Part 1 of 3

James Coyer broke down and cried when he realized the Marine Corps was not for him. He left Paris Island after only four and a half weeks to persue an education at UNC Charlotte. He decided to join the staff at The University Times his first semester. On an October day in the school newspaper's office, Coyer stumbled upon a book written by UNCC faculty member Shane Windemeyer titled, "Out of Fraternity Row: Personal Accounts of Being Gay in a College Fraternity." The book had special interest to Coyer; the ex-marine wasn't involved in Greek life. He was gay.

After thumbing through the book, Coyer did something that no student at UNCC had ever done before him. He penned his experience about being gay in the student newspaper, thus giving gay, lesbian and bisexual students an identifiable voice for the first time in the University’s history.

Coyer never hid his sexuality, but it wasn’t obvious; he passed as a straight male to many of his peers.

“I was a little nervous writing the article at first because it was a big thing for me,” said Coyer, who is back at UNCC after taking three years off. “I didn’t have any hesitations; I just wrote it.”

Coyer’s opinion piece appeared in The University Times two weeks after the slaying of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The tragedy not only inspired Coyer to write about his sexuality, but it also moved one of his co-workers, Keith Kitchens, to come out to the campus community in editorial space adjacent to Coyer’s article.

Prior to the articles being printed in that October 1998 issue of the school newspaper, no gay or lesbian student had used the forum to express their own homosexuality. Until the 1990s, articles pertaining to gay and lesbian issues were not commonplace.

In fact, most students quoted in GLBT issue stories were given aliases in articles until the 1990s to avoid discrimination.

Over UNCC’s history, huge strides have been made by the often silent and small actions of students, faculty, staff and their allies in advancing gay, lesbian and bisexual acceptance.

Though the majority of the University’s strongest strides in GLBT issues have been made within the last few years, many say that UNCC is still in the transitional phase of accepting gay and lesbian students, faculty and staff.

Some feel as if social stigmas still exist because UNCC is a microcosm of society and this particular microcosm resides in the conservative region known as the “Bible Belt.”

Never has gay and lesbian culture at UNCC been put under a microscope, until now.

This is not the story of James Coyer, though he is one of the few recognizable faces in the movement in getting GLBT issues to the forefront of campus acceptance. This is the story of all gay and lesbian UNC Charlotte students and employees and their allies.

A historical perspective

Gay liberation was not strong enough to stand on its own and trailed the coattails of the feminist movement until 1969. June 27 of that year, police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Days after, the city would see riots in the area, giving birth to the national gay movement.

The impact of Stonewall struck a major chord with a small minority of students at UNCC, which was just four years old at the time. These students secretly met in 1969 and called themselves the Gay Student Union (also referred to as the Gay Student Alliance). The University did not recognize the group, because the members did not apply for a student group charter, instead, opting to make an impact in the Charlotte area.

The group met until the end 1974, when many of its members left to form gay groups in the Charlotte community. One such group was the Metrolina Gay Alliance, which was started in January 1975, before many of that organization’s members soon went to form Alternative Life Styles in Charlotte.

In a 1975 campus newspaper article (then called The Journal), Donna Hoover interviewed two gay students from campus who had been members of the organization.

One of the students interviewed was given the alias name John.

“John stated that there was a great deal of fear of the administration as a result of it being very young and at the same time, very conservative in many ways,” detailed Hoover in why the Gay Student Union did not seek a charter.

Many of the members remaining from the inactive gay student organization were seniors. John expressed to Hoover his desire for a new, younger group of students to seek a charter for the organization.

Members of the Gay Student Union wrote two letters to the editor of The Journal during the group’s existence, but their names were not published.

The fear did not stop the efforts of gay students at the University. Some covertly conducted work through the Counseling Center or submitted lists of books on GLBT issues for Atkins Library to update its catalog.

Chuck Lynch, vice chancellor for student affairs, describes the workings of the gay student union when he began working as housing director in 1973 as being underground.

“Most people were in the closet,” said Lynch, who arrived to UNCC from the diverse University of Miami. “When I got here, it was something that was fairly noticeable for me.”

It wasn’t long after Stonewall that other student organizations began sponsoring speakers to talk about homosexuality. A UNC-Chapel Hill professor visited UNCC in March of 1972 to talk about emerging sexual issues, including homosexuality.

But it wasn’t until the University Programming Board (now the Campus Activities Board) invited Village Voice journalist Jill Johnston in 1974, when an openly gay speaker visited campus with what many considered “radical” views. Johnston, an outspoken writer, was billed as “one of America’s most controversial feminists.”

The Oct. 8, 1974 lecture lived up to expectations. Carolina Journal writers David Ledbetter and Tamara Sane detailed the speaker’s comfort level at the lecture when she confronted the UNCC audience in the Rowe Arts Building.

