Rachel Barrow's Oral History
Rachel Barrow, one of the original members of University of Alabama’s Gay Student Union (GSU), was born on June 11, 1960, in West Point, Georgia, where she lived all her childhood. She attended UA from 1978-1984, graduating in 1982 with a B.S. in Biology and in 1984 with a Master’s, also in biology. Currently, she resides in Decatur, Georgia, where she works as a Resident Nurse. For Rachel Barrow, membership in the GSU was an important opportunity to be more visible as a lesbian woman. At the time the GSU was founded, Barrow had only identified as a lesbian for a few years, mostly to herself and those closest to her. She mentions in her interview an exchange she had with her sister, who said when Barrow first came out to her that she’d never known any gay people before; Barrow, incredulous, thought, “Well, of course you have. You have to have.” Barrow cites this as an important influence in her decision to become more visible as a lesbian on campus through participating in the political advocacy efforts of the GSU. Barrow was one of the original ten members who volunteered to be listed on the club’s first roster, a requirement for the club to become chartered by the Student Government Association. She spoke to classes and organizations on campus as part of the GSU’s speakers’ bureau and fielded questions from curious students about what it was like to be gay. Barrow also helped curate the library that the GSU formed—first in a member’s apartment, and later, in the Reese Phifer building. Upon reflection, Barrow finds the most important part of her time in the GSU to be the simple rebellion of its official existence. By forcing the university to acknowledge the existence of queer students on campus, Barrow says the GSU, hopefully, was able to prevent bigotry and encourage other queer students.
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Tori Carl (TC): So, before we actually get started with the interview, did you have any questions or anything like that about this project or how your interview is gonna be used?
Rachel Barrow (RB): No, I’m—I guess not, it doesn’t really… I mean, I trust you. I don’t really—it doesn’t matter to me how… No, I’m good.
TC: Okay, great. Well, I know I introduced myself in my email, but I’m gonna do it again, just, you know, so that you’re aware of what’s going on, who I am, and then, just, to reiterate how this is gonna be used… So, my name is Tori, I’m an undergraduate at UA, I’m currently completing my research seminar class, and so for this seminar class, we are completing oral history interviews of the start of the Gay Student Union at UA. So we are compiling all these oral history interviews, and they’ll go on a website that our class is creating to kind of document how the Gay Student Union was created, and its first couple years of life. And then in addition to that, I’ll be writing a research paper that’s gonna kind of use your oral history interview as a backbone for documenting what it was like to be a woman and then also to be a lesbian in the Gay Student Union.
RB: Okay.
TC: Okay, awesome! So, we will go ahead—oh! Before we get started, I did—I read through the biographical information, the two questions at the end of that and I noted that you did say—mention that the word “queer” has a different connotation for you. Is there a word you’d like me to use in place of that? We use it kind of exactly how you described it, as almost like a “catch-all” for anyone who’s not cisgender or straight, in our class, but I absolutely don’t wanna make you uncomfortable in any way.
RB: I—It, it—doesn’t matter, I understand how it’s used now, just—I never used that—I don’t ever… I wouldn’t choose to use that word.
TC: Okay…okay. Well, I will still try to… kind of veer away from that, but I do go ahead and apologize if I slip. We use it pretty often in our class, just because it has a different connotation for us, but—
RB: Right.
TC: I’m going to do my best to make sure I try to use it as little as possible.
RB: It’s okay, I’m not gonna take offense from you.
TC: Okay. All right! Well, we can go ahead and get started then. Thank you again, so much, for doing this. I’m really excited about this project. Okay. So we’ll start with a few kind of more, background questions?
RB: Okay.
TC: And as we talk, I will be taking notes in my—on my clipboard, for the transcript, for the times, so if there’s a little bit of a pause at any point, that’s probably what it is, me just writing something down.
RB: Okay.
TC: All right. So we’ll go ahead and get started. So just some background questions…kind of, personally, how do you identify? Like, pronouns, and also, like, how would you self-identify your sexuality?
RB: I’m a lesbian. I use female pronouns. (pause) I’m female. I was born female, I’m still female.
TC: Okay.
RB: And I’m a lesbian.
TC: Okay. Thanks so much—and it’s like, some of these are a little more of just, like, you can just—answer, you know, exactly like that.
RB: Okay.
TC: Okay, so then, also, when were you born? I know you—I think you mentioned—er, noted it on the biographical information, but just again, to make sure we have correct… What year was that?
RB: 1960.
TC: 1960. Okay, thank you so much. And what’s your hometown?
RB: Uh—I grew up in West Point, Georgia, which is right on the Georgia-Alabama line.
TC: Okay. Great. How long did you live there?
RB: I guess I lived there until…I mean, technically, that was my address until I finished school. I mean, I kind of left after high school, but you know, it was still my home base.
TC: Right.
RB: Until I…I—I graduated from Alabama in December of ’81, and then I went to grad school for a little while and sort of, you know, floundered and fooled around [interviewer laughter] and then… [interviewee laughter] finally decided I needed to just get a job, and I came to the Atlanta area in fall of ’84. So I guess that’s technically when I quit using my parent’s house as home base and…
TC: Right. So… why did you move to Atlanta then?
RB: There were jobs in Atlanta. The ‘80s…the economy wasn’t great, and I actually had a partner at the time that got a job in the Atlanta area and so… She got her job first, and then I started looking for jobs in the Atlanta area. But there just wasn’t a lot in Alabama—I had a degree in Biology, and so I got a job in a research lab here in Atlanta.
TC: Okay, great. So you went to high school in West Point, then, right?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Do you remember the name of that high school?
RB: West Point High School.
TC: [Interviewer and interviewee laughter] I grew up in Montgomery, and we have five or six different ones that have, like, specific names, so it’s—
RB: Yeah.
TC: —always kind of a little funny to me to hear, like, the high schools that are literally just the name of the town as well.
RB: Well—it’s very small.
TC: Right. Okay… do you have any siblings?
RB: Yes, I have an older sister.
TC: How much older is she?
RB: Six years.
TC: I have an older brother…I think four and a half years? And then I also have a baby brother who is 17 years younger than me. [Interviewer laughter]
RB: Oh, my.
TC: Right! [more laughter] That was interesting. Do you still keep in touch with your family very often?
RB: Uh, yeah, I talk to my sister often; she actually has recently moved back to my parent’s house, which is on the lake in West Point, so…it’s about an hour and a half from here, so I see her and I talk to her, and… My parents are dead… My sister has a husband and children and grandchildren, and I see them fairly often too.
TC: Great…
RB: They live in—[their kids] all live in the Atlanta area.
TC: Right. That’s great. Okay, awesome, thank you so much. So we’ll talk a little bit—we’ll focus a little more, then, on when you were a student at Alabama. You said that you majored in Biology, right?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Did that change at all, throughout your time at Alabama? Like, did you come in knowing you wanted to major in biology?
RB: No, I—I—yeah, I came in as a biology major. And then—well, later in life, I went back to nursing school. But that was not at…I mean, that was after I moved here and worked for twenty years, so…
TC: Right. Okay. So then—why did you choose Alabama? Since you’re from that border of Georgia and Alabama, what about the University of Alabama drew you to it?
RB: Well, my mother had gone to Alabama and at the time I was growing up, I still had family—my grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins—in Tuscaloosa. My cousins were older… the youngest of my cousins was in law school at Alabama at the time I started, but all of my cousins had gone there, and my mom, my uncle, my aunt… so that’s just where I’d always wanted to go.
TC: Right. Well, awesome. What’s your favorite memory of being a student there?
RB: Hm…gosh… (pause) I love football. [Interviewer laughter] And we were really good—we won the national championship my freshman year and my sophomore year, so, you know, lots of good memories around going to football games. (pause) Probably more pleasant—memories about football games than about classes, but…ah…I don’t know, and just—just hanging out with friends. The, you know, the people I knew there, and I was friends with Elliot Jones, who’s kind of…came up with the whole Gay Student Union idea, and—and that was exciting, it was—it—there were times when it was scary, but it was exciting to be, you know, kind of part of something that seemed big.
