“‘We had to let people know we were here’” (p. 49). With these words a 1975 college newspaper account captured the primary objective of the first gay student associations at Midwest universities. Patrick Dilley's book addresses a critical gap in queer higher education history and the historiography of student organizing more generally. He traces the trajectory of “non-heterosexual” student organizing that occurred between the coasts from the earliest days of the gay liberation movement to the early 1990s. Dilley identifies the struggle for formal recognition as the major focus of the student groups, asserting that such recognition was prerequisite for advancing other claims to equal access on college campuses. He draws an ideological connection between revolutionary claims for visibility that characterized the student groups at their founding and the assimilationist-driven demand for institutional services that became the province of student affairs offices by the 1990s. “As the students gained more ‘respect,’ more access, and more rights to campus, their ideals changed from one of revolution … to reformation” (p. 235). Dilley traces his analysis along a circular path that connects early struggles for inclusion to queer students taking up leadership positions and forming alliances in order to enact more inclusive policies.
Dilley gathered extensive archival data, canvassed websites, and conducted interviews with former members of student groups at the Universities of Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin in pursuit of the photographs, news clippings, organizational and institutional documents, and correspondence that form the basis of his study. He is quick to acknowledge limitations of the project: it provides “partial snapshots” of the ideologies and activities of non-heterosexual student groups at sixteen universities, with more detailed attention to the flagship institutions in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio (p. 5). Through these efforts, Dilley provides an important compendium and more than a few compelling stories to flesh out the early history of queer student organizing.
The argument unfolds in four chronological chapters bookended by an introductory chapter and one devoted primarily to analysis. Two chapters address the “Formulation of Gay Liberation Identity in the 1970s,” focusing on visibility as a form of radical politics, efforts toward community building, and fractures that developed almost from the beginning regarding the student groups’ purposes and aims. Dilley opts for an organizational structure that features findings on each university in turn, commenting on events at Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Ohio State in chapter two, and Michigan State, Illinois, Iowa State, Kansas, and Missouri in chapter three. This approach obstructs the flow of the narrative, however, accentuates unevenness in the historical record regarding the various institutions, and allows repetition to find its way into the analysis.
In chapter four, Dilley returns to the campuses of Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio State to document the expansion of campus services, responses to the AIDS pandemic, instances of overt discrimination and violence, and renewed alliances that non-heterosexual student groups made as they leveraged minority status for social justice during the 1980s. Chapter five examines 1990s student activism that adapted queer tactics in pursuit of nondiscrimination policies, such as the right to serve openly in the military, mixing radical strategies with assimilationist objectives.
The task of surveying a vast landscape of student organizations at the beginning of a movement still in motion is challenging, and Dilley is to be commended for laying out some useful contours for the field. This is not only the first book published on the history of queer student organizations in higher education, it also focuses on a geographical region generally overlooked in queer history. The ambitious account, though, is encumbered by choices regarding terminology and organization. As readers familiar with Dilley's Queer Man on Campus: A History of Non-Heterosexual College Men, 1945–2000 (2002) will know, he utilizes the term non-heterosexual to “connote distinction from heterosexuals without engendering or politicizing the individual people” under discussion (p. 5). Historians are well aware of the important considerations regarding use of terminology that is historically accurate and respectful of lives studied. While Dilley has a right to, and makes a case for, his preference for non-heterosexual, some readers may find the use of the term throughout the book cumbersome. Others—those who still believe the personal is political—are likely to question the claim that using Dilley's preferred term allows one to skirt politicization of non-heterosexuals. In the context of a volume in need of a bit more proofreading, the deployment of this terminology can have a discordant impact.
Regarding another stylistic point, one wonders if a crisp argument would have more room to surface in a simpler book design. In addition to the decision to subdivide earlier chapters campus by campus, the layout of chapter six is a busy compilation of relatively short sections: three structures regarding student organizations on campuses, a short recap of the history of the student organizations in Dilley's study, a brief analysis that focuses on four internal and four external themes, and a series of broader questions regarding identity formation based on sexuality.
While Dilley's history of queer student organizing could be strengthened with more attention to scholarly context regarding queer educational history and the historiography of student movements overall, it raises a number of intriguing and important questions. To begin, an argument assessing the impact of regional context seems a natural fit for this study. Were queer student experiences significantly different in the Midwest compared to other regions of the country? For example, Dilley indicates that, in the Midwest, only students at the Universities of Kansas and Missouri had to fight for official recognition for their student groups, as administrators at other campuses cited state law or recent court decisions as rationale for allowing the groups status on campus (pp. 47–49, 55, 101). Might this point to a regional distinction of note? One might also explore relationships between the queer student organizations and the broader gay liberation movement in greater detail. Dilley notes, for example, that Frank Kameny appeared on many college campuses during the 1970s. What kind of impact did national LGBTQ leaders have on the student organizations, and to what degree did these college appearances support the wider movement? How much influence did college towns like Ann Arbor and Columbus (and their recently enfranchised student populations) have on the antidiscrimination laws enacted in the 1970s? The first openly gay politicians to take office in the country, Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler, were elected to the Ann Arbor City Council in 1971. Both had been students at Michigan (p. 41). To what degree did queer student organizations lay the foundation for political leadership in the wider community?
While stronger synthesis would enhance the study, Dilley has done the hard work of laying out historical markers to delineate significant events in the history of queer student organizing. As a result, the visibility of non-heterosexual college students from past decades is more secure.
