Introduction
This exhibit is based on a collaborative faculty-student research project that I organized in three of my history of sexuality classes at San Francisco State University from 2019 to 2022. I organized this project in part because I had just finished working on The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History and I was interested in learning more about what was happening at the university where I work during the Stonewall era.[1] Another prompt was SF State’s fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the 1968-69 Third World Liberation Front Strike, which made me wonder about how, why, and whether the strike had relationships to LGBTQ liberation. A third reason was a legal history project that I was doing on the struggles that occurred in the 1970s when newly-established gay student groups were denied official recognition by fourteen public universities and many private ones; I was curious about what happened at SF State in this regard.[2] Yet another prompt was the work being done at many colleges and universities to hold these institutions accountable for their historical connections to genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism. Finally, I was interested, as a teacher, in showing my students that they could do politically meaningful historical scholarship, that their own university could be researched and historicized, and that they could make original contributions to our knowledge about the history of sexuality in general and LGBTQ history in particular.
More than forty students at San Francisco State University, all of whom are listed in the acknowledgements, contributed to this project, as did research assistants Adam Nichols, Jennifer Zoland, and Zachary Greenberg. The project thus far has generated a teaching-oriented essay that was published in the journal California History, an essay by M.A. student Ruth Etta Hyde Truman that was published in the SF State History Department’s student journal, and a short introduction to the project in SF State’s alumni magazine.[3]
While the larger project addresses the history of sexuality and sexual politics at SF State from 1969 to 1974, this exhibit focuses more narrowly on LGBTQ history. Readers interested in non-LGBTQ topics, including non-LGBTQ aspects of interracial sex, pornography, sexual commerce, sex education, sexual health, sexual reproduction, the sexual revolution, sexually-transmitted diseases, sexual violence, sex work, and student-faculty sex at SF State, will find media stories listed in one of the annotated bibliographies included in this exhibit.
Before turning to the main sections of the exhibit, readers might find it helpful to know a little about the history of the institution now called San Francisco State University. SF State was founded in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School. It was renamed San Francisco State Teachers College in 1921 and San Francisco State College in 1935. In 1960, SF State joined the California State College system, which later was renamed the California State University (or Cal State). San Francisco State University acquired its current name in 1972.
Higher education in California is explicitly and intentionally tiered. The University of California system, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, features research-intensive institutions with extensive graduate and professional programs; relatively high tuition; faculty expected to devote significant time to teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activities; and highly competitive student admissions. Cal State institutions, in contrast, are less research intensive; have fewer graduate and professional programs; have relatively lower tuition; expect their faculty to concentrate primarily on teaching; and have less competitive student admissions.
Cal State is the largest public university system in the United States, with twenty-three campuses, more than 450,000 students, and one of the most diverse student bodies in the United States. Located in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, SF State currently counts 1900 faculty, 22,000 students, and 280,000 alumni. SF State has a Sexuality Studies Program, which offers an undergraduate minor in Sexuality Studies, an undergraduate minor in Queer and Trans Studies, and a master of arts in Sexuality Studies. In addition, the Race and Resistance Studies Department offers an undergraduate minor in queer and trans ethnic studies. For decades, the university has had LGBTQ provosts, deans, chairs, and student leaders, along with a large number of other administrators, faculty, coaches, librarians, staff, and students. Since 2022, the university’s provost has been Asian American queer historian Amy Sueyoshi. As of 2025, SF State has multiple LGBTQ student groups, including the API Queer Club, EGAY, HausBlaque, Latinx Queer Club, and Queer Alliance. Other LGBTQ-oriented projects at SF State include the C&C Fellowship in Queer Ethnic Studies Endowment, Family Acceptance Project, LGBTQ+ Identity Center, Queer Cinema Project, Queer & Trans Resource Center, Research & Education on Gender and Sexuality (REGS) Hub, SAFE Place, and Safe Zone Ally Program.
Notes
[1] Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2019).
[2] See Marc Stein, “Students, Sodomy, and the State: LGBT Campus Struggles in the 1970s,” Law and Social Inquiry 48.2 (May 2023): 531–560. For the broader queer history of colleges and universities, see OutHistory’s Queer History of Colleges and Universities. See also David A. Reichard, Here Are My People: LGBT College Student Organizing in California (Athens: Univ. of George Press, 2024).
[3] Marc Stein, “Teaching and Researching the History of Sexual Politics at San Francisco State, 1969-1970,” California History 98.4 (Winter 2021): 2-29; Ruth Etta Hyde Truman, “Priscilla Prude and the Lusting Lout: The Sexual Revolution versus the Regulation of Women’s Sexuality at San Francisco State, 1959-1972,” Ex Post Facto 33 (Spring 2024): 9-25; Marc Stein, “Strike Sparks,” SF State Magazine, Fall/Winter 2024, 8-9.