TC: Right. Can you tell me a little more about how Elliot came up with this idea? Like, what started the idea?
RB: Mkay, this is the story he always told—I’m not completely certain that it wasn’t in the back of his mind before this, ‘cause he’s a—he was a PR person. That was his major, but also that was his personality. [Interviewer laughter] Elliot always said it was born in a bar. Well, the whole modern gay movement was born in a bar, but… some of them were at… gosh… I think the name of it was the Brass Monkey. Maybe not… anyway, some bar there on University Boulevard in the afternoon, and I think they were just playing pool and hanging out and being themselves. It was some lesbians and some gay men, and somebody started messing with them and picking on them. There was kind of a fight—there may have been some shoving, I don’t think there were really any punches thrown, but at the end of it, they—they—were—people were making homophobic remarks to them. I’m not even sure we used that word at the time, but at the end of it, they threw the gay students out instead of the straight guys, that had kind of started it. The—you know, the bartenders or whoever said, you know, y’all are in here causing trouble, and threw them out. And so Elliot started this whole thing, y’know, we’re oppressed, we’re discriminated against, this isn’t fair…and kind of—he had a lot of friends, and so he got us all riled up. And…and, like I say, I’m not sure he wasn’t, like—he may have been plotting for years to start a gay student group at the university and used this as a way to get other people riled up. But…that—that’s our birth story.
TC: Were you there that day?
RB: I was not with them that day, no.
TC: Did you ever experience anything like that while you were at student at UA?
RB: You know, it’s funny to me… after we had the Gay Student Union, there was a party… We were—we used to have keg parties as fundraisers. And, you know, I might not, kind of go along with that now, but it is what it is. We would get some kegs and we would charge people X amount to get into the party and it would more than pay for the kegs, and you know, it was a fundraiser for the Gay Student Union. We got a lot of people who weren’t interested in organizing or politics or so forth to come and contribute that way. But we were having a party at a house that one of our members lived in…She didn’t own it, she was renting it, and it was in, you know, one of those streets where all the houses were kind of rented to students. And the guys next door were watching it—watching the party, I guess, all night long, walking up and down the street, staring in and so forth, and— one of ‘em fired a gun. And I’m guessing he wasn’t trying to hit anybody, because he didn’t hit anybody, I guess he fired it in the air to scare us—which it did. You know, we all ran in the house… We called the police, the police came, and did—nothing. I mean they went and talked to the guys and didn’t do anything. And some of us went down to the police station to talk to them, to get a copy of the report—there hadn’t been a report filed, there wasn’t anything. And then we were able at the police station to, you know, get some charges filed… I think they got the guy for discharging a firearm in the city limits. ‘Course, we thought attempted murder might be more appropriate…probably somewhere in between those two was the real story. (pause) So that was really weird, to think that somebody would fire a gun at us for being gay. And—and—from time to time, things would…people would holler something out of a car window, but I mean—I’ve had that happen in San Francisco. You don’t have to be in Alabama for that. There was a lot of outcry when we started the Gay Student Union. There was a group—the Young Americans for Freedom—that were against it, there were lots of arguments back and forth in the CW, and… I mean, most of the time, I think we were probably under people’s radar enough that they didn’t say anything to us. You had to be—they didn’t know we were—I mean, I’m walking down the street, they don’t necessarily know.
TC: Right. That’s—kind of crazy, that y’all were just having a party and somebody came over and just…discharged a weapon… you know, that’s…
RB: Yeah.
TC: Would you happen to remember the year that that happened? Or anything about, like, the specific day, time, anything like that?
RB: It’s hard to say. I know I moved here in the fall of ’84, so it was…it had to be sometime between ’80—when did we start, in ’83? I know I was in graduate school when we started. I wanna say we started in ’83, so it had to be like ’83, ’84, I—I don’t know if I can pinpoint it anymore than that.
TC: That’s fine, thank you so much. We may be able to, like, go back through some police records, and see if we could actually find that report, which would be something really awesome to kind of like… [simultaneous speaking, unintelligible]
RB: Oh, wow—I can tell you the name of the woman whose house it was at—
TC: That would be great.
RB: I don’t—I don’t know—now, if you’re gonna publish all of this, she—you know, she might not agree, but if you wanna look for—it was Natalie Madden .
TC: Okay…
RB: So…I’m guessing her name would’ve been on the police report…
TC: Right.
RB: Since it was the house she was living in.
TC: Okay, that was really—I’ll definitely try to look into that. And, of course, if there’s anything that we were going to publish that had her name in it, we would contact her and make sure, you know, that was okay with her. Absolutely wouldn’t want to, like, invade anybody’s privacy in any kind of way. So—so you guys did—
RB: She—she might be a good person for y’all to for and talk to, but I have no idea where she is.
TC: Right. We may be able to find her…I’ll definitely let our professor know, and we can maybe look into it.
RB: Mkay.
TC: So, you said you guys did keg parties? As fundraisers?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Were those, like, kind of, like, under the radar, or like, official fundraisers by the University?
RB: Ooooh…well…[simultaneous speaking, TC unintelligible] probably not, I mean we—we always had them off-campus. And we would just…you know, put flyers out, and truthfully, you know, you have two or three people in the community you tell, and they’re—I mean, we didn’t have social media, but we did have people who were connected. And we’d just put out the word. And, you know, buy an appropriate number of kegs…and I wanna say we maybe charged people, like, three dollars to get in? I mean, and they could drink all night. And I wanna say kegs were maybe…$40 each? I don’t really—anyway, they—it more than paid for the kegs. And the—the whatever…you know, and people would bring some chips or whatever, and the profit would go into our treasury. No, I’m sure the university didn’t know we were doing that, [interviewer laughter] but there was—there was a lot more drinking—first of all, the drinking age was 19. Not 21. And there was—I—there was not a lot of alcohol awareness at the time. And I mean, fraternities had—maybe they still do— had keg parties routinely, had kegs just tapped at the house routinely even though they were on campus, so… No, the university didn’t sanction those, but it wasn’t the deal it would be now, probably.
TC: Right. Okay, interesting… so going back, I guess, a little bit to the start of the Gay Student Union, you said that Elliot kind of…used that maybe as a launching point to get people interested, and like, you said ‘riled up’.
RB: Yeah, that’s kind of my take on it, that—that maybe it never occurred to him until that incident happened, and, of course, he can’t tell us, but…
TC: Was that what it was like for you when you decided to join? Is it, like, because of that experience? Can you tell us a little bit about why you wanted to join?
RB: Okay, well I was friends with Elliot, and he says, you know, we’re having this meeting at my house Sunday night—I think it was a Sunday night—and so…it felt like a gazillion people were there, I don’t—I don’t really know, maybe 40 people? Anyway, so we go to this meeting, and Elliot’s—Elliot’s, like, got it all worked out in his head how we’re gonna start this group, and he had somebody from the CW there, you know… So this was an organizational meeting, but he had already done some of the—you know, put some thought into it. And to me it wasn’t like, oooh, this incident, because, I mean, I knew that—that—[pause] oppressed was the, kind of the word we used at the time… I mean I knew that gay people were discriminated against, we couldn’t—and a lot us were not very out. We couldn’t be out, we felt like if we told people they would, you know…they wouldn’t like us, if we told our parents, they would disown us, I mean… [pause] people had stories that were real, and then a lot of us had fears that may or may not have been real, and [pause] it—and it just seemed exciting to do…you know, we were reacting to that one incident, but we were sort of—you know, taking some…empowering ourselves. And, and not, not just saying, oh, this is where it is and this is where it’s always gonna be, but, you know, trying to make an impact and trying to be there for each other in a public way, and—and—and be more visible for people who were just coming out, which of course, a lot of people in college are just coming out. And especially back then, people didn’t come out in middle school, the way they do now. [Pause] So I just—I think that, you know, I immediately could see that that visibility would be helpful to us. And that organizing would be helpful to us.
TC: Right. Were you out during that time? Like, when you joined?
