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In those pre-Internet days, out-of-state students could gamble that their parents wouldn't see the coverage. Others could gamble that their families simply preferred to avoid 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 Richard Maxfield '74. "I never felt pressure 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, 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 to help his mother move, she said, "Are all those boys gay? They're very nice." April felt lucky; he had friends whose parents cut 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, who had to come out to her parents when she was about to be quoted in The New York Times. On campus, the group's members found unwavering support in one another, and once the ACLU got involved, they didn't have to pay much attention to the legal cases. Still, Arguedas and Philbin remember feeling nervous. J. Bonnie Newman '07H, who was dean of students at the time, says that she and Richard Stevens, vice provost for student affairs, privately made it clear to the students that the university was going to court not to shut down the Gay Students Organization but rather to settle the question of authority and thus silence the critics. The students, however, still felt as if a judge might at any minute sanction kicking them out of school. "The potential downside was pretty grave," says Arguedas, "and we didn't have any way to know if we'd win or lose."

As the Union Leader continued its attacks, most of the other papers in New Hampshire, plus occasionally the Boston Globe, ran editorials and columns supporting the students and blasting Loeb and Thomson for using homosexuality as an excuse to undermine state funding for public education. Foster's Daily Democrat in Dover editorialized, "The furor initiated by the Manchester press and echoed by its puppet in the governor's office is taking place in order to sabotage efforts to adequately fund the university."

Then, in January 1974, Judge Hugh Bownes of U.S. District Court in Concord issued a resounding victory for the Gay Students Organization, ruling that every recognized student group has the same rights. The university "may not restrict speech or association simply because it finds the views expressed by any group to be abhorrent," Bownes 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 gay students' rights. 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 foundation is rotten at the core?"

Bownes' ruling attracted enough attention that Newsweek and other national publications ran stories. 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 if it was within its rights to regulate the group's social activities because homosexuality is a "communicable mental illness." The American Psychiatric Association had taken homosexuality off its list of mental disorders the previous year, but the American Psychological Association had not yet followed suit.

Baran, Arguedas and Philbin clearly remember the disbelief they felt, sitting in the N.H. Supreme Court as a lawyer for their university argued that they were mentally ill. "These men in suits who didn't know us ... they were talking about us—me and Wayne and Crissie and Annie," Baran says.

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