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Behind Bonner's Resignation at UNH: Two Years of Attacks by Publisher William Loeb (Chronicle of Higher Education, April 15, 1974)

As graduation approached, April was feeling proud of what the GSO had accomplished, but also exhausted. So, it turned out, was the president of UNH. In March Thomas Bonner announced that he would leave UNH at the end of the school year to become president of Union College in upstate New York. For the Chronicle of Higher Education, a national publication, this development merited a long front-page story tracing the "bitter, decades-long battle between the state university and New Hampshire's largest newspaper." The Union Leader's attacks on Bonner, the Chronicle wrote, "seemed extraordinarily vicious, even by the standards of New Hampshire's often turbulent political discourse."

New Hampshire editorial writers met Bonner's resignation announcement with outrage. Foster's described him as "the victim of one of the most unending and malevolent hate campaigns ever witnessed in our or any other state," while the Concord Monitor said Loeb's attacks "made the activities of the Ku Klux Klan a choirboys picnic by comparison." Bonner himself said little at the time. But four years later, when he became president of Wayne State University, he told a Detroit magazine that Loeb "dislikes whatever he cannot control. The university was the one institution in the state that he had not been able to intimidate." In that story, UNH trustee Paul Holloway called Bonner "a strong president who did a super job." But he agreed with Bonner that if he'd stayed, the endless controversies would have thwarted future accomplishments.

Caught up in those controversies, the members of the GSO held a range of opinions of the university administration back then, and those views have evolved over time. All of them are grateful to a few administrators who kept them updated and offered support behind the scenes, though they wish someone had done so publicly. April believes Bonner was simply stuck; he could not speak out without losing his job. Baran says, "We chose to go to school in New Hampshire; we knew the climate of the time. I have separated in my mind that particular cast of characters from the institution of the university and my experience of it." Arguedas says, "I didn't particularly blame this on UNH; I blamed it on the Union Leader and Meldrim Thomson. They pressured the university because Thomson held the pursestrings."

Philbin feels more conflicted. Even under pressure, she believes, "UNH didn't have to say to the governor 'OK, OK, we'll do whatever you say.' Let's just say they weren't exactly heroes. At some universities, this would not have ended up in court." All of them agree that the Union Leader's continued demonization of the GSO ended up backfiring. As Maxfield puts it, "The extremists pushed the moderates to our side of the court."

UNH Gays Raising Money To Win Thomson Breakfast (Boston Sunday Globe, May 12, 1974)

Though the GSO remained small, the first court victory boosted its clout (and its "cool factor," Philbin says), and members began to capitalize on the change. They would announce a social event—for instance, speaking on WUNH one day, Arguedas cooked up the idea that a softball game for gay students from around New England would take place that weekend—and magically, it would happen.

They also began taking the group's educational mission more seriously. Arguedas and several others became a gay students speakers bureau that visited dorms and fraternities, aiming to demystify homosexuality. Small and blond, with hair down to her waist, Arguedas would get up in front of a room of hooting and hollering fraternity members and tell her story: "This is who I am, this is who I was growing up, and then one day I fell in love with someone who to my surprise turned out to be a girl." By the end of the night, Philbin recalls, audience members would be raising their hands and asking serious questions, "and it was so moving because it was like she was taming the room." Arguedas pulled off that transformation over and over, Philbin says. "It was incredibly courageous of Crissie—and that's why the rest of us stayed in the back of the room and let her do the talking." Kruger says of those years, "I don't remember any overt anti-gay incidents on campus, but the only gay-affirming incidents were the ones we created."

Before everyone headed home for the summer, a new event grabbed the GSO's attention. New Hampshire Public Television was holding its first fundraising auction, and one of the items up for bid was a pancake breakfast with Thomson and his wife at the governor's mansion, featuring maple syrup made on their Orford farm. Never having sat down with Thomson through the long months of controversy, GSO members started raising money to bid on the breakfast. The publicity that encouraged people to contribute also alerted the governor to their plan. On May 11, the day before the auction, several newspapers ran stories reporting that a UNH grad student had been contacted by a representative of the governor's office who offered whatever money he might need to outbid the GSO.

Both Thomson and the grad student denied that rumor. But on the night of May 12, when the GSO bid $1,025 for the pancake breakfast, that was the highest bid shown on TV. The auction for other items continued. The auctioneer made no "last chance" call for the pancake breakfast, as he was doing for other items, and then suddenly he announced that bidding on the breakfast was closed—at $1,075. The winning bidder was a store owner from Hampton who was working at the auction and said he'd simply decided to bid at the last minute. Both he and the station's management denied that the governor or politics had played any role. But a student who was working the phones at the auction wrote in The New Hampshire later that from where he sat, things looked just as they did to the audience at home: The GSO had made the high bid and was not given a chance to counter the subsequent one.

"We won, but they didn't give it to us," Maxfield says. "That's the short version of the story--which didn't surprise any of us at the time. It just added to the whole idea that we were being discriminated against."

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