RB: I was out—there were—there were, you know, there are a lot of layers of being out. I was out to myself, I was out to some friends, I think I—I was out to my sister but not to my parents, and certainly not to everybody I knew. [Pause] So…I mean, it was—it was a very gradual process. I think I had been out to myself maybe just a couple of years at the time? So, you know—and I—and I think the GSU kind of—a lot of us, you know, became more visible. We—you know, we started speaking up, and at—and at that time, just being out, sometimes, could be a bold statement. Because—when I came out to my sister, she said she had never known any gay people. And I was like, sure you have. You have to have. But—you know, she—nobody had ever come out to her before.
TC: Right. Is that, maybe, how it was for a lot of people in the GSU?
RB: I would think. I would think—it—I mean, [sigh] you would think, oh, it’s the ‘80s, but, I mean, Alabama’s a little behind, and the ‘80s weren’t what—people think. I mean, it was still—it was a very conservative time, and conservative place.
TC: For sure. So—I guess, kind of, in terms of what the GSU was, in your opinion, was that kind of more of a political organization, or was it more of a social organization-type thing? Like, in your own words, just tell me about what you think about that.
RB: Yeah, we—we billed it as educational, because we knew, you know, that’s what the university wanted to hear. It—it was—yeah, it was political. I mean, it—it was—we did a lot of social things, but we could do social things without an organization. I mean, we already knew how to—have a party. It was political. We had a speaker’s bureau that went to classes and campus organizations and—[exhale] answered questions we probably had no business answering [laughter]. Like, you know, we’re speaking for the whole community—we…yeah, it was—it was political.
TC: Did you ever—
RB: But—and a lot of people that were part of our social group—after the initial mee—couple of meetings were not in the Gay Student Union. They didn’t want to do that stuff. But they would come to our parties, so…
TC: Did you ever participate in that speaker’s bureau, and go around talking to classes?
RB: Yeah. Yeah, that was fun.
TC: What was that like? Like, what kind of questions did you guys get asked?
RB: Oh, gosh…we got, like, asked everything. [Pause] People—people asked us what our families thought, and—sometimes in a tone of, like, you know… Like, “your families can’t be okay with this.” And… but people asked us a lot of just, like, what was it like to come out, how did you know… They would ask—they would ask us, you know, gay positions on things in the world… That’s the part I feel like we probably had no business answering [laughter]. They—they would ask us… like, a lot of people who were okay with us being closeted were not okay with us being out, and they—they would ask us why—you know, why—why would you come out? Why wouldn’t you just do what you do behind closed doors and not talk about it? We—we really got a lot of—lot of good questions. I think, you know, because we were students, and they were students, they—there was… they felt like they could ask us stuff that, you know, they didn’t… they didn’t have any other way of getting the answer to.
TC: Right.
RB: And they would—and—and a lot of them, I think would—would try to put themselves in your place, like, how did you, you know, how did—asking about our families or our friends or… they would ask about religion and church and, you know, I think they really were trying to think, okay, if I were gay, how would I—be in the world.
TC: Were those experiences mostly… positive, would you say? Like—
RB: They—yeah. I—I think so, ‘cause I felt like… most of the time people were really trying to learn something, and I’m—I’m not saying they all agreed with us, at the end of the day, but I’ve—I’ve always felt like the more information somebody has, the better. And now it’s—it’s so different, I mean there’s, there’s people all over the TV and, you know, and you can Google stuff, but… at that time, you know, we might have been the only out… you know, the only time they had ever seen a gay and lesbian person. And they would look at us and go, “oh, well… wait…” you know, “I know her, and she looks just like me,” or… it—it… I don’t know if it really helped, but we thought it did at the time.
TC: Right. That’s great. What other kind of political, I guess, advocacy stuff did you guys do?
RB: Well, we always did Get On Board Days, where we’d show up, just to be visible, like even if—even if there was somebody that thought they might be gay and they weren’t really ready to be out, that at least, like, they could see us. [exhale] We wrote a lot of articles for the CW and letters to the CW. We would also… there was—gosh, what was the name of the group?—it was some statewide group… I can’t remember the name of it now. It was like, an umbrella group of gay organizations, so it was—people from Birmingham, Montgomery… grown-ups who were [laughter] doing—some of them were social, some of them were political, but that—that helped us a lot, to, you know, get to—well, maybe that wasn’t us advocating, it was us learning from them, but—but I think we inspired them a lot too, because a lot of them probably hadn’t been out when they were younger. We had a library, and the group in Birmingham—I—I wanna say it was… I don’t know, “lambda” was in the name… The Birmingham Gay Center—and they had, the, like the “Lambda” library, and they gave us a bunch of books that they had copies of, and so we had those available for people to read—I don’t know what happened to them, I don’t know where they are now, those books—and we wrote to a bunch of gay organizations all over the country that had newsletters, and got them to send us their newsletters, sometimes they were free, and so we had those available for—for students to… you know, come and read or borrow. So, we really did try to be—you know, since we were at a university, try to be educational. I don’t—we—we spent a lot of time in the early days trying to get official recognition from the university, and—and fighting with people who didn’t think we deserved that. When I was there, I don’t remember really any—anything that you’d call activism today, I—that—that came, but not until later.
TC: Can you tell me some more about the process of getting official recognition from the university?
RB: [exhale] Yeah, there’s—there’s an official process, and you have to have…I think it was ten people’s names—that became an issue, because some people didn’t want to put their name down… We had some straight allies who put their names on it and… to help us, you know, get our ten people. And you had to apply—what was it… it was some committee of the student government, or maybe it was the whole SGA… it had to approve it… they turned it down and then the university administration overrode them because the Tuscaloosa chapter of the ACLU was—was gonna sue them if they didn’t recognize us. They were probably a little disappointed that they approved it, ‘cause they were—looking forward to the fight, I think. They would have won, there was a lot of court precedent in other states. So there was a lot of, you know, back-and-forth in the court of public opinion, and then the SGA turned us down, and the administration knew they had to say okay, so they overrode it. And we got officially recognized. And then I think they kind of sat back and waited for us to graduate so it would go away. But! Other groups—other, you know, as we left school, other people entered school and kept it going… you know, they kept—changed the name, like, a million times, but it’s still there.
TC: Right. I think today it’s known as SPECTRUM.
RB: Right.
TC: It’s pretty cool.
RB: Yeah, and—and—you know, I think one of the first changes—name changes probably was to add “lesbian” to the name, and then bisexual, trans, queer… everything got added, and then “Spectrum”, I think they just thought… instead of this whole alphabet soup, let’s just call it a—give it another name.
TC: Right. So… when the group first started, what was attendance like? At your first couple of events? You know, like, how did you—how did you guys work on, I guess, getting more members?
RB: Well, first, it was social networking. Not the online kind, but the old-fashioned kind, and—you know, somebody else may have another memory of this, but I wanna say we had—we had thirty, forty, fifty people at meetings. A party—uh, who knows, probably a hundred people… [pause] The speakers bureaus, you know, you don’t want forty people going to a classroom to speak. There were, you know, like, different groups of people—four, four of five people might go to this one class, and four or five other people might go to a different class, you know, depending on their schedules and so forth… I—I would say, most of the time, probably our real membership was probably about forty people.
TC: Right. How many… trying to think of a way to phrase this question, sorry—were there many—I guess, like, women involved? Or was it mostly men? Talking about demographic groups? How would you characterize the demographics of that original, like, fortyish people who came to meetings?
RB: I’d say 50% women.
TC: Really?
RB: I—I—again, you know, if you talk to somebody else, and there’s—they’re like, you know, Rachel’s crazy, her memory’s shot, but… I’d say about half women, and—and—when it first started, that was—a lot of us knew each other before. And then gradually, you know, other people would hear about it, or you know, we did Get On Board Days, or we did stuff, and, you know, word would get out… and, you know, people that we hadn’t previously known… but that—that was—that was kind of the social group that Elliot was probably kind of at the core of at the time, there were—there were lots of lesbians. And I would say… it was mostly white, we did have some—some black students, but… not very many. Not—and—and—that comes from—from it starting as a group of social friends that was mostly white. We always tried to have the—we had the, you know, traditional officers—president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. We always made sure that there were males and females in that, like if the—if the president—the first president was Elliot, and… so the vice president was a female, and we were conscious of, hey, it should be a female, and then later if the president was a female, we would try to make sure the vice president was a male.
