolley-Marks papers occurred well in advance of most colleges adopting lesbian and gay studies in the curriculum.Footnote 1 Martha Nussbaum’s (1992) account of the difficulties she and her colleagues at Brown University encountered in introducing lesbian and gay studies in the mid-1980s provides evidence of the sort of academic hostility to scholarship on sexuality that characterized the early years of this work. She drew parallels between the challenges in establishing women’s studies programs and lesbian and gay studies, but emphasized that “On this one issue of sexual orientation …the straight academy’s (and above all the straight male academy’s) fear of contagion was so deep that it was rare indeed to find support for those claims of justice, or for the closely related claims of scholarly inclusiveness” (Nussbaum, 1992, p. 32). In her hallmark style, Nussbaum argued with clarity that support for the new studies was rooted, most importantly, in scholarly integrity concerning the pursuit of truth and understanding. She cited, as an example, David Herlihy’s work as a founding member of the Women’s Studies Committee at Harvard and his contributions to the collective effort to add lesbian and gay studies to the curriculum at Brown. The esteemed historian placed scholarly critique and reason above curricular tradition bound by social prejudice , as evidenced by his support of John Boswell’s graduate study that culminated in one of the landmark works (1980) in gay history.

For her part, Wells had simply set out to write a biography of Mary Emma Woolley , notable Mount Holyoke president whose historical record appeared curiously slim by the 1970s. Woolley’s prominence in women’s education history was without question, having achieved national recognition for her work in higher education, women’s organizations, and peace and disarmament talks. In 1930, Good Housekeeping editors listed her among 12 “greatest living women in America” (Wells, 1978, p. 211). Woolley’s own educational trajectory —graduate of Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, among the first class of women admitted to Brown University, A.B. 1894, M.A. 1895, and professor at Wellesley College—reflected the changing terrain of women’s higher education in the late-nineteenth century. Certainly Woolley was a worthy candidate for a biographer interested in exploring the first decades of women’s higher education in the United States. Wells was aware that the circumstances surrounding Woolley’s departure from the college in 1937 would require careful consideration and was prepared to “slide gracefully over it at the end” of the book (Wells, 1978, p. viii).

Wells also knew about the 55-year relationship between Woolley and Jeannette Marks that began when Marks was Woolley’s student at Wellesley. It was common knowledge on campus in the 1920s when Wells was a student at Mount Holyoke, if not necessarily cause for much comment. In her study Wells drew on material in the Wellesley and Mount Holyoke archives to document the reciprocal nature regarding the influence of women’s relationships on women’s colleges and the ways in which women’s academic communities affected individual women’s relationships. She was not prepared for the contents of the crate opened in the Mount Holyoke archives in 1975, however, soon to be off limits to researchers. Wells explained she was “shocked and embarrassed” by the letters packed in “neat brown paper packages labeled with initials and dates… .letters in the packages in their original envelopes, addressed in Miss Woolley’s now-familiar hand or Miss Marks’ difficult scrawl, stamped and postmarked” (Wells, 1978, p. ix). For the purposes of historiography, Well’s foreword is perhaps now the most enlightening part of the biography. It provides a glimpse of how the author of the first significant book dealing with LGBTQ themes in the history of higher education struggled to make sense of evidence of intimacy in the lives of her subjects.

One cannot dismiss Wells’ unsubstantiated claims that the Woolley-Marks “relationship began in the childlike ignorance of sexual matters in which many young women of their generation were kept” (1978, p. x) or that “professional women of their generation…abjured sex” (p. xii). But it is important to note, too, that Wells reflected upon her own prejudices in a way that highlights the unrest of a generation of scholars on the cusp of new ways of thinking about sexuality . “It seemed to me impossible to ignore or suppress the content of the letters, impertinent to continue to read them, and quite unthinkable to publish them… . I had supposed myself to be open-minded and tolerant about sexual deviation, but it now appeared that I was not at all when it occurred in women I admired and respected” (Wells, 1978, p. ix). While readers, then and now, rightfully take issue with some of the language and assumptions in Wells’ analysis, her criticism of efforts to keep a lid on the “shameful secret ” at Mount Holyoke was on point: “the conspiracy of silence was not working” (Wells, 1978, pp. x–xi). Thus, the reluctant scholar took her place in the debate just heating up among women’s historians concerning appropriate terminology for women who loved women in earlier periods (Chambers-Schiller, 1979). Wells did not describe Woolley and Marks as lesbians because she considered the term pejorative and inaccurate, implying a necessary connection to particular types of physical expression of affection (p. x). Wells was assessing the subject from the standpoint of a person who came of age in the 1920s, a critical period in the transformation of how Americans thought about sexuality , while in the midst of another significant turning point regarding how Americans thought about sexuality.

In retrospect it appears that Wells was right about two important points. First, while taking pains to expose her own lack of tolerance regarding the sexuality of Marks and Woolley, Wells was, nonetheless, more broadminded than many of her contemporaries, Mount Holyoke alumnae and fellow scholars alike (see, for example, Kendall, 1976, pp. 131–143). Wells could see that any responsible biography of Woolley or Marks would have to feature their relationship as a central theme, and rather than abandon the writing project she brought the contents of the archival crate out for scholarly discussion. Second, Wells was cognizant of the historian’s understanding of perspective. Noting that “a new generation will see the facts in a new light,” Wells explained, “I cannot hope to justify the lovers’ self-denial to the young any more than to justify their love to the old, but I have told their story to the best of my ability” (1978, p. xii).

Wells’ biography of Miss Marks and Miss Woolley was the opening chapter in a line of scholarship on LGBTQ history in higher education. Four decades on, work remains relatively sparse in this field of study. But things have changed substantially at Mount Holyoke since Mary Ann Wells cracked into the Woolley-Marks correspondence. Restrictions on the collection were removed in 1990, and in 2012 Head Archivist Leslie Fields (n.d.) began the process of cataloguing the 38 boxes of material. Student curators Megan Haaga, ‘15, Jennie Ochterski, ’15, and Carolina Palmer, ’15 prepared an exhibit, “Mary Woolley & Jeannette Marks: Life, Love, & Letters” (n.d.) for the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, that now can be accessed online. In 1999, Mount Holyoke College opened what would become known as the Jeannette Marks Cultural Center to serve members of the college community who identify as sexual and gender minorities, and allies (The Jeannette Marks Center, n.d.). Today the Woolley-Marks legacy is widely recognized as “history of great value,” at Mount Holyoke College and beyond (cited in Fields, n.d.).

In 2012, I published a historiographical essay assessing the field of LGBTQ education history, elaborating on the text I delivered the previous year as Vice President of Division F: History and Historiography in the American Educational Research Association . There wasn’t much to report on, and one of the questions I addressed then was why education historians have been relatively late in incorporating questions of sexuality into their work. Although LGBTQ research in the history of education has unfolded in patterns similar to the broader field of LGBTQ history, education historians were not among the grassroots activists who labored on local history projects “to uncover history that the academy had neglected, or perhaps, resisted” (Graves, 2012, p. 478). Citing William Pinar’s claim that homophobia “is especially intense in the field of education” (1998, p. 2), I argued that Colleges of Education were not welcoming spaces for scholars who focused on the queer history of education. In addition, evidence regarding perceptions of sexuality, elusive for most historians, is particularly difficult to find when the subjects are students, teachers, or professors living and working under strict public scrutiny. Finally, education historians , particularly in the United States, have been slow to incorporate theory, explicitly, into their scholarship. This tendency has done little to bridge the gap between history of education research and queer studies. To date, there is no landmark work in the history of higher education to parallel Jackie Blount’s 2005 volume, Fit To Teach, a comprehensive history of lesbian and gay school workers in the United States. Blount began this study before lesbian and gay archives had established a strong institutional presence, and before the advent of ready access to online resources . Gathering relevant primary sources was, in and of itself, a significant contribution to the history of teachers. But Blount’s central argument—that those who desire others of the same sex or otherwise transgress gender norms have always been among America’s educators—established a critical theoretical framework for LGBTQ education history. In a corollary analysis, Blount examined why these educators had to maintain a relatively low profile throughout much of the twentieth century. More than any other scholar, Blount has shown that schools have held, among other primary concerns, a fierce commitment to regulating the sexuality of the nation.

This historiographical essay surveys histories of higher education that have examined LGBTQ issues as a central theme, or included substantial analysis of LGBTQ issues as part of a larger argument. The focus is decidedly on the experiences of sexual minorities in higher education, as students, professors, or administrative staff, and related issues. The scope of the study does not encompass broader issues relating to gender and sexualities, except as such research intersects with LGBTQ history. Throughout the essay, I use the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” “homosexual,” “queer,” “bisexual,” and “transgender” as they surface in particular historical moments, and address historiographical debates about terminology as part of the analysis. It is widely understood that “gender expression, sexual behavior, attraction, and identity are each separate and distinct domains” (Wimberly, 2015, p. 5; Graves, 2012) and that the multiple definitions regarding sexuality are fluid, embraced by some and not others, and have changed over time. Therefore, I am using the term “LGBTQ” as a general categorization common to research in the field. One should note, however, that very little scholarship in the history of higher education explicitly addresses bisexual or transgender students, professors, or issues , and publications that embrace queer theory have only recently emerged in the literature.

I started compiling the bibliography of sources that constitute this review a decade ago, and have added to it as new work is published in the history of education. Since so few books have been published in this area, it is important to include journal publications in a review of the field. In 2016, I ran a targeted search, beginning with Exe Libris: the UK History of Education Society’s Online Bibliography. This is a comprehensive search engine for scholarship in the history of education that includes 56 UK historical journals, ANZHES Journal (the journal of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society), History of Education Review, History of Education Quarterly (the journal of the United States History of Education Society), and Paedagogica Historica (the journal of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education). The following list of keywords resulted in just one article addressing LGBTQ issues in higher education history: “homosexuality,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “transgender,” “same sex,” “queer,” “sexuality,” “purge.” This recent search reinforced an observation I had already made: most published research on LGBTQ issues in the history of higher education does not appear in history of education journals. One must look elsewhere, so I ran a search of the same keywords on the EBSCO database, specifically targeting the following search engines : Academic Search Complete, America: History & Life, Education Full Text, Education Research Complete, Gender Studies Database, Historical Abstracts, LGBT Life with Full Text, and Women’s Studies International. In this search I crossed the keywords listed above with “higher education” and “history,” yielding a number of hits but only four articles on LGBTQ issues in higher education history.

To begin my analysis of the literature, I separated the resulting bibliography into three parts : books, articles, and films on the history of higher education that address LGBTQ issues as a central theme; books and articles that either incorporate LGBTQ issues in higher education in broader LGBTQ histories or address historical themes in broader treatments of LGBTQ issues in higher education; books and articles that examine life histories of people in higher education, either through biographies, surveys, or other reflections on college experiences. I then organized the material into sections that present a thematic overview of the literature, beginning with early work that simply established the presence of LGBTQ people in the academy. In that section, I examine biographies that informed our understanding of women’s relationships in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colleges and their connections to women’s claims on educational, political, and social rights during that period. Dilley’s (2002) typology of male sexual identity, Queer Man on Campus, and Shand-Tucci’s (2003) study of the ways in which Harvard men over the course of a century came to understand and express their sexuality were useful contributions that followed roughly two decades later. At the same time, Beemyn (2003a) published an article in the first issue of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education that included a short overview of transgender history and referenced recent experiences of three college students.

Sexual politics shifted in the middle decades of the twentieth century so that by the post-World War II era “mere survival ruled the day” (Bernstein, 2002, p. 542) for gay men and lesbians, on campus and off. Government officials at federal, state, and local levels manically embraced a wide-sweeping strategy of repression of sexual minorities that included arrests, forced hospitalization, loss of jobs, blackmail, surveillance, and physical attack (Graves, 2015). Thus, this essay’s second section reviews the series of purges which attacked the very presence of LGBTQ people on college campuses during the Cold War. The most intense and concentrated of those witch hunts occurred in Florida, between 1956 and 1965. Research on the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee published between 1992 and 2014 (Braukman, 2012; Graves, 2006, 2009; Poucher, 2014a; Schnur, 1992, 1997; Sears, 1997) is the most developed scholarship on this topic, and constitutes a considerable part of the bibliography on the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education. Historians have documented other purges, some occurring before the Cold War , at Harvard, Dartmouth, Smith, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, Texas, Southern Mississippi, and UCLA (Feinberg and Odeshoo, 2000; “Hunting Homosexuals at Southern Miss: 1955–1965,” 2016; Martin, 1994; Nash and Silverman, 2015; Syrett, 2007; Tsang, 1977a, 1977b; Weiler, 2007; Wright, 2005).

At about the same time that historians turned their attention to research on gay purges at colleges and universities, others were beginning to analyze LGBTQ students’ efforts to organize on campuses. This work, detailed in the third section, appeared as journal articles and book chapters; no full-length treatment has yet been published. Similarly, historical scholarship on gender and sexuality that intersects with LGBTQ themes in higher education, the topic of the final section, appears most often as part of larger works addressing notions of masculinity in European universities and American fraternities , and the sexual revolution that transformed U.S. culture in the 1960s and 1970s (Bailey, 1999; Friedman, 2005; Syrett, 2009; Weber, 2008).

