Former leaders reflect on fight for Gay Lib Mizzou student group – Columbia Daily Tribune
With same-sex marriage legal, though potentially threatened, and the LGBTQ community enjoying greater freedoms and support, it may be easy to forget that not so long ago being gay faced greater opposition and stigma in society.
And so it was at the University of Missouri when gay student and Vietnam veteran Larry Eggleston in April 1971 applied to the Missouri Students Association at MU for recognition of Gay Lib, a gay student group. The approval didn’t come until about seven years later after MU resisted the recognition.
Several members of the MSA from that era are in town for Homecoming and met Wednesday with current MSA leaders.
Eggleston, in a May 16, 1974, interview on KOPN, gave an overview of the situation. The host noted that the scheduled tape on sexual communism was being interrupted for the surprise and rare treat. The interviewer was Egal Redenko, and the interview was found on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
“One of the first things we ran into was trying to find a place to meet,” Eggleston said in the interview of wanting space on campus to meet.
He applied for recognition to MSA and was approved. Then a faculty-student committee that until then had routinely approved student groups put up obstacles, he said.
“Gay Lib went through nine months of hearings,” Eggleston said.
It was approved by a split vote in December 1971. But Dean of Students Edwin Hutchins vetoed the approval, worried about the public response, according to an article in Artifacts Journal at MU.
Local attorney Dan Viets, who was MSA president in the 1972-73 school year, said there were political considerations.
“What will happen if we recognize Gay Liberation?” Viets said of the administration’s rationale, speaking during a Wednesday meeting with current MSA leaders. “The Legislature will cut our funding.”
The MSA tried to bypass the veto and established a committee on sexual freedom. University officials viewed the committee as a subterfuge.
“I really didn’t give a damn about the name,” Eggleston said in the 1974 KOPN interview.
Deciding recognition as a student organization was needed, and with backing from the American Civil Liberties Union, Gay Lib sued the university for recognition, with Eggleston as chief plaintiff.
“I think it’s very good that Gay Lib is a very unorganized thing,” Eggleston said in 1974. “It’s highly autonomous.”
But there were notes of discouragement in the interview.
“There’s damn little protection in the law,” he said.
The 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in June 1977 ruled in favor of the recognition of Gay Lib as an MU student organization.
“The university, acting here as an instrumentality of the state, has no right to restrict speech or association simply because it finds the expressed views abhorrent,” wrote Judge Donald Lay.
And a concurring opinion from Judge William Webster: “I have no doubt that the ancient halls of higher learning at Columbia will survive the most offensive verbal assaults upon traditional moral values; solutions to tough problems are not found in repression of ideas.”
There is a dissenting opinion from Judge John Regan.
“The credible testimony of highly qualified psychiatrists persuasively demonstrated to me, as it did to the District Court, that homosexual behavior is compulsive and that homosexuality is an illness and clearly abnormal,” Regan wrote.
His opinion continued to say that formal recognition of Gay Lib would likely result in violation of Missouri laws forbidding sodomy.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected MU’s request to take up the case. The Feb. 21, 1978, New York Times reported on the ruling.
“As it has done consistently in the past, the high court refused to examine the legal issues posed by homosexual activity, thus postponing any national legal precedent. But today, for the first time, two justices voiced their objection to this refusal,” reads the Times report.
“Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, voting to hear the Gay Lib case, declared that the Supreme Court’s discretion to decide which cases it reviews should not become a sort of judicial storm cellar to which we may flee to escape from controversial or sensitive cases.'”
On April 20, 1978, members of Gay Lib marched to their first meeting, with hecklers jeering and throwing things, according to Artifacts Journal.
Sally Macnamara was a board member on Gay Lib and was named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. She’s straight, but Eggleston recruited her for Gay Lib based on her membership in the Association of Women Students, she said.
“He was very much the activist,” Macnamara said by phone.
She describes herself as an ally.
“He was one of the first people I knew on campus who came out publicly as gay,” Macnamara said.
When Viets attended law school at MU, the case was in his constitution law textbook, he said.
We’re living in a more enlightened time, he said.
“It was an obvious reflection of the university’s bias,” Viets said of the resistance. “They did everything to avoid acknowledging there were gay students on campus.”
He has fond memories of Eggleston, who has died.
“He was courageous,” Viets said. “He was extremely brave, in those times, especially.”
Students looked up to Eggleston and respected him, Viets said.
“He was a little older than most of us,” Viets said.
Eggleston in the radio interview said that there was little support for people coming out in Columbia, but he offered to be their support.
“Individuals are too intimidated to be open about their sexuality,” Eggleston said.
Her involvement in the case is a point of pride, though the rulings didn’t happen until long after her 1974 graduation, Macnamara said.
She had forgotten she was involved until Viets reminded her a few years ago, she said.
“I’m very proud I was part of it,” said Macnamara, who now lives in Evanston, Illinois. “It was a victory for students. It was a victory for gay students. It was a victory for student organizations in general and their right to associate with who they want to.”
Roger McKinney is the education reporter for the Tribune. You can reach him at rmckinney@Columbiatribune.com or 573-815-1719. He’s on Twitter at @rmckinney9.