On Sept. 27, 1971, then-Dean of Students George Langler sent a letter to student Gary Keeper. It read, “Dear Gary: You will be pleased to know that the Student Life Committee approved the charter for your organization...I am willing to loan Gay Lib $50 with the understanding that you will repay it if and when you receive an allocation from the Student Finance Committee.”

For a while after that it didn’t seem as if Gay Lib was all that prominent a presence on campus. In January 1971, the Lorain-based publication The Journal wrote an article quoting Jack Campbell, a Cleveland-based leader of the “homophile movement,” lamenting the lack of gay support in the area outside of Cleveland.

“There are many homosexuals in Lorain County,” he said. “Many Oberlin College students are gay and come to Cleveland for contacts.”

Campbell mentioned the particular need of college students for support: “Where the homosexual has problems is when he’s in his late teens or 20s and has pressures from friends and family to date girls. If he can adjust to his homosexuality to get through this tough period, then as he gets older he finds his happiness.”

Joseph Pruitt was the acting director of Oberlin College Psychological Services at the time. He said, “There seems to be good support...that we all have the potential of being gratified in a homosexual relationship...it’s better to be a happy homosexual than an unhappy, struggling heterosexual.”

Pruitt also made this somewhat ambiguous remark: “If you have a bisexual person who can respond either to a man or a woman, I have trouble saying that person is sick.” This was in contrast to the attitude of the other psychological services in the area. The only salient remark of the psychiatrist at the Elyria Mental Health Center was, “Young homosexuals cruise almost constantly.”

Obviously, Oberlin had to make some real show of support. It would seem that it was about time there was a gay liberation organization. But they only began to make waves a couple of years later when they requested the appointment of an intern in charge of homosexual concerns in College Psychological Services.

In the fall of 1973, Gay Lib met to determine the precise needs of gay students on campus and decided that a homosexual concerns intern was a prerequisite for many of their programs. They began a large petitioning campaign involving approximately 300 people and wrote a formal proposal.

“The key words of this statement of need are advocacy and commitment, education and community orientation, and counseling,” it read. “Oberlin College has been respected since its inception for acknowledging and meeting the needs of all individuals regardless of race, sex or creed. We are now proposing that these civil rights be extended to cover sexual orientation. The acceptance of homosexuality by our society is inevitable. Oberlin College now has the opportunity to accept responsibility in facilitating attitudinal changes from repression to understanding and freedom.”

This was meant to be a wake-up call. For several years, Psychological Services and the President of the College had been receiving requests for this kind of service, and with the American Psychiatric Association declaring that homosexuality should no longer be considered a mental illness just that year, there was no more point in not acquiescing. As it was, they were already behind many colleges. In stark contrast to now, when newspapers talked about gay activism on campuses they talked about Yale, Princeton or the University of Michigan, but not Oberlin.

However, this position only lasted one semester because of budgeting problems. But it seemed to be enough to kick-start activism. Later that year the Gay Lib and the Student Union put together “New Perspectives on Homosexuality and Bisexuality: A Symposium.” The very subject of bisexuality became a charged one on campus with a lot of political ramifications. And the issue of cohabitation rose yet again.

A student named Don Joralemon wrote a paper for the Residence Halls Life Committee called “Homosexuality: Some Thoughts.”

“The normal procedure in...a room occupied by both a straight and gay individual has been for the straight roommate to either apply some kind of pressure on the gay person for his/her removal or for the straight person to remove himself/herself,” it stated very bluntly, calling for special attention to be paid to the “deep-seated biases.”

And by 1978, what was then called the Oberlin Gay Union finally decided to move outside of the Oberlin bubble and started lobbying the College to fund a newsletter that would be sent to interested parties within Oberlin, the Ohio Gay Rights Coalition and outside college groups.