In 2011, preeminent gay historian John D’Emilio addressed the members of the History of Education Society meeting in Chicago, encouraging scholars to take up a new challenge in writing LGBTQ history. As the field entered its fourth decade it was time, he said, to think about how LGBTQ history contributes to an increased understanding of broader questions of historical significance. Looking back over the trajectory of research on LGBTQ history in higher education, one can appreciate the difficult work historians began in the 1970s that established a foundation for future study. It was no small thing to document the presence of LGBTQ people in the academy, drawing fragments of evidence from personal correspondence and the ways in which people lived their lives. As Cold War restrictions drew tighter around gay men and lesbians falsely accused of posing a deviant threat to the social and political order, investigative committees, court records, and news reports left a trail of interrogation transcripts, official sanctions, policies, and laws for historians to interpret in the decades to come.Footnote 2 The repression gave rise to gay rights groups and, later, student organizations that produced their own policy documents, publications, and other primary sources that historians have turned to, along with an increasing reliance on interviews, to examine the changing landscape of LGBTQ issues in higher education. Throughout, historians have weighed the impact of contemporary scholarly and popular literature in science, medicine, psychology, religion, law, and education, among other fields, on changing cultural norms regarding sexuality . In the last decade, historical scholarship on LGBTQ issues in higher education has relied more on queer theory in framing questions for analysis. To paraphrase the Queer Nation (60) rallying cry of the 1990s, education historians have made it clear over the last few decades that “we’re here” in higher education. It falls to an emerging generation of scholars to articulate in richer detail what it means, and has meant, to be queer in the academy.

4.1 Establishing a Presence

…[T]he aim of my research, while physically most ambitious, was intellectually quite modest—to simply recover and present a significantly large, wide-ranging collection of historical documents concerning … Gay American history. … After several years of research, working alone, with quite meager financial resources , I was able to uncover evidence of a vast, subterranean world of same-sex relations, coexistent with the ordinary historical universe. I now believe it will one day be possible to write a comprehensive, analytical, narrative chronicle of the homosexual American experience, but only after Gay history is legitimized, after it becomes a cooperative enterprise, after more research is undertaken and more evidence collected… . This book is significantly not a product of academia; it does not play it safe; it is rough at the edges, radical at heart (Katz, 1976, pp. 6, 8).

It is fitting to remember how desolate the scholarly landscape of LGBTQ history was in 1976 when Jonathan Katz published Gay American History. Historians’ turn to social history had barely begun when Katz “single-handedly created a subfield of American history” (Downs, 2016, n.p.). Well, not exactly single-handed, as Katz himself was the first to point out. Part of the impetus for his work came from the Gay Socialist Action Project , a group of activists and intellectuals who met regularly at John D’Emilio’s New York apartment to discuss critiques of power structures ranging from Marx to feminist and critical race theorists of the moment. Downs (60) reports that the group was “searching for a new theoretical framework for what it meant to be gay and for instructions on how to launch a revolution” (n.p.). Katz came to appreciate the critical importance of documenting one’s history, as a buffer against changing political winds. “If you think of yourself as some sort of psychological mutant or biological freak , you have an ahistorical way of looking at yourself. Gays have a history, a society. And it’s very important to me to show not only the ways in which gays have been oppressed, but the ways in which they have survived and resisted” (as cited in Downs, 2016, n.p.).

Katz (1976) referenced more than 25 colleges, universities, and medical schools in his 690-page volume, although in most cases that involved simply noting the institutions as part of a person’s educational biography or as sites for anti-gay “research .” Some of these brief reports, however, staked new ground that other historians would explore in later years. Most of these addressed same-sex relationships involving students or faculty, for example, Antoinette Brown and Lucy Stone at Oberlin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Martin Gay at Harvard, women attending Johns Hopkins Medical School—“apparently a hotbed of Lesbianism and feminism ” in the early 1900s—and, Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas ’ relationships with Mary Gwinn and Mary Garrett (Katz, 1976, p. 645, n. 9). Bertrand Russell’s autobiography provided the window into the Thomas-Gwinn-Garrett triangle, an example of how much of LGBTQ history is preserved through sources hostile to the subject. Katz observed that Russell probably would not have recalled the relationship at all, absent the conflict between Gwinn and Thomas adding, “a great many homosexually relevant documents come to portray problematic episodes in the lives they recorded” (Katz, 1976, p. 59).

Katz effectively parlayed shreds of available information into a documentary history that has stood the test of time. His writing was carefully structured to guard against reaching beyond the evidence. For example, noting that Henry David Thoreau “often explores and tries to sum up the meaning and quality of his intimate interactions with men—that special love-friendship which is a recurrent theme of his writing,” Katz wrote that “it would not have been unusual if Thoreau had found one special friend among his Harvard schoolmates” (1976, p. 481). This is a theme that Shand-Tucci elaborated on in his 2003 book, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture.

Katz drew attention to a few primary sources that would, in later years, serve as foundational elements in the emerging historiography of LGBTQ issues in higher education. His section on English socialist Edward Carpenter, for instance, opened a portal to work that explores discourse on sexuality at Oxbridge (Dowling, 1994; Weber, 2008). Carpenter, best remembered for his early articulation of homosexuality in positive terms, contrasted different climates regarding perceptions of sexuality. He observed, “We must remember, too, how different, the atmosphere on all these matters was then [1891] (especially in the U.S.A.) from what it is now [1924] in the centres of modern culture, and in places like Oxford and Cambridge and London, where you can nowadays talk as freely as you like, and where sex variations and even abnormalities are almost a stock subject of conversation” (as cited in Katz, 1976, p. 365). In 1994, Dowling pointed readers to the way that Greek studies at Oxford in the Victorian Era operated as “homosexual code” to justify male same-sex love, while making it clear that “‘homosexuality ’ eventually emerged as a positive social identity only through a slow process of cultural transformation taking place over centuries” (p. xiii). Taddeo (1997) picked up the story in the Edwardian Era with an analysis on the “New Style of Love” practiced by the Cambridge Apostles, a version of male love that “separated the lower from the Higher forms of sodomy, the body from the soul, and passion from love” (p. 201). It was a version of manly love that claimed class and gender privilege, and male superiority. Quinn and Brooke (2011) argued that Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds rejected this aristocratic reading of homosexuality and, instead, embraced a democratic, more inclusive sexuality. Quinn and Brooke concluded, “Different versions of homosexuality could buttress different versions of socialism; to talk about sex—as ever—was also to be talking about politics” (2011, p. 696).

In another section Katz introduced readers to Katharine Bement Davis’ 1929 report, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, a study that included two chapters on homosexuality. Blount (2005) drew from this work to establish the fact that significant numbers of women educators in the early-twentieth century experienced intense emotional and/or sexual relationships with women, a point she notes that Davis made in generally positive terms.

Katz also highlighted incidents regarding gay and lesbian purges that others would analyze more thoroughly, including dismissals from Smith College (Martin, 1994; Shand-Tucci, 2003) and universities in Florida (Braukman, 2012; Graves, 2006, 2009; Poucher, 2014a; Schnur, 1992, 1997; Sears, 1997). Recently, Katz has been instrumental in recording details on the “hunt for homosexuals” at Southern Mississippi University from 1955 to 1965, and is organizing a nationwide database (60) at OutHistory.org to document the university purges. Homophobic impulses did not always win the day, however. Gardner Jackson recalled from his student days at Amherst (1915–1916) that Robert Frost asked President Meiklejohn to fire his colleague in the English department, Stark Young, on the basis of Young’s homosexuality (Katz, 1976). Evidently, there were other areas of conflict between the professors, and Meiklejohn refused to dismiss Professor Young, presumably due to his competence as a teacher. Although President Lowell would take a drastically different approach in the next few years at Harvard (Wright, 2005), purges of gay and lesbian faculty had not yet become as aggressive as during the Cold War (detailed in the next section).

Some sections in Gay American History underscore the point that Blount (2005) and others have since developed: gender transgressions often provoked more fury in schools and universities than same-sex desire. Katz reported on the case of a student at Cornell who was expelled in the 1880s for attending a concert with another woman dressed in a man’s suit. According to a recollection by Cornell alumna Ellen Coit Brown, ’82, the expelled student was eventually reinstated at the university and graduated. While she ended up living a “long and exemplary life,” the woman’s “companion who wore the man’s suit never appeared at college again but faded into anonymity” (Brown cited in Katz, 1976, p. 231).

While it would fall to others (for example, Boswell, 1980; Chauncey, 1994; Cook, 1977; D’Emilio, 1983; D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988; Duberman, Vicinus, & Chauncey, Jr., 1989; Faderman, 1981; Kennedy & Davis, 1993) to break into the academic ranks, Katz’s painstaking work assured that generations of LGBTQ people would come to know they have a history.

Historians who study nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s colleges were the first to write on LGBTQ issues in higher education. Prominent work includes Wells’ biography (1978) of Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley , Judith Schwarz’s 1979 article on Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman, Patricia Palmieri’s path-breaking research on the community of women faculty at Wellesley (1983, 1995), Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s biographical study of M. Carey Thomas (1992, 1994), and Nancy Sahli’s influential article, “Smashing: Women’s Relationships Before the Fall” (1979). The imprint of women’s history and feminist theory on these beginnings is evident; Sahli’s and Schwarz’s articles appeared in women’s studies journals, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s foundational article (1975) appeared on the first pages of the first issue of Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society.

Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” remains a requisite reference in lesbian, women’s, and gender history, describing the network of intimate, supportive relationships that girls and women developed in the nineteenth century. Smith-Rosenberg encouraged her readers to “view sexual and emotional impulses as part of a continuum or spectrum of affect gradations strongly effected by cultural norms and arrangements, a continuum influenced in part by observed and thus learned behavior” (1975, pp. 28–29). Her research revealed that, in different historical contexts, people have more or less freedom to move across the spectrum from heterosexuality to homosexuality. Whether or not historians chose to label emotional, sensual, and sexual relationships between people of the same sex in the past as “lesbian” or “gay,” however, was another question. Given that “[w]omen’s colleges were important sites in defending social constructionists ’ claims that historical forces shaped the possibilities that led women to claim a lesbian identity,” education historians have had a central role in this debate (Graves, 2012, p. 479).

Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull’s introduction to The Lesbian History Sourcebook (2001) addresses this question in clear fashion. They articulate the complexity of the issue, first, by explaining that “lesbian” encompasses many meanings and identities, ranging from “feminist woman-identified-woman (emphasizing community and politics) to a specifically sexual definition (emphasizing powerful eroticism and transgression)” (Oram & Turnbull, 2001, p. 1). Since these meanings have changed over time and women rarely claimed a lesbian identity until recent decades, we cannot simply apply a concept or language from one time to another. Rather, historians must “enter into the culture of the past as best we can, and understand the social and economic constraints within which women could express or act out love and desire for other women, while at the same time recognizing that our questions, concerns and interests, and the interpretations we make of women in the past, have arisen in our specific historical circumstances” (Oram & Turnbull, 2001, p. 1). Oram and Turnbull’s definition of lesbian requires some evidence of a broad sense of eroticism, whether indicated by sexual practices, transgressing gender roles, or women’s consciousness of their feelings toward other women. They add that the scholarly discourse on how to “define lesbianism historically ” has been most useful in underscoring “the diversity and ephemerality of historical evidence of desire between women,” not that it has led to a stable definition of the term (Oram & Turnbull, 2001, p. 2). Leila Rupp (1989) offered a comparable set of guidelines, cautioning that one bear in mind that identity and sexual behavior are discrete elements, sexual behavior is only one factor in a relationship, definitive evidence of sexual behavior is hard to come by, and what does exist is often misinterpreted. In her collective biography of Wellesley faculty from 1875 to 1930, Palmieri adopted a similar stance, describing the Seven Sisters college “as a community of women-committed women,” adding that such an approach “acknowledges the elements of love, physical affection, and openly sexual behavior in some Wellesley marriages and reserves the term lesbian for women who have consciously claimed that identity” (Palmieri, 1995, p. 138).

Judith Schwarz did not hesitate to refer to Wellesley professors Katharine Lee Bates and Katharine Coman as “a devoted lesbian couple” in her 1979 biographical sketch (p. 59). Consciously striking out to contribute to what she perceived as a nearly non-existent history of independent women, Schwarz acknowledged the concerns that historians have about referring to “long-dead women ” as lesbians. Yet the term, for Schwarz, meant much more than an implication of overt sexual acts. Citing Phyllis Lyon’s definition of a lesbian as “a woman whose primary erotic, psychological, emotional, and social interest is in a member of her own sex,” Schwarz argued that the more important concern was to “discover and analyze how these women lived their lives outside of the standard comforts and socially approved protection of a male-female relationship ” (Schwarz, 1979, p. 60). Although her analysis centers on Bates and Coman, Schwarz referenced Vida Scudder and Florence Converse, Margaret Sherwood and Martha Shackford, and Jeanette Marks and Mary Woolley as other couples in the Wellesley orbit who left evidence of the kind of mutually supportive, vital relationships that sustained professional women in the early-twentieth century. The biographical studies by Schwarz (1979), Horowitz (1992, 1994), and Wells (1978) provide glimpses into the early functioning of the women’s colleges by some of their most acclaimed leaders, and at times, some insight into how the women, themselves, thought about their life choices. Schwarz reports, for instance, that when a friend described “free flying spinsters” as a “fringe on the garment of life,” Professor Bates responded, “I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don’t think I mind not being woven in” (as cited in Schwarz, 1979, p. 65).

