Gay Revolution In The University?

The current round of new programs in lesbian and gay studies do not represent the first time that lesbian and gay scholars have tried to break out of the ivory closet. The early days of the gay movement were full of intellectual ferment. Almost immediately after Stonewall, a flood of books, periodicals, and other publications found an audience eager to explore the political and cultural implications of lesbian-feminism and gay liberation. The powerful lesbian-feminist manifesto "The Woman-Identified Woman" (written collectively by a group called Radicalesbians) was published in 1970. A year later, Dennis Altman published Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation , the first book after Stonewall on the politics of gay liberation. Between 1972 and 1978, Karla Jay and Allan Young published a series of anthologies (Out of the Closets, After

You're Out, Lavender Culture ) that explored gay and lesbian history, psychological theories, the problems and possibilities of coming out, lesbian and gay culture before and after Stonewall, the gay movement's relation to the Left, the women's movement, the black civil rights movement, sex roles, and the images of gay men and lesbians in the media.

Scholars of the Stonewall generation made an effort to bring gay liberation and feminist perspectives to bear on their research and writing when they founded the Gay Academic Union (GAU) in March 1973. Professors, writers, students, and librarians banded together and, backed by three hundred like-minded people, sponsored the first GAU conference on November 23 and 24, 1973. New York hosted two other conferences before political divisions broke up the group: the annual conference moved out to Los Angeles, while GAU in New York maintained a shadowy existence for several years.

GAU grew out of a need to confront the virulent homophobia of academia. But from the very beginning, this early attempt to create a place for lesbian and gay studies also had to contend with the institutionalized gender imbalance of the university system. The organization was overwhelmingly male in membership, and the few women who attended meetings were constantly put in the awkward position of challenging the sexist comments and underlying chauvinism of their male colleagues. Divisions among the men occurred along lines of Left-versus-Right politics. Initially, GAU responded by publishing a political statement of purpose that listed opposition to all forms of discrimination against women within academia as the first priority and opposition to all forms of discrimination against gay people as the second. Nevertheless, all three GAU conferences in New York were marked by increasingly bitter confrontations between lesbians and gay men. By 1975, the radical gay men and most of the lesbians had left GAU.

The rapid growth of women's studies programs in the 1970s provided a safe space for courses with lesbian content and themes. For a while, lesbian studies thrived. The ideological basis for many of these courses was "cultural feminism," which emphasized the idea of a "female nature" and proposed the construction of a woman's culture reflecting that nature. The lesbian community seemed to fit this theoretical

model as an example of a woman's culture unsullied by male domination.

Lesbian-feminism—defined by important pieces such as "The Woman-Identified Woman," the Radicalesbian manifesto, Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation , and Adrienne Rich's essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"—presented lesbianism as an alternative model for female identity. Some of the major contributions to lesbian studies—such as Lillian Faderman's history of romantic friendship among women, Suprassing the Love of Men —were written in this tradition. Most significantly, women's studies programs often created a safe place for lesbians to come out and familiarize themselves with lesbian culture. In the 1980s, as these programs came under attack from conservatives and fell victim to budget cutbacks, the lesbian content of the courses was downplayed or eliminated.