A Pride Flag in the SUB Ballroom?
Tracing the history of queer advocacy and its relationship to the diminishing centrality of Methodism at SU through the analysis of a Gay Pride Flag placed in celebration of National Coming Out Day 1995.
In the Fall of 1995, the student organization SOAL (the Sexual Orientation Awareness League) celebrated National Coming Out Day by hanging a Gay Pride flag from the hearth in the Bishops Lounge Ballroom in the Student Union Building, a former community hub of SU. Although National Coming out day had been celebrated on campus before (with events dating back to 1990), 1995 was documented as an especially turbulent year for the event.
An article from the Megaphone written during the first week of the flag’s placement in the SUB argued that it: “constitutes poor policy on the part of administration,” because it directly opposes the Christian values of Southwestern and its students who practice the religion. This article inspired many arguments through Opinions and Letters to the Editor in the Megaphone and across campus over the course of the next few weeks, with conflicting perspectives on whether or not the flag should have been placed in a central community space.
The ensuing discourse surrounding this issue quickly coalesced into 2 main questions. The first was whether the presence of the gay pride flag in a central campus space represented an official endorsement of gay rights by Southwestern as an institution. The second was whether the flag’s placement in a community space infringed on the moral values of students who cited their Christian faith as the reason for the flag being offensive to them.
Regarding the first topic, students against the placement of the pride flag argued that SOAL was improperly using the flag’s placement to assert that the entire SU community supported the gay liberation movement. Alternatively, supporters of the flag argued that it was there not to officially endorse the group’s cause, but to celebrate the accomplishments of gay people and allies towards equality, while bringing an awareness of these accomplishments to others with the hopes of encouraging them to do the same, rather than speaking for them or assuming that they already agreed.
Moving towards the argument about how the installation of the flag was an “infringement of moral values” of some Christian students, I believe this notion relates to the way homosexuality is considered a sin within many religious circles, particularly until recently.
Both articles critiquing the pride flag cite multiple Bible verses claiming “the sin of homosexuality,” but I found it interesting that they both tied their arguments specifically back to Southwestern’s affiliation with Methodism, and how this was fundamentally a Christian school.
Southwestern’s relationship to Methodism is the subject of several other Placing Memory entries. Here, it is important to establish that the founding of Southwestern is rooted in Methodism, and its initial aim was to instill Methodist principles and incentivize continuing a life in the Church after college. Over time, the enforcement of these principles waned, evident through the cancellation of required Chapel attendance in 1967 in response to increased religious diversification of the student population after various social justice movements in the 1960s.
While almost all the requirements of a faith-based education were no longer in force at SU by the 1990s when this controversy over the pride flag emerged, the students who advocated removing the pride flag from the SUB in 1995 acted as if their perspective was authorized by Southwestern’s history as a Methodist institution. Therefore, they argued that their invocation of the Bible against homosexuality was more valid than SOAL’s argument for religious freedom and social equality.
What I find most interesting about this is that proponents of the pride flag never attempted to antagonize the institution of Christianity, even citing various faith-based gay and lesbian advocacy groups to affirm that the immorality placed on homosexuality was inspired through the bigotry of individuals rather than Christianity itself.
A final statement against the pride flag was written on the 26th of October and accompanied by an in-person speech given by a student in the Faculty Lounge 4 days later. Ultimately, the flag maintained its place on the hearth of the SUB ballroom during the 2 weeks worth of events held for National Coming Out Day.
Researching this discourse surrounding the presence of the Gay Pride Flag as a symbol for queer advocacy at SU, I had anticipated writing an entry that focused more on the specific points that were used to promote or antagonize its presence to understand how gay and lesbian identities were perceived and represented on-campus in the 1990s.
Here, I would like to recognize my own bias as a queer person with no religious affiliation detailing and critiquing this experience through this entry. I knew I would likely encounter some assertion that “homosexuality is a sin” by students against the flag, but as I read through the various arguments, I was surprised to see the students from SOAL characterize homophobia as a practice rooted in individual bigotry, as opposed to a form of systemic oppression supported by the institution of Christianity.
This is what prompted my deeper analysis of this situation’s relationship to the history of Methodism at SU, where I noticed a correlation between the diminishing presence of a religious education on-campus in the 1960s and 1970s, and the increased advocacy for marginalized groups in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, these strands were woven together differently as the University actively worked to align itself with the progressive wing of the Methodist Church on LGBTQ+ issues, but this moment in the 1990s shows that the battle could have gone either way.
By examining how both queer advocacy and homophobia were both influenced by Christianity, despite the loss of its historical centrality to the SU experience, this entry attempts to capture how the campus’ history as a religious space has affected student activism differently over time.
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