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:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)