“After Johnson belatedly ambled onto the stage in the recital hall, fumbled with the mikes [sic] and interrupted the MC’s introduction, she expressed her feelings towards the audience of some 250 people with ‘I don’t feel a particularly friendliness here, generally,’" wrote Ledbetter and Sane.

Salamander East, an opinion writer for The Carolina Journal, also wrote an article on the event but was more insulting.

“It was very interesting to note that she was dressed as a leather boy that you would expect to meet at a bar on Christopher Street in New York City,” penned East. “The only thing missing was her whip. Her face is rather worn and this is possibly a result of all the drugs that she has done over the recent years.”

Johnston read an article focusing on her impressions of society, followed with a question and answer session and then excused the men from the audience.

East wrote that Johnston asked all the men to leave so that she could give women in attendance information about starting a lesbian movement at UNCC.

“This is pretty strange since all the higher-ups deny the existence of such an organization on this campus,” wrote East. “What she was doing was breaking down a big audience into a smaller group and then even a smaller group … until she had all the potential young girls she needed to brainwash and start a chapter on this campus.”

The lecture, which started at 8:15 p.m., went well beyond three hours and prompted letters to the editor of differing views.

Penny Webb, one of the letter writers, felt many in the audience attended the lecture with preconceived notions about Johnston.

“They knew nothing of her beliefs except that she is a ‘radical Lesbian Feminist,’” wrote Webb. “They got on their defensive bandwagons and never came down.”

Webb wrote that there was no such feminist-lesbian group on campus, but the lecture had attendees from members of Charlotte’s Women’s Center.

Bob Prophitt wrote to The Carolina Journal “disgusted” of Johnston appearance on campus and the corresponding newspaper coverage.

Johnston would not be the last homosexual speaker on campus. Many would follow but none surpassed the resistance by homophobic students and faculty than the Gay Liberation ’76 Symposium in November of 1975.

Each day of the symposium featured a different issue pertaining to the gay movement given by a prominent speaker. Barbara Gittings, coordinator of the Task Force on Gay Liberation for the American Library Association, spoke about what heterosexuals should know about Gay Liberation. Reverend John Gill, a pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in Atlanta spoke about Gay Liberation in terms of being a spiritual revolution. Bruce Voeller and Franklin Kameny, two members of the National Gay Task Force, spoke about gay rights within the federal government.

Though never reported by campus media, records from university archives show that several UNCC professors were opposed to the weeklong conference, complaining to then-Chancellor Dean Colvard the events violated University policy.

Howard Godfrey, an assistant accounting professor at the time, sent Colvard a memo Nov. 3, 1975 expressing his “shock and disappointment” after seeing publicity for the event in the Campus News newsletter.

“The report seemed to indicate that the “Gay Liberation '76” symposium is designed to sell a way of life considered by most people to be illegal and undesirable, if not immoral,” Godfrey wrote in the memo.

Godfrey expressed the event would violate University policy statement No. 8, which regulates visiting speakers. The policy, which originated by the UNC-system Board of Trustees to combat communist threat years prior, stated “express effort shall be made to present all sides of controversial issues in a balanced program of public addresses.”

“The program seems to be designed to solicit increased acceptance and participation in the gay way of life,” continued Godfrey. “This becomes a serious concern when one considers that the program runs for a week, without any indication of consideration for opposing views.”

Eleven other faculty and staff signed their names to the memo in agreement, which asked the chancellor to take time to consider if the symposium violated the policy.

Four days later, Colvard wrote Godfrey back explaining that the event was educational and in no way promoting homosexuality.

Colvard wrote that many controversial speakers had visited the University in recent years and having an opposing view for each program “would not only have been highly impractical in many cases but may have been establishing procedural obstacles that become, in essence, a subtle form of censorship.

"While I fully understand that to many this is a topic of considerable unpleasantness that best not be dealt with, I trust that the University as a marketplace for ideas will be able to continue to provide an atmosphere which, on balance, is characterized by a tolerance of different points of view and a willingness to risk hearing out opposite opinions.”

Douglas Orr, Jr., who was an administrator at the time and current president of Warren Wilson College, wrote a memo to Cone University Center director Vern Parrish after the symposium congratulating him for the handling of the sensitive topic.

“We shall have other such instances in the future, of course, and it is gratifying to know that every attempt is being made to ensure that such programs are administered fairly, professionally, and with an underlying commitment that freedom of expression is encouraged on this campus without fear of pressure or censorship.”

He suggested that future events deemed “controversial” have moderators to allow for audience questions or opposing views to be addressed.

