Liberating Lawrence

Book excerpt: The early struggle for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and 1970s has typically been told from the perspective of the coasts—in places like New York, San Francisco, and Miami. But the midwestern town of Lawrence, Kansas, home of the University of Kansas (KU) and a thriving location for activist organizations in the 1960s, had an important role to play in the national story of LGBTQ activism in the United States. Liberating Lawrence tells the first-hand story of the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front (LGLF), a KU student organization that began in 1970. Having conducted sixty-seven interviews with people who were involved at the time, author Katherine Rose-Mockry focuses on the group’s early formative years between the founding and 1979, during which time the members of LGLF had to fight for their right to exist on campus as an official student group. Inspired by a class project that led him to interview local members of the LGBTQ community, David Stout initiated the formation of the LGLF in the summer of 1970 to provide a safe space for gay students to meet each other and to establish a base of operations for student activism on campus. The group focused on educating the campus about the experience of being gay. They formed a speakers’ bureau in their opening months and gave frequent presentations at KU and nearby campuses. In addition to raising awareness and providing counseling services, the group was also self-consciously political from the start and advocated for equal protections, employment rights, and the elimination of laws criminalizing same-sex sexual activity. The university administration, however, did not welcome the formation of the LGLF. Three times the chancellor rejected their request for recognition. This led the group to file a lawsuit against the university in 1971, and the famous cause lawyer William Kunstler, who had previously defended the Chicago Seven in 1969, agreed to represent them—a development that received national media attention. While the LGLF lost the legal battle, they ultimately won the war to change the campus culture. Katherine Rose-Mockry has written the definitive history of gay and lesbian activism at the public universities of Kansas. Liberating Lawrence is a major contribution to our understanding of the fight for gay pride and LGBTQ civil rights, both locally and nationally.