History
The SHL had twelve members who fought with university administrators for a year before the group was officially recognized. Stephen Donaldson, a bisexual-identified LGBT rights activist is commemorated by a plaque in the queer lounge that bears his name in one of Columbia's residence halls for spearheading the creation of the group.
When the charter was ultimately granted in April 1967 it earned media attention with the New York Times printing a story on the front page, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported that some students believed that the creation of the group was an April Fool's Day joke. Cornell University and New York University also allowed LGBT groups to form causing a wave of LGBT student activism in the years leading up to the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. One of the early members of SHL was author Arthur Evans, even though Evans himself was still closeted at the time.
In addition to other activities the group has hosted "First Friday Dances", which at their inception were one of the very few places where college-age LGBT people could socialize with one another.
Read more about this topic: Columbia Queer Alliance
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)