Prior to the release of her 1994 biography of Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas , Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz published an article in the Journal of American History (1992) in which she argued that Thomas created her self-identity through reading. Deeply immersed in the biographical study, Horowitz knew that it was not easy to access the private thoughts that guided Thomas in her personal relationships. “Thomas was a formidable public figure,” Horowitz explained, “who sheathed herself in the conventions of her era” (Horowitz, 1992, p. 69). Based on juxtaposed readings of Thomas’ letters and diary with the poetry and fiction she read, Horowitz aimed to develop “an understanding of how a Quaker daughter born in the constricted world of mid-nineteenth-century Baltimore could emerge by her early twenties as a free-thinking woman capable of pursuing an independent course in Europe to attain the Ph.D. and of passionately loving another woman” (1992, p. 72). Horowitz argued that a method that envisions reading as a social experience as well as a private act can be a useful tool in reconsidering our notions of women’s love for other women, and claimed a new perspective on women’s same-sex love. “Carey Thomas and the women of her circle were not part of either the world of sentimental friendship or that of lesbianism . They did not take their primary cues from prescriptive literature. They were not passive victims of male definitions. They sought out and read works of fiction and poetry, written largely by men, that opened them to a sensuous world of eroticism between women. They actively and willingly chose the passionate sensibility of ‘nous autres’” (Horowitz, 1992, p. 91). Similar to the position she had taken in 1984 (pp. 187–197), Horowitz explicitly noted that she avoided using the terms “lesbian” and “sexual” in her study of M. Carey Thomas since Thomas did not consider that women’s feelings for each other had a sexual basis until she read the work of sexologists in the 1890s. Horowitz preferred to describe Thomas as “a passionate woman who reveled in aesthetic delights and formed intense, loving commitments to other women” (Horowitz, 1992, p. 94).

Sahli (1979) claimed Blanche Cook’s definition of lesbian, “[w]omen who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently” (as cited on p. 17), in her exploration of changing perceptions of women’s relationships at the end of the nineteenth century. She cited women’s enrollment in coeducational and women’s colleges as one of the significant social changes that had an impact on shifting notions of acceptable behavior among women. Living and working together at the colleges, women students and professors shared a commitment to claiming new educational, social, and political opportunities. They joined together to combat the sexist backlash to these advances as expressed by opponents of higher education for women. Sahli cited excerpts from Dr. Edward Clarke’s popular text, Sex in Education: or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, that castigated college-educated women for abandoning what he thought was women’s proper bearing: “There are those who write and act as if their object were to assimilate woman as much as possible to man, by dropping all that is distinctively feminine out of her, and putting into her as large an amount of masculineness [sic] as possible… .There may be some subtle physiological basis for such views; for many who hold and advocate them are of those, who, having passed middle life without the symmetry and development that maternity gives, have drifted into the hermaphroditic condition that sometimes accompanies spinsterism” (as cited in Sahli, 1979, p. 20).

Sahli relied upon women’s correspondence, college documents, reports of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, and publications in the emerging field of sexology to support her argument that aspects of the nineteenth-century feminist movement converged with the publication of new scientific theories on sexuality to alter public perception of women’s relationships. She makes a case that the feminist movement “subverted the heightened emotional commitment which had typified women’s relationships during most of the nineteenth century” in conjunction with consciously honing their rational, intellectual capacities as part of their collegiate training (1979, p. 26). This occurred in parallel with the development of psychiatric and other prescriptive literature that sought to define and control acceptable sexual behavior. Sahli’s review (pp. 23–25) remains a useful overview of the emergence of this literature base.

What may have been most striking to readers, however, when this piece was published in 1979, was the rich primary source evidence that delineated the central concept captured in the article’s title. Alice Stone Blackwell’s 1882 description provides a classic definition of “smashing ”: “I could hardly have believed that the things they told were not exaggerations, if Maria Mitchell hadn’t told me, when I was visiting at Vassar, what a pest the ‘smashing’ was to the teachers there—how it kept the girls from studying, & sometimes made a girl drop behind her class year after year… .they write each other the wildest love-letters, & send presents, confectionery, all sorts of things, like a real courting of the Shaksperian [sic] style. If the ‘smash’ is mutual, they monopolize each other & ‘spoon’ continually, & sleep together & lie awake all night talking instead of going to sleep; & if it isn’t mutual the unrequited one cries herself sick & endures pangs unspeakable. …The coeducational colleges don’t suffer much from ‘smashes.’…There are plenty of cases of ‘particular friends,’ but few or none of ‘smashes’” (as cited in Sahli, 1979, p. 22). Evidence of smashing permeated primary source material such as correspondence, diaries, campus and other contemporary publications, and many historians addressed the phenomenon in their work. Jana Nidiffer’s short essay on smashing that appears in Linda Eisenmann’s 1998 Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States provided a concise overview of the concept. Defined as “a version of same-sex romantic friendships among college women of the late nineteenth century characterized by rituals of declaring love and courting,” smashing was initially perceived as a harmless rite of passage (Nidiffer, 1998b, p. 378). However, once the writings of prominent sexologists began to filter through society, smashing was recast as a deviant expression of sexuality “and it disappeared by World War I” (Nidiffer, 1998b, p. 378). Other work beyond the scope of this essay’s focus on higher education addresses student same-sex relationships in English public schools and boarding schools (Blount, 2005; Blount & Anahita, 2004; Bullough & Bullough, 1980; de S. Honey, 1977; Gathorne-Hardy, 1977; Vicinus, 1984).

The presence of women who loved women on nineteenth-century college campuses was firmly established in the biographical studies by the historians noted above. Lillian Faderman drew upon this work in writing her ambitious 1981 cultural history, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. In that volume she included a description of the Marks-Woolley relationship, citing Wells’ 1978 biography and Schwartz’s 1979 essay on Bates and Coman, among other sources (Burgess, 1952; Finch, 1947; Kendall, 1976; Scudder, 1937). In her 1991 social history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, Faderman synthesized research on “The Educated ‘Spinster’” (pp. 13–18) and “The Metamorphosis of Romantic Friendship” (pp. 18–22), offering an overview of themes that circulated regarding women’s higher education in the nineteenth century: the emergence of the women’s colleges , criticisms of women’s higher education, marriage statistics, Boston marriages, and smashes, referencing experiences at Bryn Mawr, Cornell, Oberlin, Smith, Wellesley, and Yale. She expanded on this work in 1999, devoting a section of To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America to the history of women’s higher education. The title, in fact, referenced a letter to Bryn Mawr President M. Carey Thomas from an alumna who wrote, “I have forgotten everything I learned at Bryn Mawr, but I still see you standing in chapel and telling us to believe in women” (as cited in Faderman, 1999, frontispiece). In these chapters Faderman provides general overviews of the work of Mary Lyon and Zilpah Grant, Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles, Lucy Salmon and Adelaide Underhill, and other education leaders who established intimate partnerships , claiming “many of the early female academics were virtually case studies of sexual inversion, seemingly right out of the pages of sexological tomes” (Faderman, 1999, p. 186). She discussed smashes and Wellesley marriages , and devoted a chapter each to M. Carey Thomas and Mount Holyoke President Mary Woolley . The prominence of women’s partnerships at Wellesley College led women to adapt the term, “Boston marriages” to describe “lifelong relationships of deep significance” that fostered “verbal and physical expressions of love” (Palmieri, 1995, p. 137). In her discussion of Boston marriages, Nidiffer notes that these relationships “were known to be monogamous, long-term life choices for women… . Having grown up socialized to treasure women’s friendships and women’s values, the letters and diaries of participants in Boston marriages indicate that they had found ‘kindred spirits’ and discovered the full satisfactions of family life in their living arrangements” (Nidiffer, 1998a, p. 53). In her 1915 book on The Women’s Movement, Jessie Taft wrote, “Everywhere we find the unmarried women turning to other women, building up with them a real home, finding in them the sympathy and understanding, the bond of similar standards and values, as well as the same aesthetic and intellectual interests , that are often difficult of realization in a husband, especially here in America where business crowds out culture” (as cited in Nidiffer, 1998a, p. 54). Like the overt crushes experienced by young women, however, the phenomenon of Boston marriages would not last. Faderman discussed the sea change in women’s colleges in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when domestic science curricula encroached on the liberal arts curriculum, percentages of women holding professorships and administrative positions dropped, and the heterosexual imperative intensified to the point where “women were warned against desiring both a serious education and the love of another woman” (Faderman, 1999, p. 240). Theories promulgated by sexologists at the turn of the twentieth century had been taken up by psychiatrists, such as the one who declared that female homosexuals were often “intellectual and cultured, though sexually infantile” (as cited in Faderman, 1999, p. 240). That is, he considered homosexuality a sign of arrested development. Faderman explained that shifting attitudes toward same-sex desire reflected a wider distribution of the sexologists’ theories that went beyond the medical establishment and were echoed in the popular press.

Two books that address women’s higher education in the South (Farnham, 1994; Jabour, 2007) also took up the theme of romantic friendship. Contrasting higher education for women in the southern states with women’s education in the North, Farnham challenged the regional bias that defined southern education as inferior. Rather, she endeavored to show how “basically conservative agendas produced an advance in women’s education” (Farnham, 1994, pp. 6–7) for the privileged class even as educators adapted both formal and informal curricula to fit dominant versions of gender in the South. Part of this argument focused on romantic friendships, common in the South as well as the North. The rituals of female romantic friendships, patterned on heterosexual love, were similar in both regions but Farnham detected a “distinctive stamp ” in the evidence she examined (1994, p. 155). She found that women tended to engage in short-term, serial relationships due to shifting attractions and physical separation when one of the pair would leave school. Farnham argued that the serial nature of romantic friendships and the image of the Southern belle actually made them “opposite sides of the same coin, both leaving a trail of broken hearts” (1994, p. 161). Farnham’s discussion of the extent to which physical affection occurred in female life in the South in general set a new context for the questions historians have raised about romantic friendships, particularly whether they could be characterized as lesbian relationships. She concluded that it was “more than likely that several things were going on”—simply engaging in a trendy practice, seeking affection to reduce the pain of familial ties left behind, joining a high status group of friends—but for some, “romantic friendships had a broader meaning” (Farnham, 1994, p. 165). But these women, too, had to live within the conventions of their society. Since southern women did not have access to the same range of economic opportunities as women in the North, this had an impact on their life possibilities, diminishing one’s prospect for a “Charleston” marriage. Farnham observed, “Unlike the North, a lesbian culture failed to spread among these women, because they were unable to parlay their educations into occupations that could provide independent incomes sufficient to permit the development of communities of women” (1994, p. 4, 166).

Jabour’s more recent study (2007) confirms that romantic friendships were “an important aspect of school life in the Old South,” writing that the “female community of the female academy was the primary reference point for southern schoolgirls” (p. 71). Jabour described the female friendships she studied as highly romantic, perhaps erotic, involving physical displays and intense emotional connections. They enabled young women to find self-fulfillment in the form of academic achievement and to develop a self-in-relation, all the while allowing for “a temporary reprieve from the demands of conventional southern womanhood” (Jabour, 2007, p. 76).

Women’s relationships with each other prompted college officials to consider the social implications of building and campus design (Horowitz, 1984) and turned up in popular novels and short stories in the 1890s and early 1900s on student life at women’s colleges (Inness, 1994). Horowitz argued that the architecture of women’s dormitories, enormous buildings where “room arrangements hid much from view,” bedeviled college authorities trying to “curb an autonomous student life” (1984, p. 68). Crushes and sexual relationships ran alongside political organization in the gamut of behaviors that college officials hoped to contain. In her study, “Mashes, Smashes, Crushes, and Raves: Woman-to-Woman Relationships in Popular Women’s College Fiction, 1895–1915,” Inness argued that “these fictional crushes can act as a barometer of changing social attitudes toward women’s homoaffectionate relationships at the turn of the century” (1994, p. 49). Although not a new feature of college life in the 1890s, crushes fell under more scrutiny after the publication of Havelock Ellis’s “The School-Friendships of Girls” (1897) and “it became increasingly difficult for people not to identify a homoaffectionate crush as abnormal” (Inness, 1994, p. 53). Interestingly, Jeannette Marks adopted this stance in an unpublished 1908 essay, “Unwise College Friendships,” (Faderman, 1981; Wells, 1978) and revisited it in A Girl’s Student Days and After (1911). Inness (1994) and Horowitz both argued that “the burgeoning of an independent student culture at the women’s colleges of the 1890s” provoked more administrative control (p. 55).

Margaret Gibson (1998) exposed a critical inconsistency in her study of the vast medical literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries used to dampen enthusiasm for women’s higher education. She noted a weak link in a series of assumptions regarding perceptions of the lesbian intellect. As Gibson explained, writers who assumed that masculine intellect was superior to feminine intellect, and that lesbians were masculine, were left to conclude that lesbians possessed superior intellect. This flew in the face of the notion that lesbians were degenerate. Gibson’s argument provided fine-grain detail on how “the specter of an intelligent, sexually deviant woman became a threat to the status of any ambitious woman” (1998, p. 87). The medical classification of homosexuality that emerged in the late-nineteenth century breathed new life into Edward Clarke’s earlier claims regarding women’s education, masculinity , and degeneracy, especially as the schoolgirl crushes were gaining more attention. These concerns reached the point that “even the desire of a woman to attend college could indicate her latent or active homosexuality” to some, a notion that persisted decades into the twentieth century (Gibson, 1998, p. 89).