TC: So you never felt like the group, I guess, had kind of like, an off-balance in that demographic? Like, that balance between men versus women, gay men versus lesbian women, anything like that?
RB: No, not when I was there. Now, I can’t speak for the rest of the thirty or forty years.
TC: Right. I ask, not because I’ve, like, heard stories about the Gay Student Union, or anything like that, but it’s—we’ve—it’s been documented in other university groups, I wanna say, that sometimes in the beginnings of these groups, they kind of lean towards being populated… almost exclusively, at times, by, specifically gay men. So—it’s an interesting historical question.
RB: Yeah, and when—and after I moved to Atlanta, the… most of the groups here were either all male or all female. And in fact, some of them—some of them were lesbian separatist groups, so… deliberately all female, but I—I don’t know, there were—there just—there weren’t very many of us, and we’re in Alabama, so we… we stuck together.
TC: What is your favorite memory of the GCU? Er—not GCU, sorry, GSU. [Laughter]
RB: I don’t know, probably…we got some space in the communications building, and we had had this library, and it—it was like at somebody’s apartment, and, you know, the guys in Birmingham had given us these books, we took a little money to this bookstore in Birmingham, a lesbian bookstore—and the name will come to me about three o’clock this morning, I don’t remember the name—and we actually took like, $100, and we picked out books, and that was really fun, and when we got some space in the communications building, we were able to set our library up there. And I don’t know if a soul ever went there and checked out a book, or read a magazine, but to have that—to have that spa—and, you know, there were three or four of us there one night, setting it up, making little boxes to put the periodicals in and stuff, and—and it was just fun, we felt like we were doing something. It felt like we were in on something that—that was important, and something was—something bigger than ourselves.
TC: Right. That’s really cool. Do you remember—this is a long shot, maybe, but do you remember of, like, specific titles that you guys had in your library?
RB: We had… Feminine Mystique, why, I don’t know—some of these were probably rejects from the Birmingham library… we had—I remember some of the periodicals more than the books… We had Atlanta, which was from the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, we had the newsletter from the Gay and Lesbian Atheist Association, which I thought was really cool. Had no idea that existed until, you know, we found that. But—it—one of the guys in Birmingham gave us a list of gay and lesbian periodicals, and we just—we just sent a postcard to every one of them. [Pause] We had gosh, I can’t—you know, I remember going to the bookstore and picking out books, and now I can’t remember what we picked out. Uh… oh! Uh—what’s her name, Del Martin? Lesbian—Lesbian/Woman? We had that. And—I—I sort of remember that as it was really influential on me because—not so much what was in the book, but the bio… I don’t know if you know, but the book is written by two women who, at that time, they’d been together forever, and that’s the first time I thought… Oh! I can be in a relationship that, like, lasts. You know, like straight people have. Because the writers of this book had been in a long-term relationship. Beca—I was—I mean, it sounds stupid, but part of that, I was like… you know, lesbian relationships last about three months, and they were very intense, and then you broke up, and went on to the next one, and… so I remember that title because it was inspiring to me. Even though I don’t remember a word of what the content was.
TC: Did you have a partner while you were at UA? Or—did you date, I guess, while you were at UA?
RB: [exhale] Yeah, I—I did. I dated a few people—I guess they would—it would be short term, you know, three months… I think I knew somebody who had been together six months, and that was, like, long-term? So—and then—but then—I did have a partner… we got together right around the time the Gay Student Union started… and that’s who I moved to Atlanta with. So I guess during the time of the Gay Student Union, I did—I did—and, that’s why I say, reading that book, both of us kind of went… Oh. Okay. Maybe we can make this work. And… ultimately, we did break up, but we were together, like, seven years.
TC: Wow. That’s—that’s amazing. I’m—I’m an English major, so I love hearing about the books and the early literature, like—the—that kind of thing, about like, different historical movements, and stuff like that. I think it’s always really interesting to see what about a book is… really impactful on people. ‘Cause it’s always different.
RB: Right.
TC: And sometimes it’s the bio… I, in particular, started writing fiction because I had seen one of my favorite authors—her early work was, honestly, terrible, but she was a writer who had gone to and majored in English at Yale University, which really made an impact on me. Sorry, not to digress—but—
RB: [laughter] No, that’s fine—
TC: I just think that’s—that’s so cool, hearing about the ways that books impact people. But back to—
RB: Yeah, and I—I really think a lot of the books we had were probably… Well of Loneliness was one of them, I mean—I feel like a lot of the literature that was available back then were really depressing, sort of… things… I mean, we were getting—it was sort of—now you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t be surprised to read any novel or any television show or any movie and, oh, there’s a lesbian, oh, there’s a gay person, but… it wasn’t like that then. But I’m sorry, now I’m the one digressing. [laughter]
TC: No, it’s fine! It’s—it’s totally fine. Okay, well, uh… I guess, just to get back to the Gay Student Union, just a little bit before we wrap up, two questions that kind of go together: What did the group see as, like, its biggest success, and then, you know, versus that, as kind of, like, its biggest failing? When you were there, specifically? Or—alternatively, what did you see as its biggest success and biggest failure?
RB: Yeah, yeah… now you’re asking me to speak for everybody. [laughter]
TC: Yeah, no, definitely not. [laughter]
RB: We—we saw—we saw university recognition as a huge success. And, you know, I might look at that now and say, you know, why’d we care if they validated us or not? But it—it was important to us at the time. Not that the university meant to validate us, but—but to say—and—and we weren’t really trying to be part of the mainstream, but we were trying to belong in the world. And that…that was a big deal, even though they were kind of forced to do it. To say, you know, we’re here, we are students at this university, and we have a right to be here, and we have a right to have our interests recognized, and… and survival. The fact that it—it—it’s still there, in some shape or form, that it didn’t just… go away when the couple of key people graduated. Because I’m not sure at the time, we even thought that was gonna happen. And, you know, that it was still there five years after we had graduate was…woah, that’s a long time, woah it’s still there. Because, you know, five years is a long time in the life of a university, because the students turn over in five years. And I—and I… I like to think there were successes we didn’t even know about, like people that just were… maybe thought twice before they said some really stupid anti-gay thing, or—or people who were, you know, tentatively coming out, and were inspired, and… I had a friend call me, this has probably been four or five years ago, call out of the blue—I mean, we reconnected through Facebook, but we hadn’t talked to each other since… college. And she called me and wanted to talk to me about because her daughter was coming out. And her daughter was at Alabama and felt very isolated, and she was worried. And she—she just—she wanted to talk to me, and see what I knew, and I knew enough to, you know, tell her daughter to look up SPECTRUM and I told her she could call me if she wanted to, but, you know, she didn’t wanna talk to some old lady. And—and—this particular friend of mine, I had been in the sorority with her, and she was… three years younger than I am, so I really didn’t even know her all that well, and I was like—I didn’t even know, you know, you knew I was a lesbian. And she said, well, you were in that gay student group and all that. Which—I wasn’t even sure everybody knew about, so I’m sure all of us have little successes like that, where we, you know, that might not manifest until years later, where, you know, just—just being out and being visible and saying, you know, here we are, and we’re not some boogeyman, we’re part of this university. That was the biggest success to me.
TC: All right, absolutely… and then, I guess maybe not, to say, like, failure or failing, but is there something that you really wish that the GSU had been able to do while you were there that just didn’t work out? Or anything like that?
RB: We—I don’t know, we still had a lot of people that would participate on the fringes, like coming to parties, but not doing any political stuff… I think we probably had a lot of people who were scared, but probably just a lot of people who didn’t… who didn’t get it. And maybe they had needs that we weren’t addressing. And I—and I—and we weren’t always very inclusive. I mean, we, you know, we intended to be, but because it had started with a group of people who knew each other, I think that we probably didn’t do a lot of outreach to black students. That would be a—a failing in Alabama, because there is a—they’re a sizable part of the student body, and we kind of didn’t address that at all.
