Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE)
Gay activists from Minnesota Free University began work to be recognized by the University of Minnesota as a student organization. Jack Baker, a first-year law student, was elected president.
Approval of FREE by the Twin Cities Assembly Committee on Student Affairs came November 1. "FREE is the first student gay organization to gain recognition in the upper mid-west," a news release proclaimed. "Its leaders believe it to be the first such organization on a Big Ten campus."
Moving openly and aggressively, members of FREE slowly transformed Minneapolis into a "mecca for gays". Three major companies doing business in the Twin Cities area responded quickly to a survey, insisting that they do not discriminate against homosexuals in their hiring policies. Honeywell responded differently. It was blunt: "We would not employ a known homosexual."
FREE pressed for equality and crafted a new University policy. The Administrative Committee approved a final draft 22 May 1972. Complaints could now be filed with the Campus Committee on Placement Services for discrimination by employers recruiting on campus. When challenged, Honeywell admitted that its objection to known homosexuals "still holds." Facing expulsion from University facilities, Honeywell "quietly reversed its hiring policy". No longer would it refuse to employ people because they are gay.
Read more about this topic: Jack Baker (activist), Student Activism
Famous quotes containing the words fight, repression, erotic and/or expression:
“To fight without hope is to fight with grace,
The self reconstructed, the false heart repaired.’”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“No hand has been allowed to touch
The rose I hide,
Though eyes have looked upon it and desired it.”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
ErPo. Erotic Poetry; the Lyrics, Ballads, Idyls, and Epics of Love—Classical to Contemporary. William Cole, ed. (1963)
“Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)