Deborah Olsen (2000) found that heterosexual images took on strategic importance in promotional literature designed by Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley Colleges to boost enrollment and donations during the late 1940s. As top-tier institutions increasingly opened admissions to women in the post-war years, officials at the women’s colleges looked for ways to “avoid association with such ‘radical’ ideas or traditions as feminism, ‘careerism,’ lesbianism, a separate women’s culture or communities of women” (Olsen, 2000, p. 419). One of four techniques that Olsen (2000) identified in the promotional literature was a “heavy reliance upon heterosexual images, including frequent references to the presence of men on campus and an emphasis upon the ‘feminine’ qualities of students” (p. 434). For instance, photographs of male professors and students dating men became much more prominent in fund-raising appeals . Presidents and professors took pains to distance their colleges from “Ivory tower” references, leading Olsen to wonder if the wording might have been code for communities of women. Statements assured potential applicants that there was a good supply of single dormitory rooms, and one president, for instance, was quoted as stating: “Wellesley’s ‘ivory tower’ has clear windows and outward swinging doors” (as cited in Olsen, 2000, p. 435). The erasure of lesbians, feminists, and academic communities of women that Olsen detected through her examination of college promotional literature was certainly not as harsh as the purges that would follow. Nonetheless, it proved an effective method of bolstering heterosexual culture on campus. Rather than promoting ignorance of lesbian sexuality directly, as a strategic ploy, this tactic was grounded in political geography as described by Proctor in his important book on Agnotology (2008). Sometimes ignorance results not simply from a vacuum of knowledge, or a more direct suppression of information; it can also stem from a selective choice. Proctor explained, “inquiry is always selective. We look here rather than there; …the decision to focus on this is therefore invariably a choice to ignore that. Ignorance is a product of inattention… .” (Proctor, 2008, p. 7). By mid-twentieth century, the apparent presence of lesbian and gay people on college campuses was fading.

Douglas Shand-Tucci (2003) launched a bold attempt to recover, not just a gay presence but a gay sensibility at Harvard, arguing that for over a century Harvard-connected gay men had an inordinate influence on the shaping of American culture. The work, written in a style that reflects the connections of an insider, relies upon secondary sources, cultural and literary history, personal and relayed narratives to produce a volume valuable for its many points of information regarding prominent gay lives. Shand-Tucci articulated the challenge faced by the first generation of gay historians : “Charting those currents, difficult to locate and sometimes thankless to detect, powerful as they are, because they are so deeply hidden, is for me the most worthy task of any historian alert to his calling” (2003, p. 5). He constructed his thesis around archetypes represented by Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, the warrior and the aesthete, “each an actual, indeed personal, presence in Harvard Yard in historical time, each a key vector, as scholars of Proust might put it, in psychological time ever since…” (Shand-Tucci, 2003, p. 11). Moving through chronological time and the organizational structures of “home” and “away,” Shand-Tucci offers typologies centered, first, on the themes of pederasty, aristocracy, secrecy, and guilt; then, politics, repression, rage, prophecy, and “a greater emphasis on sex” (2003, p. 176); and finally, polemic, therapy, insight, and more sex. By the end of his 400-page study, Shand-Tucci succeeds in making a case for a gay sensibility, asking “If, indeed, there is a Harvard sensibility, or a Boston sensibility, or a Jewish or an American or a Southern or a New York or a medieval or modern sensibility, or a leftist or a rightist or a warrior or an aesthete sensibility—are there not also sexual, as there are ethnic and vocational and period and regional and gender, sensibilities? Is there not a gay sensibility” (2003, p. 347). What is less clear, is whether the impact these subjects had on American culture was due to a gay sensibility rather than their Harvard connections.

Other scholarship that has helped to establish the historical presence of LGBTQ people in higher education utilizes surveys and oral history, drawing on interviews, recollections, and personal commentary. Patrick Dilley’s study (2002, 2005) of non-heterosexual college men from 1945 to 2000 is, perhaps, the best known of this work. Queer Man on Campus is a qualitative typological study that makes use of interviews, historical context (concentrated primarily in Chapter 6), student identity development theories, and queer theory to understand how men “who do not identify as heterosexual make sense of their lives in college” (Dilley, 2002, p. 4). Dilley developed a typology of seven patterns of identity : three of these—homosexual (1940s to 1960s), gay (1960s to present), and queer (1980s to present)—emerged over time, he argues, while another four types—normal, closeted, parallel, and denying—were evident across the scope of his study. As part of an effort to clarify distinctions, Dilley explained, “Whereas a closeted student understood his identity to be a secret, a homosexual believed his identity to be a private matter, and a gay collegian conceived of his identity in social terms, a queer man found the very notion of his identity to be public in nature and discourse” (2002, pp. 119–120). Dilley’s use of the term “non-heterosexual” throughout invites confusion and critique on the grounds that it implies a sense of inferiority that he does not intend. Rather, for him the term serves as a signifier that the men he interviewed “uniformly conceptualize[d] heterosexuality as a fixed, monolithic quality, …separate and distinct from their own sexuality” (2002, p. 9). Historians of higher education are likely to be most interested in the student narrative chapters that offer insight into perceptions and memories regarding the campus environment, fraternities and gay student groups, and sexual behavior, among other issues.

Anne MacKay’s (1993) anthology of lesbian and gay experiences at Vassar College, Wolf Girls at Vassar, provides a rich source of 41 student recollections representing students from the class of 1934 to the class of 1990. MacKay’s own recollection, “Being Gay at Vassar,” was rejected by the Vassar Alumnae Magazine in 1970, but when alumnae/i began organizing the Lesbian and Gay Alumnae/i of Vassar College two decades later, the Vassar Quarterly was ready to publish a different essay, “Breaking the Silence: A Message about Being Homosexual.” Both pieces are included in an appendix to Wolf Girls (MacKay, 1993), a book that records the responses MacKay received from Vassar alumnae/i wanting to share their own recollections about life at college as a lesbian or gay man. In a brief introduction MacKay addresses key themes that emerge from the recollections—the ways in which students, their families, and college officials dealt with their sexuality; the processes and time it took for women, in particular, to discover their sexual identities ; and a range of feminist perspectives that one might expect to find at one of the Seven Sister colleges over the course of a few decades. MacKay (1993) then provided a short overview of lesbian history at the college, discussing smashes and Boston marriages in the early years, the joy women experienced in their new-found independence, and administrators’ concerns when they found that only 409 of 1082 Vassar graduates had married by 1895 (p. 7). She described the 1930–1950 frame as a period of silence, the 1950–1970 period as repressive, and identified the 1970–1990 decades with a resurgence of feminism. The introduction serves as a fine frame for the recollections that follow.

E. Patrick Johnson incorporates a section on homosex at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in his 2008 collection of life histories of black gay men of the South. John Howard adopted “homosex” as a term to delineate “sexual activities of various sorts between two males” (1999, pp. xviii–xix). Based on interviews with men who attended HBCUs in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, Johnson speculated that the universities may have been more tolerant regarding homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s than they are today. He explained that, “regardless of an institution’s attitude toward homosexuality, gay men create their own communities within a larger black student body. Sometimes they are incorporated into the fabric of student life at an HBCU, and sometimes they are cordoned off into their own discrete and discreet organizations” (Johnson, 2008, p. 285).

While not a historical analysis, Toni McNaron’s Poisoned Ivy (1997) may be of interest to historians concerned with tracing institutional change for lesbians and gay professors in the last decades of the twentieth century. McNaron describes the study as a hybrid report/narrative that incorporates insights from her 30 years of experience as a lesbian professor at the University of Minnesota as well as findings from 304 questionnaires collected from lesbians and gay men who had worked for at least 15 years in the academy. The resulting narrative presents higher education as a space characterized by gradual change, with many institutions still holding to unyielding prejudice against LGBTQ people. In the concluding chapter, McNaron offers a case study of a liberal arts college in California as a model of integration and equity . Looking to the future, she highlights accounts that underscore the point that a successful academic life requires a sense of comfort with one’s self-identity. The personal perspective that serves as a theoretical frame throughout most of the book returns at the end with a force, as McNaron offers a clear visualization of the “difficult place” lesbian and gay academics still occupied at the end of the twentieth century: “We are asked to inhabit a middle ground between exhilaration and watchfulness, between the beginnings of ease and the necessity for alertness, between appropriate gratitude to colleagues and administrators who are working to improve our environments and continued pressure on such people to do even more. If we can manage this political and emotional balancing act, the academy will never be able to go back to the dismal and cruel state scores of people like me found in 1964” (McNaron, 1997, p. 213).

While Dilley, Johnson, MacKay, and McNaron offer reminisces that aid historians in capturing elements of the past that shed light on the college experiences of LGBTQ students and faculty, John Howard’s (1999) history of queer life in Mississippi features personal narratives alongside other sources of the historian’s trade that allow him to make observations about queer life in college. Similar to Johnson, Howard found that “homosexual couples were frequently acknowledged—and occasionally accepted” in the years after World War II (1999, p. 66). He notes that the college environment —in the dorms, unions, and quads much more than in classrooms—allowed for the kind of open, sometimes hostile, conversation that increased awareness of homosexuality for queer and straight students alike. Faculty were rarely heard from on the matter, and administrators throughout the region set up stakeouts in campus restrooms from time to time to suppress homosexual activity. In spite of this climate, Howard found that “male college students constructed worlds of same-sex desire and intimacy, love and camaraderie” through “friendship ties, queer residential quarters, campus cruising areas, and off-campus networks of house parties and nightclubs” (1999, p. 69).

In the afterword to Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968, prominent gay rights activist Barbara Gittings reflected upon the secrecy that enveloped LGBTQ life in the post-war years: “Lesbians and gay men back then put a lot of effort into building their secret, good lives. They lived in their small secret compartments which may have been fun inside, but they couldn’t go beyond them. Exposing themselves put their world at risk… . The problem, though, was not only in the price paid for this secrecy but that you didn’t leave a good legacy for the next generation of gay people” (as cited in Sears, 1997, p. 259). Gittings’ pre-Stonewall civil rights work was instrumental in launching the gay rights movement that would embolden people to come out, and begin speaking openly about their lives. The benefit to LGBTQ history was beyond measure. Historians of higher education should take note. As interviews in oral history collections are gathered to supplement archival records at colleges and universities, the history of LGBTQ people in higher education will become increasingly visible.

4.2 The Purges

The story of Martha Dean is not part of official histories of UCLA. The fact that her story has been forgotten and the extent to which it may have been deliberately erased raise significant historical questions. The history of gay men and lesbians in colleges and universities in the United States is only now being written, in large part because the evidence of their lives has been suppressed, destroyed, or ignored… .These events took place more than fifty years ago, but the questions they raise about civil liberties, the disciplinary effect of sexual norms, the compliance of universities with those who seek to deny full civil rights to all, and the power of the state to create a climate of suspicion and fear of those deemed ‘other,’ are still powerful and important today (Weiler, 2007, p. 496).

In one of the earliest publications to address gay and lesbian purges at colleges and universities, James Schnur (1992) placed his analysis in the context of academic freedom. He was one of the scholars petitioning for public access to the records of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC) , one of several state bodies formed in reaction to U.S. Supreme Court directives to desegregate schools. Schnur captured the objectives of the FLIC succinctly: its purpose was to “investigate any person or organization that violated customs and traditions preserving racial segregation ” (1997, p. 133). In 1992, Florida citizens approved a constitutional amendment that expanded access to public records in the state, a change in law that made FLIC records available for examination. Although historians had already studied some political aspects of FLIC, known popularly as the Johns Committee (see, for example, Lawson, 1989; Stark, 1985), access to the committee’s files revealed a rich set of sources regarding systematic persecution of homosexuals during the Cold War.Footnote 3

Before the extent of the state’s purge of gay and lesbian students, teachers, and professors was fully known, Schnur detailed the Johns Committee’s 1962 investigation of the University of South Florida. The committee had descended on the Tampa campus to investigate not only homosexuals, but also suspected communists and professors who had assigned “questionable” texts. The investigation, an exercise in blatant civil rights violations, was a fiasco and began to turn the tide of public sentiment against the Johns Committee. USF President John Allen threw a wrench into the FLIC investigative machinery by demanding that it conduct hearings in public and tape record the proceedings. Allen was walking a fine line, trying to guard institutional autonomy while avoiding the worst of the anti-intellectual actions of the investigative committee and the Board of Control that maintained oversight over higher education in the state. As Schnur (1992) reports, Allen could only achieve so much through these compromising efforts.

One of the controversies involved newly hired assistant professor of English, Sheldon Grebstein, who had assigned Norman Podhoretz’s “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” to an advanced writing class. Although the essay had become a popular text in universities across the country, Charley Johns demanded Grebstein’s dismissal for assigning “profane” literature that Johns deemed immoral. Allen responded by suspending Grebstein, an action that provoked the academic community in Florida into action. Individually and through the auspices of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) , American Association of University Women (AAUW) , and USF alumni associations, faculty, students, and alumni demanded that the basic tenets of academic freedom be honored. The Tampa branch of the AAUW proved particularly effective in confronting the Johns Committee (Graves, 2006). President Allen accepted a faculty committee’s recommendation to rescind Grebstein’s suspension, but still censured the professor for failing to promote “a proper moral tone” (Schnur, 1992, p. 13). Before the end of the year Grebstein resigned to accept an academic post in New York. In an interview three decades later, Schnur found that Grebstein recalled his encounter with the Johns Committee as an “ennobling” experience, one that “alerted him to the precarious nature of the academy in American life” and reinforced the point that “the university community must forever remain vigilant” (p. 14).

No evidence has surfaced to suggest that the gay and lesbian “witnesses” called before the Johns Committee referred to their interrogations as ennobling. Early analysis of the gay purge (Beutke & Litvack, 2000; Schnur, 1997; Sears, 1997) described “Florida’s homophobic witch-hunts” as a “microcosm for cold war crackdowns throughout the nation” (Schnur, 1997, p. 156). Schnur’s essay, “Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956–1965,” provided a comprehensive overview of the subject, from its original authorization as a legislative body designed to suppress the civil rights movement to its demise in 1965. Regarding its foray into higher education, the committee dispatched staff to the University of Florida in 1958 to launch an undercover investigation of homosexuality; using tactics of surveillance, entrapment, and intimidation, investigators pressured scores of students and faculty to name others for the committee to interrogate. The initial investigation set off an appropriations cycle in which the Johns Committee parlayed its findings from the homosexual purge into biennial reports to the Florida Legislature, which voted to extend the committee’s authorization in 1959, 1961, and 1963. The committee moved its operation from the campus at Gainesville and announced that it was extending its investigation to encompass educational institutions throughout the state.

