Introduction

Compared with Dartmouth’s long history as an institution, it feels as if LGBTQ people have only been around for a short time. Dartmouth was founded in 1769 but didn’t have its own gay student group until 1977, when it became the last Ivy League institution to do so.¹ Of course, these were by no means the first gay students to attend Dartmouth, but they were the first to organize a group that they called “gay,” which they joined because they identified themselves as “gay,” and which forced the broader Dartmouth community to acknowledge that gay people existed and had shed, at the very least, the shame that had kept them from identifying themselves at all.

Dartmouth’s social culture in 1977 did not make it easy to deal with that shame, and at many times encouraged it. In the fall of 1975, a bisexual senior published an anonymous open letter in The Dartmouth asking why Dartmouth remained the only Ivy League school without a gay organization. The anonymous author’s conclusion: “we are all very closed-minded, and very afraid…at this College we are not supposed to exist.”² Defying this rule and proudly existing as a gay, or even just a “flamboyant”³ individual, could lead to harassment and violence.

How did gay students manage to form an organization in such a hostile environment, then? Before they could take such a bold step,they needed the help of the organization Students for Social Alternatives. The Students for Social Alternatives’ objective was to provide, as the name implied, alternatives for students who wanted to socialize outside the fraternities.^{4 5} At least, that was what the group said explicitly. The concept of social alternatives appealed to groups of students who felt marginalized elsewhere on campus: “women that…had their experience…with the frats and never wanted to go back…black students, Native American students…sort of leftist kind of people that didn’t want to buy into the whole…preppie, upper-crust kind of attitude of the frats.”⁶ This, naturally, included gay students.

The SSA ran into trouble when other students caught on to the organization’s gay associations. Not only did the SSA include gay Dartmouth students, but it held popular discos which were open to the public, including “some guys from the Upper Valley that were out” and openly danced together.⁷ Bill Monsour and Stuart Lewan, two of the founders and leaders of the group, were “the first openly gay public figures in the campus’s history.”⁸ In an environment overwhelmingly dominated by straight (and closeted) people, any hint of gayness was conspicuous, and in the SSA’s case, it was damning. During the 1978-79 year, the Students for Social Alternatives lost their College recognition, and consequently their funding, as they were no longer active.⁹

Had the SSA accepted defeat once they earned their fateful reputation, Dartmouth’s LGBTQ history may have looked very different. The group tried several tactics to distance itself from gay issues¹⁰, which culminated in creating an entirely new organization: the Gay Student Support Group. The SSA supported the GSSG with its own budget at first,¹¹ but leadership continued to emphasize that the SSA was not a “gay” organization. Lewan told The Dartmouth that he predicted this would benefit the SSA, because “the people who [weren’t] gay [would] feel freer to get involved with the SSA.’”¹² By the end of January of 1978, only a few months after it was created, the GSSG had split from the SSA entirely.¹³

The Gay Student Support Group could not save the Students for Social Alternatives, but it seems that it was born out of necessity, for reasons beyond saving its parent group’s reputation. After all, the SSA demonstrated that lesbian, gay, and bisexual Dartmouth students needed spaces where they felt safe to socialize. Dee Johnson, the assistant director of COSO in 1984, described students’ desire for a gay student group as “a movement increasing in intensity over a period of time.”¹⁴ Ultimately, it was the effort to create social alternatives, spaces farther away from the mainstream Dartmouth culture, that empowered gay students to take this massive step towards visibility.

Dartmouth administration has long discussed the value of, and need for, social alternatives: for example, a 1980 faculty committee report asserts that “for too long the College has been negligent in providing social alternatives to fraternities,”¹⁵ President McLaughlin noted to the Alumni Council several years later that “there are…very few social alternative[s] within the College to the fraternity system,”¹⁶ and the 1987 Wright Report echoes the concern that “fraternities and sororities play too large a role…despite ten years of expressed concern about the need to develop ‘alternatives’ to the fraternity system.”¹⁷ Even as the social landscape of Dartmouth has changed over the years, this sentiment carries into the present. The 2015 Moving Dartmouth Forward report calls for the College to provide alternatives to “exclusive, male-dominated and pong- and alcohol-centered spaces.”¹⁸ If Dartmouth, as both an institution and a community, has been aware of this problem for so long, why has it persisted? The story of Dartmouth’s first gay student organization, along with the many groups surrounding it, offers an explanation. While the Dartmouth administration has continually attempted to create social alternatives to fraternities, the alternative social spaces that have succeeded were the ones created by the students who needed them, who were already on the margins of social life. Alternative social spaces designed to appeal to the typical Dartmouth student, however, cannot succeed in serving the students who need them the most.

Next: The Social Default: The Fraternities

Notes