TC: All right, okay… all right, well, I have just one more question—not necessarily about the GSU or anything—and then we’ll wrap up the interview, but… if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
RB: [laughter] Don’t drink so much. [laughter] Yeah, that’d probably be it—that would be the best advice I could probably give her… and I guess, well… I kind of always felt like everything’s gonna be all right, eventually, but yeah… that would be a good one too. Just like, it’s gonna be all right, just trust your instincts.
TC: All right, well… we’ll wrap up there. Thank you so very much for talking to me, and for agreeing to be part of this project. We really appreciate it.
RB: Well, thank you for doing this. It’s—it’s… good to reminisce.
Title
Date
Short Biography
Topics referenced in the history
Creator
Contributor
Transcript
Rachel Barrow (RB): No, I’m—I guess not, it doesn’t really… I mean, I trust you. I don’t really—it doesn’t matter to me how… No, I’m good.
TC: Okay, great. Well, I know I introduced myself in my email, but I’m gonna do it again, just, you know, so that you’re aware of what’s going on, who I am, and then, just, to reiterate how this is gonna be used… So, my name is Tori, I’m an undergraduate at UA, I’m currently completing my research seminar class, and so for this seminar class, we are completing oral history interviews of the start of the Gay Student Union at UA. So we are compiling all these oral history interviews, and they’ll go on a website that our class is creating to kind of document how the Gay Student Union was created, and its first couple years of life. And then in addition to that, I’ll be writing a research paper that’s gonna kind of use your oral history interview as a backbone for documenting what it was like to be a woman and then also to be a lesbian in the Gay Student Union.
RB: Okay.
TC: Okay, awesome! So, we will go ahead—oh! Before we get started, I did—I read through the biographical information, the two questions at the end of that and I noted that you did say—mention that the word “queer” has a different connotation for you. Is there a word you’d like me to use in place of that? We use it kind of exactly how you described it, as almost like a “catch-all” for anyone who’s not cisgender or straight, in our class, but I absolutely don’t wanna make you uncomfortable in any way.
RB: I—It, it—doesn’t matter, I understand how it’s used now, just—I never used that—I don’t ever… I wouldn’t choose to use that word.
TC: Okay…okay. Well, I will still try to… kind of veer away from that, but I do go ahead and apologize if I slip. We use it pretty often in our class, just because it has a different connotation for us, but—
RB: Right.
TC: I’m going to do my best to make sure I try to use it as little as possible.
RB: It’s okay, I’m not gonna take offense from you.
TC: Okay. All right! Well, we can go ahead and get started then. Thank you again, so much, for doing this. I’m really excited about this project. Okay. So we’ll start with a few kind of more, background questions?
RB: Okay.
TC: And as we talk, I will be taking notes in my—on my clipboard, for the transcript, for the times, so if there’s a little bit of a pause at any point, that’s probably what it is, me just writing something down.
RB: Okay.
TC: All right. So we’ll go ahead and get started. So just some background questions…kind of, personally, how do you identify? Like, pronouns, and also, like, how would you self-identify your sexuality?
RB: I’m a lesbian. I use female pronouns. (pause) I’m female. I was born female, I’m still female.
TC: Okay.
RB: And I’m a lesbian.
TC: Okay. Thanks so much—and it’s like, some of these are a little more of just, like, you can just—answer, you know, exactly like that.
RB: Okay.
TC: Okay, so then, also, when were you born? I know you—I think you mentioned—er, noted it on the biographical information, but just again, to make sure we have correct… What year was that?
RB: 1960.
TC: 1960. Okay, thank you so much. And what’s your hometown?
RB: Uh—I grew up in West Point, Georgia, which is right on the Georgia-Alabama line.
TC: Okay. Great. How long did you live there?
RB: I guess I lived there until…I mean, technically, that was my address until I finished school. I mean, I kind of left after high school, but you know, it was still my home base.
TC: Right.
RB: Until I…I—I graduated from Alabama in December of ’81, and then I went to grad school for a little while and sort of, you know, floundered and fooled around [interviewer laughter] and then… [interviewee laughter] finally decided I needed to just get a job, and I came to the Atlanta area in fall of ’84. So I guess that’s technically when I quit using my parent’s house as home base and…
TC: Right. So… why did you move to Atlanta then?
RB: There were jobs in Atlanta. The ‘80s…the economy wasn’t great, and I actually had a partner at the time that got a job in the Atlanta area and so… She got her job first, and then I started looking for jobs in the Atlanta area. But there just wasn’t a lot in Alabama—I had a degree in Biology, and so I got a job in a research lab here in Atlanta.
TC: Okay, great. So you went to high school in West Point, then, right?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Do you remember the name of that high school?
RB: West Point High School.
TC: [Interviewer and interviewee laughter] I grew up in Montgomery, and we have five or six different ones that have, like, specific names, so it’s—
RB: Yeah.
TC: —always kind of a little funny to me to hear, like, the high schools that are literally just the name of the town as well.
RB: Well—it’s very small.
TC: Right. Okay… do you have any siblings?
RB: Yes, I have an older sister.
TC: How much older is she?
RB: Six years.
TC: I have an older brother…I think four and a half years? And then I also have a baby brother who is 17 years younger than me. [Interviewer laughter]
RB: Oh, my.
TC: Right! [more laughter] That was interesting. Do you still keep in touch with your family very often?
RB: Uh, yeah, I talk to my sister often; she actually has recently moved back to my parent’s house, which is on the lake in West Point, so…it’s about an hour and a half from here, so I see her and I talk to her, and… My parents are dead… My sister has a husband and children and grandchildren, and I see them fairly often too.
TC: Great…
RB: They live in—[their kids] all live in the Atlanta area.
TC: Right. That’s great. Okay, awesome, thank you so much. So we’ll talk a little bit—we’ll focus a little more, then, on when you were a student at Alabama. You said that you majored in Biology, right?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Did that change at all, throughout your time at Alabama? Like, did you come in knowing you wanted to major in biology?
RB: No, I—I—yeah, I came in as a biology major. And then—well, later in life, I went back to nursing school. But that was not at…I mean, that was after I moved here and worked for twenty years, so…
TC: Right. Okay. So then—why did you choose Alabama? Since you’re from that border of Georgia and Alabama, what about the University of Alabama drew you to it?
RB: Well, my mother had gone to Alabama and at the time I was growing up, I still had family—my grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins—in Tuscaloosa. My cousins were older… the youngest of my cousins was in law school at Alabama at the time I started, but all of my cousins had gone there, and my mom, my uncle, my aunt… so that’s just where I’d always wanted to go.
TC: Right. Well, awesome. What’s your favorite memory of being a student there?
RB: Hm…gosh… (pause) I love football. [Interviewer laughter] And we were really good—we won the national championship my freshman year and my sophomore year, so, you know, lots of good memories around going to football games. (pause) Probably more pleasant—memories about football games than about classes, but…ah…I don’t know, and just—just hanging out with friends. The, you know, the people I knew there, and I was friends with Elliot Jones, who’s kind of…came up with the whole Gay Student Union idea, and—and that was exciting, it was—it—there were times when it was scary, but it was exciting to be, you know, kind of part of something that seemed big.
TC: Right. Can you tell me a little more about how Elliot came up with this idea? Like, what started the idea?
RB: Mkay, this is the story he always told—I’m not completely certain that it wasn’t in the back of his mind before this, ‘cause he’s a—he was a PR person. That was his major, but also that was his personality. [Interviewer laughter] Elliot always said it was born in a bar. Well, the whole modern gay movement was born in a bar, but… some of them were at… gosh… I think the name of it was the Brass Monkey. Maybe not… anyway, some bar there on University Boulevard in the afternoon, and I think they were just playing pool and hanging out and being themselves. It was some lesbians and some gay men, and somebody started messing with them and picking on them. There was kind of a fight—there may have been some shoving, I don’t think there were really any punches thrown, but at the end of it, they—they—were—people were making homophobic remarks to them. I’m not even sure we used that word at the time, but at the end of it, they threw the gay students out instead of the straight guys, that had kind of started it. The—you know, the bartenders or whoever said, you know, y’all are in here causing trouble, and threw them out. And so Elliot started this whole thing, y’know, we’re oppressed, we’re discriminated against, this isn’t fair…and kind of—he had a lot of friends, and so he got us all riled up. And…and, like I say, I’m not sure he wasn’t, like—he may have been plotting for years to start a gay student group at the university and used this as a way to get other people riled up. But…that—that’s our birth story.