Although the committee’s reckless swagger at USF triggered a critical shift in its standing with the public, the critical blow to the Johns Committee came with its 1964 publication, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida . The committee had written the report to expose the public to “the rapid spread and insidious aspects of homosexuality” (as cited in Schnur, 1997, p. 150). The committee’s unsophisticated analysis of homosexuality was accompanied by a glossary of sexual terms presented in crude language and suggestive photographs. In a surprise to Johns Committee members, the public was outraged that their tax dollars financed such a publication. Committee member C.W. “Bill” Young, who would go on to become Florida’s longest-serving member of the United States Congress (“C.W. Bill Young, Longtime Florida Congressman, Dies at 82,” 2013), warned Floridians not to “stick [their] heads in the sand” and defended what came to be known as the Purple Pamphlet by adding, “The legislature has responsibilities to the public to expose these people who have been preying on young people” (as cited in Schnur, 1997, p. 150). The document intensified the national spotlight trained on the Johns Committee, embarrassed their supporters, drew critique from quarters as diverse as the States Attorney of Dade County and members of the Mattachine Society, and distanced committee members from political colleagues. Schnur reported that the Johns Committee began destroying some records, locked other records away in a closet, and burned photographs that might discredit the committee’s work. Charley Johns and others resigned from the committee after the release of the Purple Pamphlet, and the Florida legislature did not extend the committee’s charter in 1965.

Sears (1997) addressed the history of the Johns Committee in two chapters in the first of his oral history volumes on lesbian and gay southern life. Drawing from FLIC records in the Florida State Archives, news accounts, and interviews, he narrated the events from the perspectives of faculty and students caught up in the anti-gay investigation. Sears’ summary was both concise and chilling: “During its reign of terror against homosexuals, the Committee employed networks of paid informants, plainclothes police, private detectives, and state administrators using interrogation and entrapment, blackmail and harassment, innuendo and rumor, and threat and intimidation to flush out the homosexuals. The institutional outcome was the dismissal, suspension, expulsion, or resignation of hundreds of university professors and students, public school teachers, and administrators in Florida. Wrecked careers and failed marriages, loss of self-esteem and reputation, suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse were some of the costs” (1997, p. 58).

Recollections from those involved, narrated decades after the Johns Committee closed shop, render the significance of this history in vivid detail. One professor described the experience as “a fearful time. Every waking moment—fear. Fear of disgrace. Fear of losing my job. Fear of no money. It was awful. It was a horrible experience. It was all conspiratorial; at times, I felt like I was in a chapter of a Dostoevsky novel” (as cited in Sears, 1997, p. 75). A student recounted details regarding her expulsion from Florida State University, describing a process that became standard operating procedure. Summoned from history class, the student sat across from the Dean of Women who began, “We have had a report that you are a lesbian” (as cited in Sears, 1997, p. 89). The Dean went on—it will go on your permanent record; expulsion was likely. In this case the student’s dorm mates signed a petition to protest her expulsion and the Dean offered a chance to stay at school, as long as the student met weekly with the school psychologist and accepted a reassigned roommate selected by college officials. Much of this history is incorporated into Beutke and Litvack’s short documentary on the Johns Committee’s purge of homosexuals, Behind Closed Doors (2000).

Within the last decade, three books and a new documentary film have been produced on the Johns Committee. And They Were Wonderful Teachers (Graves, 2009) explores the Johns Committee purge of gay and lesbian teachers at the elementary and secondary levels. Although teachers whose sexuality was questioned or exposed were summarily dismissed across most of the twentieth century, Graves argues that the intensity and scope of the Johns Committee purge set it apart from other examples of anti-gay persecution. She provides a detailed analysis of how the Johns Committee probed into the personal lives of members of a profession at the center of American culture, and charts the transfer of oversight of schoolteachers’ sexuality back to the state Department of Education as the legislative mandate for the investigative committee was waning. Unlike other historians who have written on the Johns Committee, Graves explicitly situates this history in the context of education history, making the argument that teachers, long perceived as guardians of the dominant ideology, have been particularly vulnerable to anti-gay discrimination. This very fact makes the history of teaching a critically important element in a broader view of LGBTQ history. To help secure this point, Graves contrasts schoolteachers’ experiences with the Johns Committee with the experiences of civil rights activists and the university investigations.

Communists and Perverts under the Palms (Braukman, 2012) is the most comprehensive study of the Johns Committee, tracing the committee’s trajectory from a post-Brown stance of massive resistance to an all-encompassing defense of conservative cultural values. Braukman places her work in the context of historical studies on massive resistance, segregation, anti-communism, and homosexuality in order to underscore the centrality of sexuality in the contested landscape of the mid-twentieth century. She traverses this terrain with great skill, allowing readers to consider the university investigations in light of other political struggles of the period. Braukman explicitly framed her approach as “tak[ing] the committee at its word” regarding their fears of political subversion and sexual perversion, in order to better “understand the committee’s agenda and its supporters’ views of a changing world” (2012, pp. 12, 15).

The most recent publication in the Johns Committee historiography, however, constructs its narrative from the other side of the interrogation table. Judith Poucher (2014a) selected five pivotal “witnesses” from the Johns Committee records and examined their lives—before and after they encountered the committee—to identify key characteristics that enabled them to resist unchecked state power. While the individuals represent different areas of investigation the Johns Committee pursued over its 9-year existence, three of the five provide insight into various elements of higher education history. Virgil Hawkins was called before the committee because he attempted to desegregate the University of Florida Law School. Sigismond Diettrich, Acting Chair in the Division of Geography and Geology, was forced to resign from the University of Florida as a result of the undercover investigation of homosexuality . Director of Student Personnel Margaret Fisher did her best to guard the integrity of the University of South Florida when she faced the Johns Committee in 1962. While all of these individuals’ encounters with the Johns Committee have been analyzed in previous work, Poucher adds depth and fresh perspective to the story. The Florida Historical Quarterly featured a multi-part review of Johns Committee scholarship, with Poucher (2014b), Graves (2014), Schnur (2014), and Braukman (2014) commenting on each other’s work.

In 2012, a class of undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida produced an award-winning documentary on the Johns Committee, produced and directed by professors Robert Cassanello and Lisa Mills. Their film features interviews with two former students who confronted the Johns Committee at the University of Florida and Florida State University, as well as John Tileston, a retired University of Florida police officer who assisted the Johns Committee in its investigations. PBS stations have aired the film, bringing the history of the Johns Committee to a wider audience.

Shortly after scholarly publications on the Johns Committee began to surface, a writer for The Harvard Crimson came upon a reference to “Secret Court Files, 1920” in the Harvard University archives. Intrigued, the reporter sought permission to review the files but was denied because they addressed student disciplinary matters. A team of writers at the student newspaper persisted with the request, given that the files at that time were well over 80 years old and, presumably, beyond the scope of student records policies. The redacted files were released and Crimson staff set about to uncover more details about Harvard’s Secret Court (Paley, 2002; Wright, 2005). In relatively short time, the reporters constructed a clear outline of events concerning the 1920 purge of homosexuals at Harvard. An editor at St. Martin’s Press approached William Wright, biographer and Yale man, with the invitation to expand upon the Crimson’s thorough coverage of the incident, leading to his 2005 publication. Similar to Shand-Tucci’s (2003) book on homosexuality at Harvard, Harvard’s Secret Court was a narrative penned for a popular audience.

The arc of the story began with the May 1920 suicide of Harvard student Cyril Wilcox. Wright constructed dialogue to take readers through the main elements: the Wilcox family discovering Cyril’s body, his brother’s pursuit of the gay men at Harvard who formed Cyril’s network of friends, family pressure on Harvard officials to investigate. President A. Lawrence Lowell appointed a “Secret Court” headed by Acting Dean of Harvard College Chester Greenough, and including University Regent Matthew Luce, Head of the Department of Hygiene Dr. Roger Lee, Assistant Dean Edward R. Gay, and Assistant Dean Kenneth Murdock. On 1 June, the Harvard Administrative Board approved Lowell’s plan, already underway, to investigate, establish “guilt” of engaging in homosexual activity, and collect names of all Harvard men involved (Wright, 2005). Rather than sully themselves with the task, the Board let final arbitration rest with President Lowell. The Court’s main methods of gathering information seemed to rely on a proctor taking note of activities and names of students engaged in “suspicious” behavior in Perkins Hall, and following up on information contained in an anonymous letter, signed only as “’21.” The pattern of interrogation was to become a familiar one. More than 30 men were summoned to appear before the Court, casting a net wide enough to include both men who had engaged in sex with other men, as well as their friends and acquaintances. Men under interrogation “submitted to the most excruciating and intrusive questions about their sexual histories with both men and women, the extent of their friendships with other students, the degrees of involvement with town boys, the sleepovers in off-campus apartments” (Wright, 2005, p. 53). The Court declared 14 men guilty, including five not affiliated with the college. One recent alumnus had his Harvard record expunged as a result of his appearance before the Court, and an Assistant Professor was fired. The Court classified the undergraduates in two categories—those who were “confirmed” homosexuals and those who were “guilty” by association; all were expelled. Two of the latter group were eventually readmitted to the college, graduated, and went on to lead the kind of successful lives Harvard expects of its graduates. In addition to Wilcox, two of the expelled students committed suicide and two others who appeared before the Court died early deaths. Wright supplied intricate details of these cases and assessed the proceedings in light of dominant moral and medical perspectives of the day. Finding Harvard guilty of the “worst sort of ignorance,” Wright determined that the “ignorance and bigotry can be explained and, to a degree, forgiven. The lack of compassion cannot” (2005, p. 266).

While Wright presents Harvard’s “1920 antigay tribunal ” as “a cautionary parable of a powerful institution run amok,” (2005, p. 269), Syrett (2007) plumbed a contemporary Dartmouth College case for an understanding of how homosocial and rural spaces contributed to the growth of a homosexual community. Similar to Wright’s study of Harvard, most of the evidence available to Syrett comes from the college officials who were charged with punishing Dartmouth students who, in the early 1920s, spent their free time in a house in an area of rural Vermont known as Beaver Meadow . “[F]ree from the regulatory eyes of their faculty, they had parties, stayed up late, drank alcohol, and had sex” (Syrett, 2007, p. 9). Syrett explained that the men shared a couple of characteristics. Not unusual for the time at men’s colleges, many of them regularly took the women’s parts in school plays. Also, many of the students belonged to Epsilon Kappa Phi, a local fraternity in the process of applying to the national Delta Upsilon fraternity . By 1925, two co-owners of the house in Beaver Meadow had attracted suspicion, “accused of making a ‘parade of their effeminacy’ and of having embraced an ‘aesthetic’ way of life” (as cited in Syrett, 2007, p. 11). Shortly thereafter, Dartmouth students complained to President Hopkins about the behavior of the students who partied in Vermont. Hopkins wrote letters to the students’ advisors, directing them to step up their own oversight of the group. He called the students to his office, and expelled one for violating Prohibition-Era alcohol restrictions. Two recent graduates were beyond the President’s disciplinary reach but resigned their fraternity membership when asked to do so. The president also consulted with psychiatrists and, beginning the next year, Dartmouth College productions imported women to play female roles in the plays. Syrett argues that this history is noteworthy because of the insight it provides into the perceptions these men had of their own identities, “what we might understand as queer” (2007, p. 12). And, unlike most LGBTQ history, the Dartmouth case offers early evidence regarding the formation of queer identities in rural spaces. “How is it,” Syrett asks, that “these men commandeered their fraternity for the purposes of gay sex, queer socializing, and female impersonation” in the middle of the 1920s when heterosexual behavior was increasingly engaged on college campuses (2007 p. 15)? He suggests the answer has to do with the range of definitions of masculinity that were expressed in the different fraternities on campus, and the fact that performing women’s parts in plays only became problematic when the action was linked to emerging homosexual identities. While Syrett would go on to develop these themes at length in his 2009 publication on fraternities, the story of the Dartmouth men in the 1920s “suggests that there may well be many other gay Arcadias yet to be found” in archives across the nation (2007, p. 16).

In “Under the President’s Gaze,” Gidney (2001) examined other forms of surveillance of homosexual students. The focus of her analysis was a World War II letter written by a male college student in Canada who had recently been released from an internment camp. Gidney’s study explored the ways in which “religious imperatives continued to inform evolving conceptions about morality and sexuality well into the twentieth century” (p. 37). She did not provide names of the student or his university, to preserve anonymity. During a period when immigration officials vetted correspondence, a letter in which the student expressed a general appreciation for the male body raised concerns. Of equal importance, evidently, were references that suggested to officials that the student was lazy. “Concerned about the moral fibre of the student,” the director of the Immigration Branch contacted the President of the student’s university, who launched a secret investigation into the student’s character (Gidney, 2001, p. 36). Gidney devoted much of the article to an overview of the 1941 Hazen Conference on religion and life, a gathering of faculty, presidents and deans of women in Canada that provides both context and insight into how mid-twentieth-century college administrators preferred to shape the conduct of students. When the student was confronted with claims regarding his moral character, he responded that his comments on the male body were of a general nature, and stated that he had never engaged sexually with a man. He referenced his dates with women as evidence of his heterosexuality and, thus, good conduct. The president followed up with more inquiries and, finding it “almost practically impossible for a pervert, who can be as often a medical case as a purely moral problem, to live in a men’s residence for a year without giving rise to some suspicions,” dismissed the charges against the student (as cited in Gidney, 2001, p. 53). Noting the confluence of psychology, medical, and moral language in the president’s deliberations, Gidney interpreted this case as further evidence that the university was a prime site for production and regulation of sexuality and morality.

