Introduction
Rain drenched the feathery redwoods, birthing sudden creeks that
rushed all over campus, an abundance of rain. Another long
California drought had ended. It was 1978. I was seventeen, and
in my first year of college at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. Anything seemed possible, even loving women. At
UCSC, nurtured and sparked by a fantastic and fervent climate of
lesbian feminism and gay liberation politics, I came out. I fell
in love with women, with feminism, and with the soft redwoods
and craggy coastal environment of this progressive small city
ninety miles south of San Francisco.
Twenty-five years later I am still at UCSC,
and work as an oral historian at the University Library. I walk
the redwood-lined paths of today's UCSC, which has over 14,000
students. Picking my way through the muddy and chaotic building
sites of today's campus, which seems eternally "under
construction," my thoughts turn to the first gay or lesbian
students who walked these paths four years before the Stonewall
Riots. What was it like for them? Seeking the silent and sunny
refuge of madrone and manzanita in the still pristine,
undeveloped "back campus," I recall myself at age nineteen,
running through these woods with a woman I had a hopeless crush
on, fervently discussing the history we were learning in Bettina
Aptheker's Introduction to Feminism course. I remember gay pride
marches in the early-1980s, in the days when many of the
bystanders on Pacific Avenue were not smiling. I think of the
critical mass of GLBT staff that coalesced at UCSC in the
early-1990s, a new-found family. I remember twenty-five years,
not only of my life, but of a community. What stories hover here
in these misty groves, linger in these burnished meadows?
Nearly forty years have passed since UCSC
opened its doors in 1965, as the youngest campus in the
nine-campus University of California system. Spanning the time
period that begins before the Stonewall Riots of 1969, through
the rise of the feminist, gay liberation, and other movements of
the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of women's studies, the tragedy
of the AIDS epidemic, and the emergence of queer activism, the
University has witnessed and participated in a complex era. Now
in early middle age, UCSC stands at a remarkable crossroads in
history, when an older generation of GLBT community members is
able to openly share memories with a younger generation.
But before we can comprehend the history of
the GLBT community at UCSC, we must grasp something of the
singular history of the campus as a public institution of higher
education. UCSC was founded in 1963, and the first class of
students arrived in 1965. The business leaders of the city of
Santa Cruz, which at that time was an economically depressed,
predominantly white and conservative retirement community,
worked hard to convince the UC Regents to build a campus on 2000
redwood-covered acres of the site formerly known as the Cowell
Ranch. Commanding a stunning view overlooking the shimmering
Monterey Bay, UCSC's setting is one of the most spectacular
locations for any campus in the world.
But UCSC was unique not only in the beauty of
its rugged, coastal natural environment; the new campus was also
a visionary experiment in public higher education--the
brainchild of Dean McHenry (founding chancellor) and Clark Kerr
(president of the University). Influenced by the British
universities of Cambridge and Oxford, which were organized
around the college system, McHenry and Kerr sought to combine
the intimacy and commitment to undergraduate education found in
smaller liberal arts colleges together with the resources and
accessibility of larger public universities. The Santa Cruz
version of the residential university was a cluster of
individual colleges, each with its own traditions, academic
focus, and distinctive architecture. Even as campus enrollments
grew (original projections were for 27,000 students), and more
colleges were added, the small-scale, decentralized nature of
the colleges would eliminate the kind of bureaucratic and
congested atmosphere characteristic of larger campuses such as
UC Berkeley. In addition to this, the narrative evaluation
system took the place of letter grades, in order to foster a
learning environment in which self-motivated students would
pursue their education under the close mentorship of faculty.
The students who attended UCSC, particularly
in the early years of the campus, felt part of a grand new
adventure in education. It was alluring for faculty as well.
Drawing national attention, the prestigious campus was able to
attract creative and highly motivated students with excellent
grades. During the increasingly rebellious climate of the 1960s,
as the anti-war movement swept the country, many of these
students demonstrated an impassioned commitment to social
change. The clean-cut students photographed on opening day soon
transformed into long-haired radicals. Student protests
generated tensions between the liberal founders of the campus
and some of the more radical members of the student body (as
well as some younger faculty members). Relations also grew
somewhat strained between the students and the
still-conservative Santa Cruz community.
I do not want to perpetuate an uncritical,
nostalgic myth of the early days of UC Santa Cruz. From the
beginning, the campus has been overwhelmingly white and
middle-class. Even now, forty years later, UCSC remains the
whitest and wealthiest campus in the UC system. Despite recent
progress in achieving campus diversity, the rural isolation of
the campus, along with the high cost of living in the Santa Cruz
area continue to be challenges, making the University a lonely
and difficult place for many students of color and/or
working-class students.
Furthermore, the educational innovations of
UC Santa Cruz, such as the decentralized college system and the
labor-intensive narrative evaluation system, were implemented
without additional funding from the state of California. In
other words, UC Santa Cruz received no more money per student
than any other campus in the UC system, but decentralized
residential colleges and the narrative evaluation system have
been expensive to maintain. This has generated ongoing budgetary
challenges. Finally, the emphasis on faculty teaching and
involvement in the college system stood in conflict with the
tenure system of research universities, which stresses research.
Some early faculty members lost their jobs due to these
unresolved tensions.
Nevertheless, this visionary experiment in
higher public education seems to have created a space in the
redwoods for gay and lesbian students, staff, and faculty. Why?
Perhaps because, as James Graham points out in his oral history,
there was a perception of UC Santa Cruz as "queer," in a more
generalized sense of the word. This "queer" climate would shape
a gay-friendly atmosphere on the campus as it matured and the
GLBT movement developed. It is also imperative to acknowledge
the impact that feminist activism and scholarship at UCSC had in
fostering that atmosphere, beginning in the early-1970s.