TC: Were you there that day?
RB: I was not with them that day, no.
TC: Did you ever experience anything like that while you were at student at UA?
RB: You know, it’s funny to me… after we had the Gay Student Union, there was a party… We were—we used to have keg parties as fundraisers. And, you know, I might not, kind of go along with that now, but it is what it is. We would get some kegs and we would charge people X amount to get into the party and it would more than pay for the kegs, and you know, it was a fundraiser for the Gay Student Union. We got a lot of people who weren’t interested in organizing or politics or so forth to come and contribute that way. But we were having a party at a house that one of our members lived in…She didn’t own it, she was renting it, and it was in, you know, one of those streets where all the houses were kind of rented to students. And the guys next door were watching it—watching the party, I guess, all night long, walking up and down the street, staring in and so forth, and— one of ‘em fired a gun. And I’m guessing he wasn’t trying to hit anybody, because he didn’t hit anybody, I guess he fired it in the air to scare us—which it did. You know, we all ran in the house… We called the police, the police came, and did—nothing. I mean they went and talked to the guys and didn’t do anything. And some of us went down to the police station to talk to them, to get a copy of the report—there hadn’t been a report filed, there wasn’t anything. And then we were able at the police station to, you know, get some charges filed… I think they got the guy for discharging a firearm in the city limits. ‘Course, we thought attempted murder might be more appropriate…probably somewhere in between those two was the real story. (pause) So that was really weird, to think that somebody would fire a gun at us for being gay. And—and—from time to time, things would…people would holler something out of a car window, but I mean—I’ve had that happen in San Francisco. You don’t have to be in Alabama for that. There was a lot of outcry when we started the Gay Student Union. There was a group—the Young Americans for Freedom—that were against it, there were lots of arguments back and forth in the CW, and… I mean, most of the time, I think we were probably under people’s radar enough that they didn’t say anything to us. You had to be—they didn’t know we were—I mean, I’m walking down the street, they don’t necessarily know.
TC: Right. That’s—kind of crazy, that y’all were just having a party and somebody came over and just…discharged a weapon… you know, that’s…
RB: Yeah.
TC: Would you happen to remember the year that that happened? Or anything about, like, the specific day, time, anything like that?
RB: It’s hard to say. I know I moved here in the fall of ’84, so it was…it had to be sometime between ’80—when did we start, in ’83? I know I was in graduate school when we started. I wanna say we started in ’83, so it had to be like ’83, ’84, I—I don’t know if I can pinpoint it anymore than that.
TC: That’s fine, thank you so much. We may be able to, like, go back through some police records, and see if we could actually find that report, which would be something really awesome to kind of like… [simultaneous speaking, unintelligible]
RB: Oh, wow—I can tell you the name of the woman whose house it was at—
TC: That would be great.
RB: I don’t—I don’t know—now, if you’re gonna publish all of this, she—you know, she might not agree, but if you wanna look for—it was Natalie Madden .
TC: Okay…
RB: So…I’m guessing her name would’ve been on the police report…
TC: Right.
RB: Since it was the house she was living in.
TC: Okay, that was really—I’ll definitely try to look into that. And, of course, if there’s anything that we were going to publish that had her name in it, we would contact her and make sure, you know, that was okay with her. Absolutely wouldn’t want to, like, invade anybody’s privacy in any kind of way. So—so you guys did—
RB: She—she might be a good person for y’all to for and talk to, but I have no idea where she is.
TC: Right. We may be able to find her…I’ll definitely let our professor know, and we can maybe look into it.
RB: Mkay.
TC: So, you said you guys did keg parties? As fundraisers?
RB: Yeah.
TC: Were those, like, kind of, like, under the radar, or like, official fundraisers by the University?
RB: Ooooh…well…[simultaneous speaking, TC unintelligible] probably not, I mean we—we always had them off-campus. And we would just…you know, put flyers out, and truthfully, you know, you have two or three people in the community you tell, and they’re—I mean, we didn’t have social media, but we did have people who were connected. And we’d just put out the word. And, you know, buy an appropriate number of kegs…and I wanna say we maybe charged people, like, three dollars to get in? I mean, and they could drink all night. And I wanna say kegs were maybe…$40 each? I don’t really—anyway, they—it more than paid for the kegs. And the—the whatever…you know, and people would bring some chips or whatever, and the profit would go into our treasury. No, I’m sure the university didn’t know we were doing that, [interviewer laughter] but there was—there was a lot more drinking—first of all, the drinking age was 19. Not 21. And there was—I—there was not a lot of alcohol awareness at the time. And I mean, fraternities had—maybe they still do— had keg parties routinely, had kegs just tapped at the house routinely even though they were on campus, so… No, the university didn’t sanction those, but it wasn’t the deal it would be now, probably.
TC: Right. Okay, interesting… so going back, I guess, a little bit to the start of the Gay Student Union, you said that Elliot kind of…used that maybe as a launching point to get people interested, and like, you said ‘riled up’.
RB: Yeah, that’s kind of my take on it, that—that maybe it never occurred to him until that incident happened, and, of course, he can’t tell us, but…
TC: Was that what it was like for you when you decided to join? Is it, like, because of that experience? Can you tell us a little bit about why you wanted to join?
RB: Okay, well I was friends with Elliot, and he says, you know, we’re having this meeting at my house Sunday night—I think it was a Sunday night—and so…it felt like a gazillion people were there, I don’t—I don’t really know, maybe 40 people? Anyway, so we go to this meeting, and Elliot’s—Elliot’s, like, got it all worked out in his head how we’re gonna start this group, and he had somebody from the CW there, you know… So this was an organizational meeting, but he had already done some of the—you know, put some thought into it. And to me it wasn’t like, oooh, this incident, because, I mean, I knew that—that—[pause] oppressed was the, kind of the word we used at the time… I mean I knew that gay people were discriminated against, we couldn’t—and a lot us were not very out. We couldn’t be out, we felt like if we told people they would, you know…they wouldn’t like us, if we told our parents, they would disown us, I mean… [pause] people had stories that were real, and then a lot of us had fears that may or may not have been real, and [pause] it—and it just seemed exciting to do…you know, we were reacting to that one incident, but we were sort of—you know, taking some…empowering ourselves. And, and not, not just saying, oh, this is where it is and this is where it’s always gonna be, but, you know, trying to make an impact and trying to be there for each other in a public way, and—and—and be more visible for people who were just coming out, which of course, a lot of people in college are just coming out. And especially back then, people didn’t come out in middle school, the way they do now. [Pause] So I just—I think that, you know, I immediately could see that that visibility would be helpful to us. And that organizing would be helpful to us.
TC: Right. Were you out during that time? Like, when you joined?
RB: I was out—there were—there were, you know, there are a lot of layers of being out. I was out to myself, I was out to some friends, I think I—I was out to my sister but not to my parents, and certainly not to everybody I knew. [Pause] So…I mean, it was—it was a very gradual process. I think I had been out to myself maybe just a couple of years at the time? So, you know—and I—and I think the GSU kind of—a lot of us, you know, became more visible. We—you know, we started speaking up, and at—and at that time, just being out, sometimes, could be a bold statement. Because—when I came out to my sister, she said she had never known any gay people. And I was like, sure you have. You have to have. But—you know, she—nobody had ever come out to her before.
TC: Right. Is that, maybe, how it was for a lot of people in the GSU?
RB: I would think. I would think—it—I mean, [sigh] you would think, oh, it’s the ‘80s, but, I mean, Alabama’s a little behind, and the ‘80s weren’t what—people think. I mean, it was still—it was a very conservative time, and conservative place.