Brief accounts of gay purges appeared in early gay publications and the journal, Radical Teacher (Tsang, 1977a, 1977b; Martin, 1994). The fullest treatment of an individual case, and what it reveals about the disciplinary impact of sexual norms in higher education, is Weiler’s (2007) analysis of Martha Deane’s forced retirement from UCLA in 1955. Weiler chronicles the relative ease with which Deane, one of only two women who were full professors at the university at the time, was dismissed after nearly three decades at the university for the “crime” of “having sexual relations with another woman in her own home” (2007, p. 472). This is not to say that colleagues, students, and alumni did not support Deane. The Committee on Privilege and Tenure voted to exonerate her, the Dean of the School of Education expressed his complete confidence in Deane, and a group of women faculty met with her regularly over the course of her suspension, donating $100 or so a month over the 3-year period while she received no salary.

Weiler’s account not only preserves a history of an accomplished educator; it “illustrates the intertwining of Cold War hysteria, sexual anxieties, and homophobia that characterized life in the United States in the early 1950s” (2007, p. 495). Like other historians working in this field, Weiler found that evidence in this case was “fragmentary and difficult to discover” (2007, p. 477). The structure of the essay serves as a model for scholars working on similar projects, facing similar challenges. Although the primary sources consisting mainly of administrative records and oral histories provided few direct responses to why Deane was fired, they did reveal “personal animosities , antagonism toward powerful women in university professorships, and a fear of lesbian sexuality” that Weiler juxtaposed with the broader context to produce a clear analysis (2007, p. 492). The expertly rendered narrative ends with a piercing explanation of why this history matters: “Despite her efforts to defend herself, her distinguished career, and the quiet support of her friends and colleagues, in the end Martha Deane lost her job, a job which was more than just a way to make a living, but was a central part of her identity. Although she reconstructed her life, she never recovered her position as a professor, the center of her intellectual life” (Weiler, 2007, pp. 495–496).

Nash and Silverman’s (2015) recent essay is a significant contribution to the historiography on gay purges in higher education. They study three incidents in the 1940s in which students and/or faculty presumed to be homosexual were forced out of the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin, and Missouri. As the authors point out, there is “a small amount of existing literature on homosexuality and campus life,” and none of that research examines “the immediate post-War period ” (Nash & Silverman, 2015, p. 442). This is a critical gap, as the “same unproven and irrational accusations” made against others in the mid-twentieth century could not be pressed against college students (Nash & Silverman, 2015, pp. 442–443). Unlike elementary and secondary schoolteachers, college students were not burdened with society’s expectations to serve as role models for children. Unlike employees of the U.S. State Department, college students were not perceived as high security risks . In addition to posing questions about the justifications college officials gave for purging gay and lesbian students and faculty, Nash and Silverman are pushing the field to determine the extent of gay purges at colleges and universities, as well as the ways in which gay students resisted the charges leveled against them. In this piece, they re-establish the nearly forgotten role of an anti-gay agenda in the firing of the President at the University of Texas in 1944, a reminder to historians of the insights that can be gained by taking another look at stories we think we know. They analyzed a student’s argument for reinstatement to the University of Missouri, a campaign that stands out from others in its demand for due process and critique of heavy-handed interrogation techniques . One imagines that the expelled student hoped such an argument, steeped in democratic discourse, might bend the decision in his favor in a Cold War context. In another critical development, the authors traced a paper trail from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Missouri to sketch an outline of the new “administrative machinery ” college officials developed in the 1940s to deal with homosexual students. Importantly, this evidence points to a “sea change in administrative responses to homosexuality on campuses between the ad hoc ‘secret court’ of Harvard in the 1920s and the building of permanent administrative machinery in the 1940s” (Nash, & Silverman, 2015, p. 458). By mid-century administrators had established organizational structures that enabled a systematic approach to removing homosexuals from campus.

Dilley (2002) traversed half a century of higher education history to illustrate the various ways university officials have “exercised strict control over the sexual mores” of students since World War II (p. 410). In this essay, he supplemented interview data collected for his larger study Queer Man on Campus with memoirs, archival documents, and case law to identify the range of policies and practices utilized in universities across the United States to suppress LGBTQ identities on college campuses. As Dilley summarized, in the period between 1940 and 1970, students were expelled on the basis of “deviant,” “lewd,” or “homosexual” conduct; suspicion of homosexuality; or, on the basis of association with homosexuals. Other sanctions, such as notations on transcripts or officials’ refusal to write letters of recommendation were imposed on LGBTQ students who were allowed to remain at their universities. College officials engaged in covert methods of control, staking out restrooms, for example, between 1940 and 1990. Prescribed therapy gradually began to replace expulsions beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the 1970s. “On-campus treatment became a method of controlling students’ concepts of how their sexuality was a part of their lives, as well as allowing administrators a closer locus of supervision over physical or social expressions of the students’ sexuality” (Dilley, 2002, p. 419). Opposition to student assembly and free speech emerged on the heels of cultural changes in the 1970s, as students fought to organize on campus, followed by legal battles to secure funding and equal recognition for their organizations within student government. Dilley cautioned that, while this brief history of university control of LGBTQ students can be read as progressing from exclusion to integration, a more accurate reading acknowledges that “elements of control, regulation, and even suppression play out in new ways and in new arenas” (2002, p. 427).

4.3 Organizing

Gay liberation offers revealing insights into the dynamics of social change, into how the struggle of an oppressed group for recognition does not occur in a vacuum but is dependent upon other forces at work in society (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 120).

Making Trouble (1992) provides a suitable starting point for a review of what has been written on LGBTQ student and faculty organizations in higher education. This collection of John D’Emilio’s essays and speeches written over the course of two decades is infused with historical analysis, political argument, and autobiographical reflection. The essays that constitute the section on the university in this book are, in a sense, primary documents marking the emergence of gay liberation in the academy as they were written by a key player in that movement. The historian’s perspective is provided in D’Emilio’s introductory statements for each chapter. A brief overview of some of the chapters illuminates critical guideposts in gay and lesbian organizing in the academy.

D’Emilio wrote the introduction to the published proceedings of the first conference of the Gay Academic Union (GAU) , held in New York City in 1973. The GAU had branched off from the more radical Gay Liberation Front, an offshoot in the movement that brought lesbians and gay men together to confront discrimination in their work. The GAU had almost an accidental beginning, traced to an informal gathering of gay faculty, graduate students, a writer, and a film director. The meeting, as D’Emilio recalled, was transformative. “Exhilaration is, perhaps, too weak a word… . We talked in highly personal terms of the difficulties of being gay in a university setting, how we coped with being in the closet, if that was the case, or what sort of reaction coming out had engendered… . Perhaps most enlightening, however, was the discovery that our academic training, regardless of discipline or particular research interests, allowed each of us to contribute something of substance, some insight, to the discussion” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 121). In this essay, D’Emilio devotes a good deal of attention to the intense debate on sexism that arose within the gay liberation movement, indeed, within the GAU . Over the course of a few meetings, the GAU passed a proposal to amend its statement of purpose, to include as the first goal “to oppose all forms of discrimination against all women in academia” (as cited in D’Emilio, 1992, p. 124). A second proposal, guaranteeing women fifty percent of the voting power, was defeated but a compromise that required equal gender representation in a steering committee was accepted. D’Emilio remembers the tenor of the debate as “appalling,” noting, “sexism goes beyond intellect” (1992, p. 124). The GAU conference was conceived as a means to increase membership. It was, D’Emilio wrote at the time, “a resounding success… . Three hundred gay academics, women and men, working together, sharing ideas, feeling good, and proud to be gay” (1992, p. 127).

In 1983, Oberlin College held a conference to recognize the 150th anniversary of its founding as the first coeducational institution in higher education and invited D’Emilio to address issues regarding homosexuality in the context of celebrating equal access to education. D’Emilio presented an overview of the brief history of LGBTQ issues in higher education, with attention to student groups, faculty, and scholarship. He noted that when the first gay student group organized at Columbia University in 1967, the students all signed the membership roll using pseudonyms. He remembered that students at New York University in 1970 had to occupy a university building for a week just to move the administrative process needed to get approval for a gay dance. Looking back at two decades of activism, D’Emilio regarded “the spread of gay student groups and their victories in court [as] important indicators of progress. These organizations provide critical peer support for young women and men at a difficult stage in their coming out. They also provide an opportunity to break down stereotypes among the majority student population. In many ways, they serve as a training ground for lesbian and gay youth who will later become proud advocates of gay equality in society at large” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 131). D’Emilio observed that gay and lesbian faculty were slower to organize and had, thus far, experienced less success than students due to discrimination in hiring and promotion. He acknowledged progress in the publication of gay and lesbian scholarship but added, “we are still at the level of tokenism, and not simply because it takes a long time to research and write a book. The same pressures that keep gay and lesbian faculty members in the closet also discourage them, as well as graduate students, from doing work on homosexuality” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 134).

This pressure was a theme D’Emilio returned to as part of a 1989 roundtable published in the Journal of American History . The Organization of American Historians (which in 2017 began awarding the annual John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award) had assembled scholars who could speak to “the ways the organized profession of American history has responded to the challenges that people with different identities, commitments, and agendas have brought to research and teaching in American history” (as cited in D’Emilio, 1992, p. 138). D’Emilio reflected on the high stakes of his task, the transformational moment when he embarked upon his dissertation study that would result in his ground-breaking book, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), the importance of strategizing one’s moves in the field, and the reception of early scholarship in LGBTQ history as “audience and author celebrated the product. To understand this reaction requires the recognition that, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, the doing of gay and lesbian history has been more than a form of intellectual labor (as it probably will be for some time hence). It was transforming, for both the doer and the receiver, and in the social context of those decades, inherently political. …[F]or my generation and for cohorts both older and younger, the absence of self-affirming words and images and the cultural denial of our very existence made any kind of history a profound, subversive revelation ” (D’Emilio, 1992, pp. 142–143). D’Emilio went on to address the significant difficulties under which the early research was produced—lacking institutional affiliation and teachers’ salaries to support summer research, exclusion from grants and fellowships, and difficulties getting access to primary and secondary resources. He called upon professors to bring LGBTQ issues into the curriculum, realizing that the content in our courses shapes the landscape of the profession for the next generation of scholars.

Two of the chapters in Making Trouble (1992) address the emergence of gay and lesbian studies in higher education. In 1989, D’Emilio gave a speech at the opening celebration for the lesbian and gay studies department at San Francisco City College, the first such program to be established in the United States. He took the occasion to reflect upon his long friendship with the program’s inaugural chair, Jack Collins, and placed this institutional step forward into the context of a politics of knowledge. “If there is any lesson of the 1960s that remains engraved in my consciousness, it is that there most definitely is a ‘politics of knowledge .’ The research we do, the questions we ask, the results that we publish, and the courses that we teach all reflect a view of the world, of our society, and of human nature. Our social characteristics , our values, and the vantage point from which we gaze at society shape the conclusions we reach. And the ideas that we put forward in print or in the classroom help to reproduce, or to modify, or to subvert, the order of things. That makes the work of the university political” (D’Emilio, 1992, 158). In 1989–1990, Pennsylvania State University sponsored a series of lectures on gay and lesbian studies. D’Emilio gave the concluding lecture, a talk in which he assessed the current state of the new field. In this piece he briefly elaborated, again, on the politics of knowledge, the historical context of the moment, the contours of the field as it was developing, and then offered observations about strategic decisions that would have to be made as the scholarship moved forward.

D’Emilio concluded the university section of his book with a three-page reflection on a theoretical insight that occurred to him at a 1988 graduation party for one of his students, a gay man whose celebration, on the surface, looked quite typical. Here, though, the assembled family and friends quite unassumingly accepted the graduate’s “gayness—not abstractly, but in the concrete form of his lover and his friends” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 178). This made the prominent gay historian realize that while conscious, deliberate efforts at social change are absolutely necessary, the relatively unremarkable actions of individuals as they go about their lives also make a critical difference in the sweep of history. He imagined, “throughout the United States, hidden from public view, equally profound changes are occurring in the lives of countless numbers of people. It is not only a story of gay lives, but one that also includes our families, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. The many, many instance of coming out…are reweaving the social fabric ” (D’Emilio, 1992, p. 178).

Robert Martin, one of the co-founders of the Student Homophile League (SHL) at Columbia University, wrote in 1992 that “the historical memory of student groups, with their rapid turnover, is notoriously short, but there is a great deal of which to be proud” (p. 258). His memoir on this first gay student organization in the United States is an important supplement to the analyses historians have written on college gay and lesbian student groups. Martin explained how he and fellow student Jim Millham adapted lessons they learned from Frank Kameny and members of the New York branch of the Mattachine Society to organize the SHL at Columbia. Martin envisioned that Columbia would be the founding chapter of a confederation of gay student groups at colleges across the nation. After gathering a small group of interested students, Martin and Millham enlisted the support of an important ally, Chaplain John Dyson Cannon, described by Martin as “an Episcopal priest of great courage, unshakable devotion to his ideals, wisdom and a gentle understanding of the needs of gay students” (1992, p. 259). Chaplain Cannon would be dismissed from Columbia 4 years later. Martin set up a meeting with university administrators and counselors in fall 1966 to pitch the idea of the SHL . Kameny came up from Washington, DC to address the group. Martin recalls a good deal of opposition.

