Features

UNH Given Ultimatum: Ban Gay Group or Lose Funds, Thomson Warns (Union Leader, Dec. 16, 1973)

Though the play involved a little same-sex kissing, and one of the actors ad-libbed "The governor can go f--- himself," all might have gone smoothly if not for a sideshow that became the main event: Outside the auditorium, a few non-students distributed copies of an explicit magazine called Fag Rag. Several UNH administrators quickly went public to say that the GSO was not responsible; nevertheless, the incident provided new ammunition for the group's opponents and became a focus of court testimony. The Union Leader printed stories quoting the most salacious passages from the magazine and warning parents to beware gay students' "predatory pursuit" of their children.

A week after the play, Thomson made his intentions perfectly clear in a letter to the trustees: "Either you take firm, fair and positive action to rid your campus of socially abhorrent activities, or I as governor will stand solidly against the expenditure of one more cent of taxpayers' money for your institutions." The Union Leader cheered this threat of "an impoundment of university funds pending the rescindment of pansy-pampering actions."

Meanwhile, GSO members were facing their own form of ultimatum: Come out to your families before the publicity does it for you. While April and secretary-treasurer Lou Kelly '74 were still doing much of the talking for the GSO, others had also begun speaking out, turning up at trustees meetings and other public functions. It was only a matter of time before people noticed—as Kruger discovered when a high school classmate approached him at a trustees meeting to thank him for standing against the gays, and Kruger had to tell him that actually, he was there supporting his fellow members of the GSO.

In those pre-Internet days, students from out of state could gamble that their parents wouldn't see the coverage. Some students who lived closer could gamble that their families simply preferred not to confront the issue. "I brought all my friends home, and my parents were very nice and welcoming,, but I never actually said, 'I'm gay,' " says Maxfield, one of the Silver Street housemates. "I never felt pressure from them about girlfriends or getting married, so I think they must have known. But in a New England French Canadian Catholic family, some things were best left unsaid."

April didn't have the luxury of silence; he was being quoted so often that he knew his mother would notice. He'd heard her make negative comments about gays before, so he drove home to Nashua one weekend wondering, "How do you tell your mother you're something she despises?" When he arrived, he tried to put it off and then finally just blurted out the words. "It was the hardest thing I've ever said," he recalls. "I thought she was going to have a heart attack." Over time, though, the idea began to seem less alien. When he brought a group of friends home to help her move, his mother said, "Are all those boys gay? They're very nice." Overall, April felt lucky; he had friends whose parents had responded to their coming out by cutting them off from both family contact and tuition payments.

"We were pushed out in front in a way that was beyond our years," says Cris Arguedas '75, another of the Silver Street housemates, who had to come out to her parents when she was about to be quoted in The New York Times. GSO members found unwavering support in one another, and once the lawyers from the ACLU got involved, the students didn't have to pay much attention to the daily maneuverings of the state and federal cases. Still, Arguedas and Philbin remember feeling nervous. Newman says that she and Richard Stevens, vice provost for student affairs, privately made it clear to the students that the goal of the legal cases was not to shut down the GSO but rather to settle the question of authority and thus silence the critics. But to the students, it still felt as if a judge might at any minute sanction kicking them out of school. "The potential downside was pretty grave," says Arguedas, who today is a prominent defense lawyer in California, "and we didn't have any way to know if we'd win or lose."

Gay Students Gain Equality in Court Decision (The New Hampshire, Feb. 8, 1974)

Each week brought a new wrinkle. The student caucus passed a resolution supporting the GSO. Wayne April and student body president Paul "Primo" Tosi '74 testified in the federal case. The women in the Silver Street house started a women's group that, like the GSO, often met in their living room. Gay groups at other universities—Princeton, Missouri, Georgia, Oklahoma, Maine—began getting publicity for their efforts to be recognized. It was, in short, the 1970s. "Everything pales in comparison to the '70s—in terms of the intensity, the complexity of the issues, the passion of the people involved," says Newman, who was dean of students in the '70s and then returned to campus as an interim dean and interim president in 1998 and 2006. "It was a real shift culturally from what we had known up to that point."

On Jan. 16, 1974, Judge Hugh Bownes of U.S. District Court in Concord formalized that culture shift with the first legal decision in the case, a resounding victory for the GSO. Bownes ruled that as a recognized student group, the GSO had the same rights as every other student group. The university "may not restrict speech or association simply because it finds the views expressed by any group to be abhorrent," he wrote. "Minority groups as well as majority groups must be given an opportunity to express themselves, for only in this way can our system of peaceful social change be maintained."

The New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union called it the nation's first broad decision on the rights of gay students. The Portsmouth Herald said Bownes had "struck a mighty blow for the right of people to be themselves." Thomson said the judge had enforced sexual perversion. The Union Leader editorialized, in all caps, "WHAT IS THE USE OF POURING MILLIONS ON MILLIONS INTO AN INSTITUTION WHOSE MORAL FOUNDATIONS ARE ROTTEN AT THE CORE?"

At a meeting three days later, after April and Tosi urged them not to, the trustees voted to appeal. But the vote was much closer (14-8) than previous votes related to the GSO, and the opponents of continuing the fight were more vocal. Several trustees urged the board to give up and move on. Joseph Millimet, the university's lawyer, said that given Bownes' statements about the GSO's First Amendment rights, "I am not sanguine about the outcome of an appeal."

Sodomites Sane? Up to Court (Union Leader, April 9, 1974)

Bownes' ruling attracted enough attention that Newsweek and other national publications ran stories on the GSO dispute. The ACLU tried to get the state case dismissed, saying the federal ruling had settled the question. Two weeks later, UNH amended its state petition to ask whether homosexuality being a mental illness provided a valid reason for the university to regulate the GSO's social activities without infringing on its First Amendment rights. The American Psychiatric Association had taken homosexuality off its list of mental disorders the previous year, but differences of opinion continued; the American Psychological Association did not pass a resolution supporting that action until 1975.

The hearing on the mental disorder question would not come until the end of 1974. Baran, Arguedas and Philbin clearly remember the disbelief they felt, sitting in the New Hampshire Supreme Court as a lawyer for their university argued that they were mentally ill. "These older men in suits who didn't know us ... they were talking about us—me and Wayne and Crissie and Annie," Baran says. "That was the day the insane fervor of the way they were pursuing their position began to strike me."

Today, Baran and Arguedas are both lawyers. Back then, however, they thought like students. Arguedas recalls that as Millimet argued that homosexuals had a communicable mental illness, "we were sitting right behind him in the front row. So if we had one, he was very likely to catch it!" All three of the women remember vacillating between anger and laughter. "When they're saying something like that in an august courtroom with the justices and the flag and all that, it lends it some dignity, yet it was like Saturday Night Live, what they were saying," Arguedas said.

Baran remembers that they sat in the courtoom horrified, then went out into the hall and cracked up. The contrast between their responsible, good-student selves and the dangerous sick people described in court was just too absurd. "When you think about it," says Philbin, "we must have been pretty self-confident, to not let that get to us. I never remember thinking, 'Oh my god, do I have a communicable disease?' I just remember thinking, 'These people are jerks.' "

Page: < Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next >

 Easy to print version