TC: For sure. So—I guess, kind of, in terms of what the GSU was, in your opinion, was that kind of more of a political organization, or was it more of a social organization-type thing? Like, in your own words, just tell me about what you think about that.
RB: Yeah, we—we billed it as educational, because we knew, you know, that’s what the university wanted to hear. It—it was—yeah, it was political. I mean, it—it was—we did a lot of social things, but we could do social things without an organization. I mean, we already knew how to—have a party. It was political. We had a speaker’s bureau that went to classes and campus organizations and—[exhale] answered questions we probably had no business answering [laughter]. Like, you know, we’re speaking for the whole community—we…yeah, it was—it was political.
TC: Did you ever—
RB: But—and a lot of people that were part of our social group—after the initial mee—couple of meetings were not in the Gay Student Union. They didn’t want to do that stuff. But they would come to our parties, so…
TC: Did you ever participate in that speaker’s bureau, and go around talking to classes?
RB: Yeah. Yeah, that was fun.
TC: What was that like? Like, what kind of questions did you guys get asked?
RB: Oh, gosh…we got, like, asked everything. [Pause] People—people asked us what our families thought, and—sometimes in a tone of, like, you know… Like, “your families can’t be okay with this.” And… but people asked us a lot of just, like, what was it like to come out, how did you know… They would ask—they would ask us, you know, gay positions on things in the world… That’s the part I feel like we probably had no business answering [laughter]. They—they would ask us… like, a lot of people who were okay with us being closeted were not okay with us being out, and they—they would ask us why—you know, why—why would you come out? Why wouldn’t you just do what you do behind closed doors and not talk about it? We—we really got a lot of—lot of good questions. I think, you know, because we were students, and they were students, they—there was… they felt like they could ask us stuff that, you know, they didn’t… they didn’t have any other way of getting the answer to.
TC: Right.
RB: And they would—and—and a lot of them, I think would—would try to put themselves in your place, like, how did you, you know, how did—asking about our families or our friends or… they would ask about religion and church and, you know, I think they really were trying to think, okay, if I were gay, how would I—be in the world.
TC: Were those experiences mostly… positive, would you say? Like—
RB: They—yeah. I—I think so, ‘cause I felt like… most of the time people were really trying to learn something, and I’m—I’m not saying they all agreed with us, at the end of the day, but I’ve—I’ve always felt like the more information somebody has, the better. And now it’s—it’s so different, I mean there’s, there’s people all over the TV and, you know, and you can Google stuff, but… at that time, you know, we might have been the only out… you know, the only time they had ever seen a gay and lesbian person. And they would look at us and go, “oh, well… wait…” you know, “I know her, and she looks just like me,” or… it—it… I don’t know if it really helped, but we thought it did at the time.
TC: Right. That’s great. What other kind of political, I guess, advocacy stuff did you guys do?
RB: Well, we always did Get On Board Days, where we’d show up, just to be visible, like even if—even if there was somebody that thought they might be gay and they weren’t really ready to be out, that at least, like, they could see us. [exhale] We wrote a lot of articles for the CW and letters to the CW. We would also… there was—gosh, what was the name of the group?—it was some statewide group… I can’t remember the name of it now. It was like, an umbrella group of gay organizations, so it was—people from Birmingham, Montgomery… grown-ups who were [laughter] doing—some of them were social, some of them were political, but that—that helped us a lot, to, you know, get to—well, maybe that wasn’t us advocating, it was us learning from them, but—but I think we inspired them a lot too, because a lot of them probably hadn’t been out when they were younger. We had a library, and the group in Birmingham—I—I wanna say it was… I don’t know, “lambda” was in the name… The Birmingham Gay Center—and they had, the, like the “Lambda” library, and they gave us a bunch of books that they had copies of, and so we had those available for people to read—I don’t know what happened to them, I don’t know where they are now, those books—and we wrote to a bunch of gay organizations all over the country that had newsletters, and got them to send us their newsletters, sometimes they were free, and so we had those available for—for students to… you know, come and read or borrow. So, we really did try to be—you know, since we were at a university, try to be educational. I don’t—we—we spent a lot of time in the early days trying to get official recognition from the university, and—and fighting with people who didn’t think we deserved that. When I was there, I don’t remember really any—anything that you’d call activism today, I—that—that came, but not until later.
TC: Can you tell me some more about the process of getting official recognition from the university?
RB: [exhale] Yeah, there’s—there’s an official process, and you have to have…I think it was ten people’s names—that became an issue, because some people didn’t want to put their name down… We had some straight allies who put their names on it and… to help us, you know, get our ten people. And you had to apply—what was it… it was some committee of the student government, or maybe it was the whole SGA… it had to approve it… they turned it down and then the university administration overrode them because the Tuscaloosa chapter of the ACLU was—was gonna sue them if they didn’t recognize us. They were probably a little disappointed that they approved it, ‘cause they were—looking forward to the fight, I think. They would have won, there was a lot of court precedent in other states. So there was a lot of, you know, back-and-forth in the court of public opinion, and then the SGA turned us down, and the administration knew they had to say okay, so they overrode it. And we got officially recognized. And then I think they kind of sat back and waited for us to graduate so it would go away. But! Other groups—other, you know, as we left school, other people entered school and kept it going… you know, they kept—changed the name, like, a million times, but it’s still there.
TC: Right. I think today it’s known as SPECTRUM.
RB: Right.
TC: It’s pretty cool.
RB: Yeah, and—and—you know, I think one of the first changes—name changes probably was to add “lesbian” to the name, and then bisexual, trans, queer… everything got added, and then “Spectrum”, I think they just thought… instead of this whole alphabet soup, let’s just call it a—give it another name.
TC: Right. So… when the group first started, what was attendance like? At your first couple of events? You know, like, how did you—how did you guys work on, I guess, getting more members?
RB: Well, first, it was social networking. Not the online kind, but the old-fashioned kind, and—you know, somebody else may have another memory of this, but I wanna say we had—we had thirty, forty, fifty people at meetings. A party—uh, who knows, probably a hundred people… [pause] The speakers bureaus, you know, you don’t want forty people going to a classroom to speak. There were, you know, like, different groups of people—four, four of five people might go to this one class, and four or five other people might go to a different class, you know, depending on their schedules and so forth… I—I would say, most of the time, probably our real membership was probably about forty people.
TC: Right. How many… trying to think of a way to phrase this question, sorry—were there many—I guess, like, women involved? Or was it mostly men? Talking about demographic groups? How would you characterize the demographics of that original, like, fortyish people who came to meetings?
RB: I’d say 50% women.
TC: Really?
RB: I—I—again, you know, if you talk to somebody else, and there’s—they’re like, you know, Rachel’s crazy, her memory’s shot, but… I’d say about half women, and—and—when it first started, that was—a lot of us knew each other before. And then gradually, you know, other people would hear about it, or you know, we did Get On Board Days, or we did stuff, and, you know, word would get out… and, you know, people that we hadn’t previously known… but that—that was—that was kind of the social group that Elliot was probably kind of at the core of at the time, there were—there were lots of lesbians. And I would say… it was mostly white, we did have some—some black students, but… not very many. Not—and—and—that comes from—from it starting as a group of social friends that was mostly white. We always tried to have the—we had the, you know, traditional officers—president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. We always made sure that there were males and females in that, like if the—if the president—the first president was Elliot, and… so the vice president was a female, and we were conscious of, hey, it should be a female, and then later if the president was a female, we would try to make sure the vice president was a male.
TC: So you never felt like the group, I guess, had kind of like, an off-balance in that demographic? Like, that balance between men versus women, gay men versus lesbian women, anything like that?
RB: No, not when I was there. Now, I can’t speak for the rest of the thirty or forty years.
TC: Right. I ask, not because I’ve, like, heard stories about the Gay Student Union, or anything like that, but it’s—we’ve—it’s been documented in other university groups, I wanna say, that sometimes in the beginnings of these groups, they kind of lean towards being populated… almost exclusively, at times, by, specifically gay men. So—it’s an interesting historical question.