For many years, UCSC has been on Planet Out's list of top-ten
"gay and lesbian friendly" college campuses. In 2003, the
Princeton Review ranked UCSC as the top public institution for
gay and lesbian students! The gay students who lived in these
redwoods in 1965 could scarcely have imagined that such a list
would ever exist! How did we get here? What traces of the paths
of astounding changes in GLBT life, culture, and politics in the
United States could we discover in the history of one college
campus? And how has this innovative public university helped
shape the national GLBT and other movements? These are some of
the questions which this project set out to answer.
Since 1963, the University Library's Regional
History Project has been documenting through archival oral
history interviews the history of UCSC and of the central coast
of California. As an oral historian at the Regional History
Project, as a lesbian who has been both a student and a longtime
staff member at UCSC, and as the publisher of HerBooks lesbian
feminist press, I was in a unique position to initiate and
coordinate this documentary history project. My goal was to
bring these experiences into the historical record and to the
GLBT community. It is only since the 1990s that there have been
any books on GLBT students or faculty in institutions of higher
education. While some of these texts include compelling
narratives by contemporary GLBT students or faculty, or are
excellent practical handbooks for professionals working in the
area of GLBT student affairs, none take a specifically
historical approach.
The decision to include not only students and
faculty, but also staff in this project is unusual. Staff are
often overlooked in university institutional histories. But one
cannot gain a complete picture of UCSC's GLBT history without
looking at the contributions and experience of staff, who have
fought many of the battles for GLBT rights on campus, and also
served as important mentors for students.
From the very beginning, this was a community
history project with participation by many people. I began by
brainstorming with Deborah Abbott, director of the GLBT Resource
Center at UCSC. Abbott became a key figure in the conception of
this project, and in facilitating the networking needed for its
success. David Kirk, then staff at the library, also helped with
input and inspiration in this stage. Soon after, with the
partnership of my co-conspirator, Jacquelyn Marie, who was the
women's studies/reference librarian at the time, Out in the
Redwoods was born.1
It soon grew into the largest and most
complex endeavor the Regional History Project has undertaken, a
three-year project with three components. 1) A series of
twenty-seven oral history interviews were conducted by a team of
UCSC students trained in an internship class, as well as by
volunteers from the campus community, and myself. 2) We
undertook the expansion and development of GLBT library archives
which represent each of the four decades of GLBT history at
UCSC. 3) We solicited narratives by GLBT alumni, staff, and
faculty, ten of which were accepted for the project, and help
broaden the representation of the community beyond what could be
achieved through oral history alone.2
The complete collection of oral history
transcripts is available on the accompanying cd-rom in PDF
format. The full interviews also make fascinating (and fun)
reading, and give a much more complete, coherent picture of the
interviewees. For those doing more scholarly research, referring
to the transcripts is important, as they are near-verbatim
representations of the interviews. The transcripts were lightly
edited for punctuation and paragraphing, and the interviewees
also reviewed them for accuracy. Also included on the cd-rom is
supplemental material about the project, more photographs, and
other resources.
This paperback is a poetic, impressionistic,
multi-vocal montage, which weaves together edited and condensed
excerpts of the interviews in a chronological and thematic
quartet. The book concludes with a reflective coda, "Looking
Back, Looking Forward." To some extent this organizational
structure is arbitrary; real life does not always fall neatly
into decades or thematic divisions. What you will read here are
a variety of representations of historical experience. Oral
history is a powerful method for revealing the subjective ways
in which human beings experience and shape history. But none of
these words should be taken as statements of objective Truth
about what GLBT history at UCSC has been. Rather, these oral
histories and narratives should be seen as one source from which
to reconstruct and understand the past. There is not a singular
GLBT community; there are many overlapping communities, many
intersecting trajectories of history represented here. History
is a braided river.
A dynamic and nuanced understanding of how
recent GLBT history has unfolded over the past forty years can
inspire and empower all members of the campus community to see
themselves as actors in history today. This sense of empowerment
and belonging is essential for the recruitment and retention of
students, staff, and faculty at UCSC. May this book be a small
contribution towards this historical consciousness and
continuing transformation.
Perhaps you are an alum of UCSC; maybe thirty
years ago you fell in love here in a brief window of time among
the redwoods, came out, and began a long journey of identity and
politics. This book is for you. You can find yourself in
history, discover what came before and after you. Or perhaps you
have spent part of your working life as a staff member here,
shaping this campus, watching it change over the decades. This
book is for you, who are sometimes forgotten. Perhaps you came
here to teach, and have dedicated years of your life to this
place, seen a whole generation of students come out in your
classroom. This book is for you. Or perhaps you are reading this
in New Jersey, or Arkansas, or Alaska, and you have never been
to UC Santa Cruz and do not care much about it, but you do care
about how GLBT people fare at universities. This book is also
for you. In a larger sense, this book is not only for GLBT folks
and our allies, but for anyone who seeks to make sense of
history.
--Irene Reti
Santa Cruz, California
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The partnership between Jacquelyn Marie,
women's studies librarian, and the oral history office
presented a powerful, and often neglected model for
collaboration between oral history projects and
libraries/archives. Marie spent years building the
collection in GLBT studies--purchasing small press
publications by lesbian and gay presses, magazines, films
and videos, and other alternative materials. Her involvement
in the microfilming of early gay and lesbian publications,
including Santa Cruz's Rubyfruit Reader , also ensured that
these kinds of materials would be preserved and accessible.
This core collection, now expanded upon by the Out in the
Redwoods archive, has been an essential resource for the
campus community.
-
For more details on the methodology of
the project please see "Project History and Methodology."
Although most of the Regional History Project's oral history
interviews are published in archival, library-bound volumes,
occasionally, if there is a wider audience for the material,
we publish trade paperbacks such as this volume.
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