The next step in the application process, however, presented a more direct problem. The Committee on Student Organizations at Columbia required organizations seeking university recognition to submit a membership list. Since few people in 1967 were willing to identify themselves with a homosexual organization, the student group functioned underground for a time, relying on funding from Philadelphia’s Drum magazine, the West Side Discussion Group, and ONE’s New York chapter. In retrospect, Martin noted that the underground period “gave us valuable time to discuss issues, to formulate an ideology as it were, among ourselves, to educate ourselves and work on group cohesion” (1992, p. 259). In spring 1967, Martin approached student leaders of other student groups at Columbia, asking if they would lend their names as pro forma members of SHL. This early example of intergroup solidarity lifted the first gay student group in the nation off the ground as SHL was formally recognized by Columbia University in April 1967. Martin’s initial press release on SHL’s formation was virtually ignored for about a week until the New York Times ran a story proclaiming, “COLUMBIA CHARTERS HOMOSEXUAL GROUP ;” (as cited in 1992, p. 260) then the news broke around the world.

SHL’s objectives in the early years were to educate the campus, work for gay rights, and provide counseling services to students. Martin reports that membership ranged from 15 to 30 students, and was mixed in terms of orientations, gender, and race. With little faculty support, SHL ran a series of dorm discussions, held forums with invited speakers, and issued statements on various civil rights issues regarding homosexuality. Martin claims an intellectual influence on what came to be known as “gay liberation ” 2 years later, after Stonewall, writing “Any historian of the ideas of the gay movement who neglects the pioneering intellectual work of SHL has missed a key element of gay history” (1992, p. 260). Soon other SHL chapters appeared on the campuses of Cornell and New York University, and students established similar groups at Boston area colleges, Rutgers, and the University of Minnesota. Martin also makes a case that the Columbia SHL initiated the first gay demonstration in New York. In 1968 the group prepared to attend the Columbia Medical School’s panel discussion on homosexuality, and when word got out, the organizers of the panel decided to limit attendance to medical students. SHL wrote position statements for the event and, as they were distributing the flyers, medical students offered SHL students their tickets. Martin recalls that, since every member of the audience had a copy of SHL’s statement, the question-answer period was more on point than had been expected. During the 1970s the SHL focus on political activism slipped away, and was replaced with a different kind of energy—dances, parties, and dorm raps.

Beemyn (2003b) agrees that gay student activism at Columbia, Cornell, and other universities “played a critical role in laying the groundwork that would enable a militant movement to emerge following the [Stonewall] riots” (p. 205). Beemyn’s analysis focuses, primarily, on the second SHL, founded at Cornell University in May 1968. Although there was a gay social network at Cornell, most were not willing to be identified with the SHL, even using pseudonyms, so student response to Jearld Moldenhauer’s initial organizing efforts for a SHL chapter was slow and cautious. Moldenhauer tapped Reverend Daniel Berrigan, associate director for service at Cornell United Religious Works at the time, to serve as the group’s advisor. The Cornell Scheduling, Coordination, and Activities Review Board agreed to recognize SHL without the usual required membership list, and the small group focused on increasing membership in the 1968–1969 school term. The Cornell SHL emphasized it was not an all-gay group; indeed, it claimed more heterosexual members in its first year than LGBTQ students. This inclusivity allowed some cover for LGBTQ students who were reluctant to join for fear of being outed. As SHL membership grew, so did division in the ranks over the objectives of the organization. In its second year a split developed between those who wanted to emphasize civil liberties and educational work and those who saw SHL as a social group that nurtured gay culture.

The 1969 Cornell student uprisings and then the Stonewall Riot tipped the scale toward a more activist SHL. The group formed alliances with Students for a Democratic Society at Cornell and started running zaps, “sessions at which openly homosexual people would answer students’ questions, trying to raise public consciousness about homosexuality” (as cited in Beemyn, 2003b, p. 218). Activism intensified in 1970 when the Cornell SHL changed its name to the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) , invited a banned speaker to campus, and led a successful protest at a local bar against gay discrimination. When the police were called to the protest, one official reportedly told the owner, “[y]ou can’t insult these people. You can’t just refuse to serve them” (as cited in 2003b, p. 221).

Beemyn notes that by 1971, just 4 years after students at Columbia established the first SHL, there were gay student organizations at more than 175 colleges and universities in the U.S. These groups were significant players in the gay liberation movement; by politicizing sexual identity and building ties to other political movements , the student groups convinced many nongay activists and activist organizations to support gay rights, developing a progressive coalition whose legacy continues today” (Beemyn, 2003b, p. 222). In addition, the students’ action made it possible for more LGBTQ people to come out: “…[I]t was a historic moment when the leaders of Cornell’s SHL dropped their use of pseudonyms, held open meetings and dances, and began to speak publicly about their sense of pride in being gay… . In no small way, these efforts contributed to the development of a large-scale political movement in the years that followed” (2003b, p. 223).

Clawson (2013, 2014) examined the emergence of LGBTQ student groups in Florida universities, giving particular attention to how LGBTQ and straight students perceived the struggle for queer visibility. The first GLF chapter in the South was established at Florida State University (FSU) in 1970. Similar to the approaches taken by Martin (1992) and Beemyn (2003b), Clawson (2013) constructed the study on the FSU student group through an analysis of the activities of its founder, Hiram Ruiz. Clawson highlighted a queer pedagogical theme in this essay on the educational work carried out by college students in the gay liberation struggle, noting “[o]ne of the most important components of the GLF pedagogy was to tell straight people that they were expected to notice and speak about sexual minorities;” this was, citing Audre Lorde, “a crucial component of ‘transforming silence into language and action’” (as cited in Clawson, 2013, pp. 143–144).

Although the FSU student senate recognized the GLF in 1970, college officials did not allow the group to use campus facilities. The GLF posted an ad in the college newspaper, the Florida Flambeau, declaring their opposition to “‘all forms of oppression whether sexual, racial, economic or cultural. We declare our unity with and support for all oppressed minorities who fight for their freedom’” (as cited in Clawson, 2013, p. 145). A group of university employees responded with a letter to the editor of the Flambeau, protesting the printing of the GLF ad. They claimed its publication threatened public safety and charged that the GLF advocated the violation of Florida laws prohibiting homosexual acts, still a felony in the state. The Flambeau then refused to print a second ad by the GLF. Students in the Tallahassee Women’s Liberation and the Malcolm X United Liberation Front responded by supporting the GLF , and FSU student president, Chuck Sherman, charged that refusal to print the ad violated the principle of free speech. In the meantime, Ruiz and the GLF began meeting, first at Ruiz’s apartment and then on public space on the FSU campus when Ruiz and his roommates were evicted for being gay. Clawson documented various ways in which the GLF educated FSU and the broader community, and took note of how GLF members , themselves, were educated on transgender issues. Clawson highlighted the educational legacy of this history, claiming that the “GLF members engaged in a queer pedagogy that academia had not invented yet. In their work, their visibility was their teaching, and their curriculum was the opening of gay culture to the wider world” (2013, p. 147).

Clawson’s study (2014) of the University of Florida (UF) opened with a strong articulation of its theoretical framework. Queer theory is an appropriate lens for this analysis, Clawson explained, not only because it signals inclusivity and characterizes the actions of the people in the study, but also because it reflects the intent to “write a history that is queer,” that is to “focus on liberation, rather than privileging assimilation as an end-goal,” to deliberately include “gender queer and trans people,” and to acknowledge “the disruption of normalcy that comes with the inclusion of queer issues in society” (2014, p. 210). In an argument driven by a thesis on visibility, it was also important that Clawson offer a clear definition of “the closet,” another contested term. Being in or out of the closet is not a binary proposition, the author noted, citing Cris Mayo’s explication of the term: “a complex set of negotiations, a complicated set of weighed consequences and benefits, as well as a way of creating spaces for possibilities with others” (as cited in Clawson, 2014, p. 210).

Clawson argued that three particular developments were critical to the emergence of queer student visibility at the University of Florida: a climate of campus protest fueled by the Black freedom struggle and New Left politics; the American Psychological Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders; and the development of the student affairs profession with its emphasis on student wellbeing. The Independent Florida Alligator proved to be a rich primary source in Clawson’s study. In 1970, UF student Julius M. Johnson, President of the Gainesville branch of the GLF, began writing letters to the editor, arguing for courses dealing with sexuality and the establishment of a GLF on campus. As a Black man on a predominately white campus, Johnson understood the kind of strategies that could be helpful to a student group with a relatively low profile. He forged alliances between queer students and the Student Mobilization Committee and the Young Socialist Alliance in the effort to marshal resources and gain recognition and legitimacy for queer students. College officials denied the students’ request for a charter in 1971, but the students persisted with their educational activities and civil rights demands. Clawson noted that, although the “university had attempted to keep them invisible,” the students’ “increasing confidence and desire to be seen and heard prevented the fulfillment of the university’s agenda” (2014, p. 216). In 1974 the GLF demanded that the Board of Regents strike a paragraph from its policy manual that explicitly defined sex deviation as immoral behavior. The faculty senate voted to support the students’ demand, in part because the university was operating under censure from the AAUP for a series of recent firings in violation of academic freedom. Clawson detailed other evidence of the Alligator fostering “a campus climate more conducive to queer rights through keeping an editorial focus on queer issues” (2014, p. 218). In 1975 the GLF won its campus charter at UF, after similar groups had been recognized at FSU and the University of South Florida, and only after the group reorganized as the less radical Gay Community Service Center (GCSC) . As the GCSC took a more prominent position on campus, it drew harsh attack from various quarters, including religious opponents and fraternities. Between 1975 and 1982, the group reorganized again; the University of Florida Lesbian and Gay Society gained, lost, and then recovered valuable office space in the UF student union, through a series of petitions, protests, and legal battles. Clawson’s study clarified “how important a role both queer bravery and straight alliances can play in fostering a safe environment for queer people,” a scholarly contribution to a more complete understanding of higher education in the late-twentieth century (2014, p. 227).

Administrators at many universities refused to grant charters for gay student organizations , a tactic that led to numerous legal challenges. Rullman (1991) provided a brief overview of cases involving the University of New Hampshire, Virginia Commonwealth University, Austin Peay State University, the University of Oklahoma, Georgetown University, and the University of Arkansas, noting that courts generally held that such action violates students’ First Amendment rights. Reichard (2010) published an extended study of Associated Students of Sacramento State College v. Butz, the first case in which free speech and association rights were leveraged to claim LGBTQ students’ rights to organize on campus. The 1971 decision created precedent “enabl[ing] other gay and lesbian student organizations to rebut efforts at preventing their organizing on campus with authority a court decision could provide” (Reichard, 2010, p. 633). It is important to note, though, the case was filed on behalf of the Associated Students of Sacramento State College (ASSSC) , the student governing body that had initially approved the Society for Homosexual Freedom (SHF) petition for a charter. College President Otto Butz was the one who vetoed the decision. In explaining the students’ decision to file the lawsuit, ASSSC President Stephen Whitmore argued that the merits of the case extended beyond the SHF; it involved “the right to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and self determination” for all students (as cited in Reichard, 2010, p. 652).

Reichard noted that the case was also significant in regard to another student power movement, the challenge to in loco parentis. Toppling that longstanding college doctrine struck another blow at the normative heterosexual campus climate. Sacramento State students and faculty who fought for institutional recognition for SHF had yet another impact on their community that reached beyond the legal victory. Organizing the court challenge “helped transform what had been a mostly underground off-campus ‘closed society’ into a visible and self-conscious gay-liberation community” (Reichard, 2010, p. 634). Legal scholar Jane Schacter observed that LGBTQ student activism for official recognition on college campuses was a critical challenge to the “‘coerced gay invisibility [that] has historically been a central part of gay inequality’” (as cited in Reichard, 2010, p. 674).

In two pieces published in Oral History Review (2012, 2016), Reichard discussed the value of oral history in tracing evidence regarding the history of LGBTQ people in higher education: “[P]art of the critical work of queer oral history is to provide a unique view that challenges assumptions and addresses silences within the archival record, including records produced by LGBTQ people themselves. Oral history, in other words, provides a way to expand beyond the limits and silences of those records, revealing what is behind the scenes of how queer historical texts were produced” (2016, p. 101). This is an important methodological approach, he added, particularly for transient groups of people such as LGBTQ students. Reichard’s research on the Gay Student Union at UCLA and its newsletter, the Gayzette, illustrated the power of combining oral history with archival research to provide critical documentation of student organizing in California in the 1970s. He explained in his 2012 essay how the triangulation of oral history with ephemera of LGBTQ student groups can verify and enhance our understanding of both kinds of evidence. As an article in the Sacramento State University student newspaper stated in 1978, “A kiosk is an unequaled source of information” (as cited in Reichard, 2012, p. 40). Beyond confirming the importance of flyers, posters, and student-produced newsletters and newspapers for helping LGBTQ students find each other on campus, oral histories “can transform such ‘visual traces ’ of the 1970s queer student histories into more substantive evidence of the social and political climate in which students lived, went to school, and organized” (Reichard, 2012, p. 39).

4.4 Sex and Gender and Identity

Colleges and universities were often at the forefront of the struggles over the control of sex (Bailey, 1999, p. 49).

