The late 1960s and early 1970s were transformational for San Francisco State and for local, regional, national, and international LGBTQ movements. The 1968-69 Third World Liberation Front strike at SF State, which led to the establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies, contributed greatly to the intensification of campus protests, the admission of more students of color, the hiring of more minority faculty, and a revolution in the ways that indigeneity, race, colonialism, and imperialism were taught in U.S. colleges and universities. In the same period, the local and national LGBTQ movement mobilized, organized, and radicalized, especially after the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, and the movement grew especially strong on college and university campuses. Until now, however, we have known very little about how and whether these two important developments were related.
Did LGBTQ people in general, and LGBTQ people of color in particular, participate in the SF State strike? Did the strike influence the LGBTQ movement? Did LGBTQ people at SF State participate in this era’s other influential social movements, and did those other movements influence LGBTQ people at SF State? What roles did SF State play in the broader upsurge in LGBTQ student and faculty activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s? How did everyday life change for LGBTQ people at SF State in this period?
This exhibit is based on a collaborative faculty-student research project that I organized in three of my history of sexuality classes at San Francisco State University from 2019 to 2022. I developed this project in part because I had just finished working on The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History and I was interested in learning more about what was happening at the university where I work during the Stonewall era, when the gay liberation, lesbian feminist, and trans liberation movements became more influential. Another prompt was SF State’s fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the 1968-69 Third World Liberation Front Strike, which made me wonder about how, why, and whether the strike had relationships to LGBTQ liberation. A third reason was a legal history project I was completing on the court-based struggles that occurred in the 1970s when newly-established gay student groups were denied official recognition by fourteen public universities and many private ones; I was curious about what happened at SF State in this regard. Yet another prompt was the work being done at many colleges and universities to hold these institutions accountable for their historical connections to genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism. Finally, I was interested, as a teacher, in showing my students that they could do politically meaningful historical scholarship, that their own university could be researched and historicized, and that they could make original contributions to our knowledge about the history of sexuality in general and LGBTQ history in particular.