RB: Yeah, and when—and after I moved to Atlanta, the… most of the groups here were either all male or all female. And in fact, some of them—some of them were lesbian separatist groups, so… deliberately all female, but I—I don’t know, there were—there just—there weren’t very many of us, and we’re in Alabama, so we… we stuck together.
TC: What is your favorite memory of the GCU? Er—not GCU, sorry, GSU. [Laughter]
RB: I don’t know, probably…we got some space in the communications building, and we had had this library, and it—it was like at somebody’s apartment, and, you know, the guys in Birmingham had given us these books, we took a little money to this bookstore in Birmingham, a lesbian bookstore—and the name will come to me about three o’clock this morning, I don’t remember the name—and we actually took like, $100, and we picked out books, and that was really fun, and when we got some space in the communications building, we were able to set our library up there. And I don’t know if a soul ever went there and checked out a book, or read a magazine, but to have that—to have that spa—and, you know, there were three or four of us there one night, setting it up, making little boxes to put the periodicals in and stuff, and—and it was just fun, we felt like we were doing something. It felt like we were in on something that—that was important, and something was—something bigger than ourselves.
TC: Right. That’s really cool. Do you remember—this is a long shot, maybe, but do you remember of, like, specific titles that you guys had in your library?
RB: We had… Feminine Mystique, why, I don’t know—some of these were probably rejects from the Birmingham library… we had—I remember some of the periodicals more than the books… We had Atlanta, which was from the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, we had the newsletter from the Gay and Lesbian Atheist Association, which I thought was really cool. Had no idea that existed until, you know, we found that. But—it—one of the guys in Birmingham gave us a list of gay and lesbian periodicals, and we just—we just sent a postcard to every one of them. [Pause] We had gosh, I can’t—you know, I remember going to the bookstore and picking out books, and now I can’t remember what we picked out. Uh… oh! Uh—what’s her name, Del Martin? Lesbian—Lesbian/Woman? We had that. And—I—I sort of remember that as it was really influential on me because—not so much what was in the book, but the bio… I don’t know if you know, but the book is written by two women who, at that time, they’d been together forever, and that’s the first time I thought… Oh! I can be in a relationship that, like, lasts. You know, like straight people have. Because the writers of this book had been in a long-term relationship. Beca—I was—I mean, it sounds stupid, but part of that, I was like… you know, lesbian relationships last about three months, and they were very intense, and then you broke up, and went on to the next one, and… so I remember that title because it was inspiring to me. Even though I don’t remember a word of what the content was.
TC: Did you have a partner while you were at UA? Or—did you date, I guess, while you were at UA?
RB: [exhale] Yeah, I—I did. I dated a few people—I guess they would—it would be short term, you know, three months… I think I knew somebody who had been together six months, and that was, like, long-term? So—and then—but then—I did have a partner… we got together right around the time the Gay Student Union started… and that’s who I moved to Atlanta with. So I guess during the time of the Gay Student Union, I did—I did—and, that’s why I say, reading that book, both of us kind of went… Oh. Okay. Maybe we can make this work. And… ultimately, we did break up, but we were together, like, seven years.
TC: Wow. That’s—that’s amazing. I’m—I’m an English major, so I love hearing about the books and the early literature, like—the—that kind of thing, about like, different historical movements, and stuff like that. I think it’s always really interesting to see what about a book is… really impactful on people. ‘Cause it’s always different.
RB: Right.
TC: And sometimes it’s the bio… I, in particular, started writing fiction because I had seen one of my favorite authors—her early work was, honestly, terrible, but she was a writer who had gone to and majored in English at Yale University, which really made an impact on me. Sorry, not to digress—but—
RB: [laughter] No, that’s fine—
TC: I just think that’s—that’s so cool, hearing about the ways that books impact people. But back to—
RB: Yeah, and I—I really think a lot of the books we had were probably… Well of Loneliness was one of them, I mean—I feel like a lot of the literature that was available back then were really depressing, sort of… things… I mean, we were getting—it was sort of—now you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t be surprised to read any novel or any television show or any movie and, oh, there’s a lesbian, oh, there’s a gay person, but… it wasn’t like that then. But I’m sorry, now I’m the one digressing. [laughter]
TC: No, it’s fine! It’s—it’s totally fine. Okay, well, uh… I guess, just to get back to the Gay Student Union, just a little bit before we wrap up, two questions that kind of go together: What did the group see as, like, its biggest success, and then, you know, versus that, as kind of, like, its biggest failing? When you were there, specifically? Or—alternatively, what did you see as its biggest success and biggest failure?
RB: Yeah, yeah… now you’re asking me to speak for everybody. [laughter]
TC: Yeah, no, definitely not. [laughter]
RB: We—we saw—we saw university recognition as a huge success. And, you know, I might look at that now and say, you know, why’d we care if they validated us or not? But it—it was important to us at the time. Not that the university meant to validate us, but—but to say—and—and we weren’t really trying to be part of the mainstream, but we were trying to belong in the world. And that…that was a big deal, even though they were kind of forced to do it. To say, you know, we’re here, we are students at this university, and we have a right to be here, and we have a right to have our interests recognized, and… and survival. The fact that it—it—it’s still there, in some shape or form, that it didn’t just… go away when the couple of key people graduated. Because I’m not sure at the time, we even thought that was gonna happen. And, you know, that it was still there five years after we had graduate was…woah, that’s a long time, woah it’s still there. Because, you know, five years is a long time in the life of a university, because the students turn over in five years. And I—and I… I like to think there were successes we didn’t even know about, like people that just were… maybe thought twice before they said some really stupid anti-gay thing, or—or people who were, you know, tentatively coming out, and were inspired, and… I had a friend call me, this has probably been four or five years ago, call out of the blue—I mean, we reconnected through Facebook, but we hadn’t talked to each other since… college. And she called me and wanted to talk to me about because her daughter was coming out. And her daughter was at Alabama and felt very isolated, and she was worried. And she—she just—she wanted to talk to me, and see what I knew, and I knew enough to, you know, tell her daughter to look up SPECTRUM and I told her she could call me if she wanted to, but, you know, she didn’t wanna talk to some old lady. And—and—this particular friend of mine, I had been in the sorority with her, and she was… three years younger than I am, so I really didn’t even know her all that well, and I was like—I didn’t even know, you know, you knew I was a lesbian. And she said, well, you were in that gay student group and all that. Which—I wasn’t even sure everybody knew about, so I’m sure all of us have little successes like that, where we, you know, that might not manifest until years later, where, you know, just—just being out and being visible and saying, you know, here we are, and we’re not some boogeyman, we’re part of this university. That was the biggest success to me.
TC: All right, absolutely… and then, I guess maybe not, to say, like, failure or failing, but is there something that you really wish that the GSU had been able to do while you were there that just didn’t work out? Or anything like that?
RB: We—I don’t know, we still had a lot of people that would participate on the fringes, like coming to parties, but not doing any political stuff… I think we probably had a lot of people who were scared, but probably just a lot of people who didn’t… who didn’t get it. And maybe they had needs that we weren’t addressing. And I—and I—and we weren’t always very inclusive. I mean, we, you know, we intended to be, but because it had started with a group of people who knew each other, I think that we probably didn’t do a lot of outreach to black students. That would be a—a failing in Alabama, because there is a—they’re a sizable part of the student body, and we kind of didn’t address that at all.
TC: All right, okay… all right, well, I have just one more question—not necessarily about the GSU or anything—and then we’ll wrap up the interview, but… if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
RB: [laughter] Don’t drink so much. [laughter] Yeah, that’d probably be it—that would be the best advice I could probably give her… and I guess, well… I kind of always felt like everything’s gonna be all right, eventually, but yeah… that would be a good one too. Just like, it’s gonna be all right, just trust your instincts.
TC: All right, well… we’ll wrap up there. Thank you so very much for talking to me, and for agreeing to be part of this project. We really appreciate it.
RB: Well, thank you for doing this. It’s—it’s… good to reminisce.
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