In Sex in the Heartland, Bailey grounded her study of the late-twentieth-century sexual revolution in Lawrence, Kansas not because it was “representative of America’s experience,” but because seeing what happened between the coasts illustrates just how fundamental the changes wrought by this social movement were (1999, p. 5). Her research on the University of Kansas (KU) included in-depth analysis of the post-World War II development in sexual science and the ways deans of students responded to rising expectations for more explicit sexual discipline of students. During this period, university officials who confronted homosexuality embraced a psychotherapeutic form of control, adopted from military use during the war. Bailey noted, “Even though it appeared that a system of moral absolutes had been replaced by a much more flexible system of evaluation, the two systems remained enmeshed, with new ‘scientific’ analyses often used to support the old ‘moral’ claims” (1999, p. 54). However, Bailey noted, both the psychotherapeutic form of control and a parallel system that reframed regulations concerning students’ lives through curricular reform, would eventually collapse, due to the ways in which these approaches undermined the authority of those implementing the rules. “Students would challenge the system of rules about sexual behavior with the very same arguments about responsibility and democratic citizenship that university officials had used to buttress that system. The shift to psychiatric authority, in contrast, did not offer students powerful tools with which to challenge that authority. Instead, it created problems for the administrators and officials themselves by introducing criteria for judgment about sexual behavior that made it difficult to draw clear distinctions between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’” (Bailey, 1999, p. 50).

Bailey’s study of the GLF chapter established at KU in 1970 is an excellent example of how local histories can inform our understanding of national movements. She contrasted both the ideological claims and the evidence of work on the ground by the GLF and various women’s organizations in Lawrence to explore the roles the gay and women’s liberation movements played in the sexual revolution. Bailey’s examination of the GLF’s battle to gain official university recognition at KU exposed intricacies embedded in the struggle in rich detail, helping one appreciate the extent to which university, state, and national politics set the context for this struggle that would be revisited in campuses across the nation. It was nothing less than “a story of the difficulty and complexity of effecting social change in a democracy” (Bailey, 1999, p. 179).

Unlike gay and lesbian student groups at other campuses, the GLF at KU did not splinter into political and cultural factions . As its court case for official university recognition played out, the GLF continued to nurture a welcoming community for LGBTQ people not only on campus and in Lawrence, but also reached LGBTQ people throughout the region. Most noteworthy were the dances the GLF held at the student union throughout the 1970s. Bailey observed that the “dances moved gay liberation from abstract concept (First Amendment rights), from words (speakers, seminars, rap groups), from private (what two people do in the privacy of the bedroom) to a very public, embodied fact” (1999, p. 185). LGBTQ issues are central to Bailey’s argument that the sexual revolution fundamentally changed what Americans think about power, identity, diversity, and gender.

Other historians have folded LGBTQ issues into broader arguments on gender and higher education. Deslandes (2005) briefly addressed homosexuality as one of the factors that challenged established gender norms in Britain, leading to what he termed a crisis of masculinity for late-nineteenth-century Oxbridge men. He referenced two cases at Cambridge and Oxford to document changes in disciplinary systems that implicated “the marginalization of same-sex desire as a deviant category of human sexuality” after passage of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act . However, university privilege served more than once to spare Oxbridge men from local prosecution. As Deslandes observed, “Oxbridge regulations and statutes, extralegal devices that underscored the unique and privileged position of these institutions in British society, constituted a peculiar system of discipline that safeguarded the reputation of the university as much as it punished” (2005, p. 112).

Friedman (2005) and Weber (2008) gave more attention to the topic, each devoting a chapter to student sexuality in their analyses of higher education in Russia, Great Britain and Germany. Friedman studied all-male universities during the reign of Nicholas I to determine if educated Russians experienced changes to prevailing conceptions of masculinity similar to those developments in Western and Central Europe. Through an examination of student memoirs, diaries, and correspondence, Friedman discovered that “close male friendship, nurtured within a broader culture of European Romanticism, marked the coming of age experiences of many students” and offered “a notion of masculinity , which included passionate expression and emotional connection that was at odds with Nicholas’s call for obedience and singular loyalty” (p. 75). Officials anxious to promote a particular image of morality in Russian leaders increased their oversight of students’ behavior, particularly in the wake of 1835 anti-sodomy legislation. In spite of regulations that dictated distance between beds in students’ sleeping quarters and prohibited sleeping together, the university disciplinary system was flexible, allowing second and third chances to students who transgressed its boundaries . Friedman concluded that “young men encountered, created, and negotiated multiple masculinities ,” including some romantic friendships that extended into adulthood (2005, p. 140).

Weber (2008) included a comparison of student sexuality at Oxford and Heidelberg in his study of the institutional cultures of the two universities. His larger thesis was to challenge the popular notion that cultural differences in Britain and Germany were a significant factor leading to the outbreak of World War I. Understanding that the predominantly male universities, like military institutions, “produced and replicated national elites,” Weber cast the universities as “schools of both manhood and national identity” (2008, p. 139). Through a finely tuned analysis of sexuality in the two student cultures, Weber challenged the easy contrast between a homoerotic Oxford and a “very heterosexual” Heidelberg, finding evidence of homosexuality at both institutions (2008, p. 143). And it was severely sanctioned in England as well as Germany. Observing that “[a]ttitudes toward homosexuality do not shed a particularly good light on either place even compared to earlier times,” Weber found it doubtful that notions regarding student sexuality had much to do with diverging senses of nationalism in the years leading to the Great War.

Syrett’s (2009) history of fraternities in the United States turns on the axis of changing conceptions of masculinity . Membership exclusions based on class and race have long determined who could claim the status of the fraternity man. By the early decades of the twentieth century, women’s increasing presence on campuses and their demands for political and social equality began to shape how the fraternity man defined himself. At the same time, suspicions about homosexuality intensified adherence to the heterosexual norm by which fraternity men gauged their masculinity . As Syrett explained, “masculine men were understood to be heterosexual men; they were defined not only in opposition to women but also in comparison to those men who were thought to be like women: homosexuals” (2009, p. 5). In a chapter titled “Democracy, Drinking, and Violence,” Syrett made a strong case that fraternity men running from the specter of homosexuality exploited women, in part, as a means to validate their own heterosexual status. Syrett argued that this “was perhaps the most decisive development in fraternities’ history,” given the long-term impact it would have on other college students, “particularly women” (2009, p. 5).

Estes (2010) also examined connections between gender and sexuality in “The Long Gay Line,” a historical analysis of the role of homosexuality at The Citadel. Stepping into unexplored territory, Estes interviewed gay alumni of the Charleston military institution, most not out to themselves while they were cadets. He found that gay alumni resisted women’s enrollment at The Citadel with the same tenacity as straight alumni, and that they relied upon similar definitions of manhood in defense of their position. For gay alumni, The Citadel “built character, deepened a sense of honor, and strengthened the bonds of brotherhood among men . Just as important…The Citadel offered unassailable proof of manhood in society that might otherwise doubt or deny it” (Estes, 2010, p. 47). One alumnus argued that an all-male environment allowed more room for homosexual identities to emerge, saying “There’s a real easy slippage from a co-ed setting into an enforced heteronomativity or an enforced heterosexuality that can be subverted when one has a single-gender kind of society” (as cited in Estes, 2010, p. 59). Others simply seemed disappointed to see the single-sex tradition at the school end.

4.5 Conclusion

Although the bibliography upon which this study rests cannot claim to be exhaustive, two points are evident. First, few books have been written that specifically focus on the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education (Dilley, 2002; Dowling, 1994; MacKay, 1993; Shand-Tucci, 2003; Wright, 2005). What we know of this history is often gleaned from a variety of sources. Biographers and education historians have incorporated LGBTQ themes into their biographical and institutional studies (Horowitz, 1984, 1994; Palmieri, 1995, Wells, 1978), and education historians who study LGBTQ issues have incorporated higher education as it informs their work (Blount, 2005; Graves, 2009). In addition, historians who study LGBTQ issues have written work that crosses over into higher education (Bailey, 1999; Braukman, 2012; D’Emilio, 1992; Faderman, 1981, 1991, 1999; Howard, 1999; Johnson, 2008; Katz, 1976; Poucher, 2014a; Sears, 1997), and those who focus on gender issues in higher education have increasingly addressed sexuality in their studies (Deslandes, 2005; Farnham, 1994; Friedman, 2005; Jabour, 2007; Syrett, 2009; Weber, 2008). The balance of what we know about the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education has been recorded in journals, much of it path-breaking work. This raises a second observation: only four articles in this literature base appear in history of education journals. The majority of essays on the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education have appeared in a few anthologies and journals devoted to research in women’s and queer studies, education, and history. Scholars, then, must continue to read widely for a fuller sense of LGBTQ education history.

The academy is more welcoming of research in this underdeveloped field than it was even a decade ago. Rather than a lack of interest in LGBTQ history on the part of education historians or the editors of their presses, the current status may reflect a broader problem in the academy, the diminishing institutional presence of education historians, and regard for the humanities in general in higher education. If History Departments and Colleges of Education offer fewer tenure-track lines to education historians, then we face a similar dilemma as that confronted by the early gay historians: too little institutional support in terms of teacher salaries and other resources to maintain scholarly trajectories in LGBTQ education history.Footnote 4 And yet, a vast terrain of research is waiting to be explored, work that will benefit from the training, talent, and insight of higher education historians.

Thankfully, we have advanced beyond the days when, as a matter of course, archival crates were slammed shut on researchers studying the lives of LGBTQ leaders in the academy. Biographers who study college administrators, professors, and students are better positioned to consider the bearing a person’s sexual identity might have had on how they perceived their world, and what they thought possible in their work. With few exceptions (Beemyn, 2003a; Clawson, 2013, 2014), however, we know very little about the college experiences of transgender students, faculty, and staff —and bisexuals seem to appear only as the obligatory “B” in the acronym. Again, with few exceptions (Clawson, 2013, 2014; Johnson, 2008), race analyses are almost totally absent from this historiography. Some accounts address the ways in which gay student groups collaborated with the Black freedom struggle (Beemyn, 2003b; Clawson, 2013, 2014), but much more work needs to be done on the intersections between sexuality, race, and ethnicity.

A similar claim could be made for the need to know more about how gay student organizations collaborated with, profited by, and distanced themselves from the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. Fleeting references appear in some accounts (D’Emilio, 1992), and Bailey addressed the issue in her 1999 study at the University of Kansas. It would be good to follow up at other universities to enhance gender analyses of the early gay rights movement. Also, although women’s historians made substantial contributions to the early scholarship on the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education, most of that work focused on the women’s colleges at the turn of the twentieth century. Studies of coeducational colleges would enrich what we know about women who loved women during that period—and men who loved men, for that matter. That is, historians might expand their studies to include various types of institutions beyond the Seven Sisters colleges, the Ivy League, and colleges on the West coast. Clawson (2013, 2014) has taken the study South, Bailey (1999) to the Plains, and Dilley continues to study colleges in the Midwest. In addition to geographical diversity, we would do well to think about LGBTQ issues at community colleges, institutions that serve a wider range of students than the traditional 4-year college—perhaps an approach that would enable us to understand more about an understudied population in LGBTQ history in general. Colleges of education are intriguing sites of study, as well, for the insights one might gain about progress, or lack thereof, regarding LGBTQ issues in elementary and secondary schools. And the work that Strunk, Bailey, and Takewell (2014) have published on gay men in Christian colleges suggests that universities affiliated with religious denominations provide rich contexts for historical studies on LGBTQ issues in higher education.

Five areas of study might lend themselves to productive syntheses in works that aim to deliver an overarching narrative of significant events in the queer history of higher education. First, the combination of primary sources, access to interviews, court cases, and a foundation of secondary literature can now support a comprehensive historical analysis of the founding and struggle for recognition of LGBTQ student groups. Michael Hevel is working on a legal history that analyzes this trajectory and related arguments of free speech, the right to assemble, and intellectual freedom.

In a second area of research, other studies might take up an examination of how the student groups, once established, contributed to key political struggles in the LGBTQ community: funding for AIDS research, overturning sodomy laws, fighting for marriage equality and legal protections against discrimination in the workforce. Related work might examine relevant university research and administrative policy positions on these issues to gauge how involved university personnel have been in these civil rights battles.

Third, as we gain more historical perspective on queer studies courses, programs, and departments, scholars can explore these curricular developments in the context of social justice movements and the shifting university landscape on the threshold of the twenty-first century. Comparisons with other “new studies” of the 1960s and connections to queer theory are likely to expand our knowledge of intellectual shifts in the academy, competing conceptions of the purposes of the university, and curricular politics at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Two other areas of study reach back to the mid-twentieth century and, thus, are less likely to be aided by oral histories. As scholars continue to collect evidence of homosexual purges across the nation and the secondary literature base expands, a comprehensive treatment of the university purges during the Cold War would advance not only higher education history and LGBTQ history, but political history as well. And it is surely the case that there is more to know about the connections that Bailey (1999) began to draw between professional student personnel and the psychotherapeutic control of students. One of the points she noted was that male and female deans appeared to address this aspect of their work in different ways. Kelly Sartorius (2014) is beginning to explore the gendered dynamics that characterized deans’ responses to reports regarding students’ sexuality.

Jonathan Katz’s faith that, someday, the necessary elements would align so that LGBTQ history could take its rightful place in the chronicles of American history has been sustained. LGBTQ history is a legitimate field of study in higher education research, scholarly production over the years has benefitted from cooperative efforts to collect and curate precious primary sources, and scholars representing a range of academic backgrounds have contributed to a secondary literature base that has established some foundational principles and opened new questions for further inquiry. In short, the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education has a place in the academy. Having passed through four decades of research and debate, LGBTQ history is no longer “rough at the edges,” but perhaps it will always be “radical at heart” (Katz, 1976, p. 8).