Publication: The Straight College Strikes Back
My most recent article just hit print: “The Straight College Strikes Back: 1990s Backlash Against Inclusive Campuses.” It is part of a special issue on LGBTQ Politics in Politics, Groups, and Identities. The article explores three instances of straight backlash against gay and lesbian inclusion on college campuses in the 1990s. This work emerged out of a tangent from my censorship work. Pretty early on I became interested by the fact that much of the censorship activity today is aimed at attempts to have students read about diverse experiences, such as about queer folk. I became interested in ways that queer educational activism sought to challenge schools as straight only spaces. One part of that was college student groups. Some of these groups had to fight long political and legal fights to be officially recognized in the 1970s.
This paper emerged out of my favorite thing: the serendipity of archives. I was examining the last significant attempt to outlaw gay college groups (well until today), a 1990s struggle in Alabama. I found that some kind soul had uploaded the entire historical record of the case with some amazing details. While an interesting story, I didn’t have much use for it immediately until a couple years later when a helpful archivist at Penn State sent me its files on their gay and lesbian student group. The file included an amazing collection about a mid-1990s group, STRAIGHT, formed by students fed up by gay people getting attention on campus. From these stories I began to draw a common narrative of conservative straight student resistance to campuses, which were the most gay inclusive space in America in 1990. I finally added in a look at the better known struggle over student fees.
All in all, this article attempts to utilizing educational activism within the broader narrative of inclusion and backlash in American politics. But as a person who started college in 1998, it is a disconcerting process to treat my teens years as fodder for historical analysis.
