Introduction
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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
More than forty students at San Francisco State University, all listed in the acknowledgments, contributed to this project, as did research assistants Adam Nichols, Jennifer Zoland, and Zachary Greenberg. The project thus far has generated a teaching-oriented essay published in the journal California History, an essay by M.A. student Ruth Etta Hyde Truman in the SF State History Department’s student journal, and a short introduction to the project in SF State’s alumni magazine.[3]
While the larger project addresses the history of sexuality and sexual politics at SF State from 1969 to 1974, this exhibit focuses more narrowly on LGBTQ history. Readers interested in non-LGBTQ topics, including non-LGBTQ aspects of interracial sex, pornography, sexual commerce, sex education, sexual health, sexual reproduction, the sexual revolution, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual violence, sex work, and student-faculty sex at SF State, will find media stories listed and linked in one of the annotated bibliographies included in this exhibit.
This project is based primarily on print media sources, though there is one oral history featuring one of the founders of SF State’s Gay Liberation Front. Further oral histories would greatly enrich our work. Each of the main exhibit pages includes an introductory text, associated visual images (and one audiovisual recording), and links to the media articles. Most of the media articles can be accessed by clicking on the citations in the footnotes; the exceptions are the media sources for which we have not been able to secure permission to reproduce for this exhibit. After the main exhibit pages there are two annotated bibliographies, both organized chronologically. One focuses on LGBTQ history at SF State; the other includes sources related to non-LGBTQ aspects of gender and sexuality at SF State. The bibliographies are meant to support researchers interested in developing arguments or exploring topics not covered here.
For a variety of reasons, we have found far more sources about white LGBTQ people, and especially white gay men, than we have for people of color, and far more sources about gay and lesbian than bisexual and trans people. This reflects SF State’s faculty and student demographics in the period studied but also biases in the media sources. In addition, LGBTQ people of color and trans people may have been less likely to be out, or out on campus, or out to the media. With respect to gender, many scholars have addressed the greater visibility of gay men compared to lesbian women in this period, though it is also the case that lesbians became more visible with the growth of the feminist, lesbian feminist, and women’s studies movements of the 1970s. We were frustrated by our failure to identify more media sources about bisexual history, trans history, and the history of LGBTQ people of color. The pages that follow include a reference to one bisexual student (Gerald Jacks) and several unnamed trans students, along with several trans artists who performed on campus. In 1973, the Phoenix published a letter by a self-identified “Gay Chicano,” who took issue with recent comments made in another letter about San Francisco’s heavily Latino Mission district.[4] We were excited to find a 1970 letter from “Beth,” who we identified as well-known trans activist Beth Elliot, in the Berkeley-based feminist periodical It Ain’t Me Babe. A parenthetical notation, possibly from the editors, indicates that Elliot was an SF State student, but Elliot indicates elsewhere that she went to the University of San Francisco, not SF State.[5] Oral histories might be more successful in accessing the perspectives of LGBTQ students, staff, and faculty of color, but we also want to encourage our readers to be careful about (a) making assumptions about race when these are unnamed in our sources (for example, people of color were not always identified as such); and (b) making assumptions based on today’s preferred terms (for example, people who might call themselves trans today might have called themselves, or been called, gay or lesbian in the 1960s and 1970s).
Before turning to the main sections of the exhibit, readers might find it helpful to know a little about the history of the institution now called San Francisco State University. SF State was founded in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School. It was renamed San Francisco State Teachers College in 1921 and San Francisco State College in 1935. In 1960, SF State joined the California State College system, which later was renamed the California State University (or Cal State). San Francisco State University acquired its current name in 1972.
Higher education in California is explicitly and intentionally tiered. The University of California system, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, features research-intensive institutions with extensive graduate and professional programs; relatively high tuition; faculty expected to devote significant time to teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activities; and highly competitive student admissions. Cal State institutions, in contrast, are less research intensive; have fewer graduate and professional programs; have relatively lower tuition; expect their faculty to concentrate primarily on teaching; and have less competitive student admissions. Cal State is the largest public university system in the United States, with twenty-three campuses, more than 450,000 students, and one of the most diverse student bodies in the United States.
Located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, SF State currently counts 1900 faculty, 22,000 students, and 280,000 alumni. SF State has a Sexuality Studies Program, which offers an undergraduate minor in Sexuality Studies, an undergraduate minor in Queer and Trans Studies, and a master of arts in Sexuality Studies. In addition, the Race and Resistance Studies Department offers an undergraduate minor in queer and trans ethnic studies. For decades, the university has had LGBTQ provosts, deans, chairs, and student leaders, along with many other LGBTQ administrators, faculty, coaches, librarians, staff, and students. Since 2022, the provost has been Asian American queer historian Amy Sueyoshi. As of 2025, SF State has multiple LGBTQ student groups, including the API Queer Club, EGAY, HausBlaque, Latinx Queer Club, and Queer Alliance. Other LGBTQ-oriented projects at SF State include the C&C Fellowship in Queer Ethnic Studies Endowment, Family Acceptance Project, LGBTQ+ Identity Center, Queer Cinema Project, Queer & Trans Resource Center, Research & Education on Gender and Sexuality (REGS) Hub, SAFE Place, and Safe Zone Ally Program.
[1] Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2019).
[2] See Marc Stein, “Students, Sodomy, and the State: LGBT Campus Struggles in the 1970s,” Law and Social Inquiry 48.2 (May 2023): 531–560. For the broader queer history of colleges and universities, see OutHistory’s Queer History of Colleges and Universities. See also David A. Reichard, Here Are My People: LGBT College Student Organizing in California (Athens: Univ. of George Press, 2024).
[3] Marc Stein, “Teaching and Researching the History of Sexual Politics at San Francisco State, 1969-1970,” California History 98.4 (Winter 2021): 2-29; Ruth Etta Hyde Truman, “Priscilla Prude and the Lusting Lout: The Sexual Revolution versus the Regulation of Women’s Sexuality at San Francisco State, 1959-1972,” Ex Post Facto 33 (Spring 2024): 9-25; Marc Stein, “Strike Sparks,” SF State Magazine, Fall/Winter 2024, 8-9.
[4] Antonius J. (Andy) Rivera, Jr., letter to the editor, Phoenix, 11 Jan. 1973, 2.
[5] Beth, “Letter from a Trans-sexual??” and “Our Response,” It Ain’t Me Babe, 1 Dec. 1970, 14.