The speaker that hit closest to home from the symposium was Lee Lehman, director of the National Gay Student Center and professor at Rutgers. Lehman’s workshop was “Gays on Campus,” in which she discussed ways in which gay students could start a formalized association on campus. Lehman detailed the biggest obstacles of starting a gay association including funding, disapproval from the administration and internal problems.

Lehman gave ways in which a gay association could publicize and use the power of numbers to avoid discrimination.

Local media pounced on the '76 Gay Symposium.

Roy Morris, station manager of WCCB 18, wrote UNC-system President William Friday asking if he wanted to respond to an editorial spoken on the air called “Academic Freedom.”

The station said the business professors opposed of the symposium had legitimate concerns in questioning the fairness for opposing opinions.

That same day, a letter to the editor from symposium participant Franklin Kemeny was published in The Charlotte Observer in response to a negative letter posed by a reader who opposed of homosexuality.

Though campus events such as the Jill Johnston lecture and the '76 Gay Symposium elicited negative publicity, it generated much discussion on campus and in the Charlotte community.

Bill Cody, a family and community nursing professor, grew up in Charlotte and was familiar with campus in the 1970s, said gay and lesbian social life seemed to exist on the campus during that time.

“People who were here, who were adults and college students and studying before most of the students here now were born, were fairly out and open particularly in the arts,” said Cody.

In 1979, a group called the Minority Board formed, representing six factions on campus: women, blacks, gays, Native Americans, international students and disabled students. Each faction had one representative on the board.

Alonzo Saunders was the representative for gay students, and appeared in the Oct. 29, 1979 issue of The Carolina Journal to talk about his involvement in the organization.

“I think it’s time that the people of UNCC realized that the gay people are tired of being stepped on,” said Saunders at the time. Saunders joined the organization because other students harassed him because he was gay.

“[Gays] have rights not to be harassed,” continued Saunders. “This won’t change unless someone stands up for their rights. I’m standing up for this.”

The front-page feature story in The Carolina Journal by Michael Roseman was the first time a gay UNCC student had come out to the entire campus through the pages of the newspaper. Never before had an openly gay student had his picture in the campus newspaper, much less give the newspaper permission to use his real name in an article.

A senior at UNCC, Saunders had been victim of several acts of discrimination including verbal harassment, his car damaged and a hammer being thrown at him from a dorm window.

“I remember students feeling threatened like Alonzo,” said Lynch.

As housing director, Lynch led efforts to include GLBT issues during resident advisor training. Some of the resident advisors were having trouble dealing with the subject matter.

“I think they just hadn’t really confronted it,” said Lynch. “I thought that was an important issue that we needed to get on the table. We did, but it took some time to change the environment.”

Saunders continued to push the boundaries of gay acceptance at UNCC by leading a group of students into forming a chartered, University-recognized Gay Student Union just days after he was interviewed by the Carolina Journal for his work on the Minority Board.

Saunders, who was president of the grassroots union, met with Student Government Association officials to form the student group but was met with red tape.

The SGA Ways and Means committee told Saunders that they could not become an organization until a typed constitution was on file, which Saunders said he was not told about.

On a subsequent visit to the committee, some SGA members deemed the Gay Student Union’s constitution too vague because of a termination clause. A motion was made to go into an executive session to discuss the constitution, but the motion failed due to no prior notice being given. The committee approved the Gay Student Union’s charter that day, but it would not become official until voted on by all of Student Legislature.

The date and location for the meeting was published by the Journal the day before Legislature would decide on the charter, which drew a crowd on Nov. 6 1979, including six members of the club.

Lynch, who by then was promoted to dean of students, remembers having attended that meeting to ensure the gay organization would not get discriminated against.

With a reworked termination clause that satisfied the SGA committee’s recommendation, the Gay Student Union became an official organization. It was the first University-recognized gay student organization.

The publicity generated in October and November 1979 from Saunders and his efforts prompted many students to publicly support or oppose homosexuality through letters to the editor of the campus newspaper.

In the issue following coverage of the Gay Student Union’s charter, The Carolina Journal printed an editorial cartoon submitted by Frank Bray IV and William D. Brown III called “Response to gay rights.” The image depicted a guillotine with a place for a gay man to stick his penis. The cartoon generated letters of its own.

From October to December The Journal printed 11 letters concerning gay rights including one of support from the Baptist Student Union. A follow-up letter from Bennie E. Taylor expressed shock when he read BSU’s letter of support. He suggested the moral standards of the organization had eroded.

The Gay Student Union did not last long. By 1984, the group was dissolved.

Regardless, the gay movement had made its way on the UNCC campus. What started as a low whisper had grown to a loud defiant cry for fair treatment and understanding.

Led by students like Saunders, gay students were breaking the silence.