Out Bid A skirmish over a pancake breakfast launches a long-running campus tradition

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When New Hampshire Public Television held its first fundraising auction, in the spring of 1974, one of the items up for bid was a pancake breakfast with Gov. Meldrim Thomson at the governor's mansion, featuring maple syrup made on his Orford farm.

At that point, Thomson had spent more than a year denouncing gay students as deviants. To get a chance to talk with him—and also to have some fun—gay UNH students started raising money to bid on the breakfast. The day before the auction, newspapers reported that someone from the governor's office had offered money to a UNH graduate student so he could outbid the group. Both Thomson and the student denied that report. But on the night of May 12, the Gay Students Organization's $1,025 bid was the highest bid on the pancake breakfast shown on television. The auction moved on to other items, and then the auctioneer suddenly announced that bidding on the breakfast was closed—at $1,075, without the usual last-chance call for higher bids.

The winner was a store owner from Hampton, N.H., who was working at the auction and said he'd simply made a last-minute decision to bid. Both he and the station's managers denied that politics had played any role. But later, a student who worked at the auction wrote in The New Hampshire that from where he sat, things looked just as they did to TV viewers: The gay students had made the high bid and weren't given a chance to counter the subsequent one.

It was the only fight the Gay Students Organization lost in that contentious year—and since 1992 it's been transformed into a victory in the form of the annual GLBT Pancake Breakfast. Each spring several hundred people gather to honor the contributions of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community on campus. And on every table stands a rainbow brochure hailing "the pioneers who founded UNH's first gay student organization." —J.H.