Karen Graves

Doing the Public's Business: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, 1959-1964.

Abstract A decade after Kinsey published his famous studies on sexuality, a special legislative committee in Florida targeted gay and lesbian teachers in an investigation that led to the dismissal and loss of credentials for scores of educators. The Florida purge of 1959–1964 remains without parallel in educational history in terms of its intensity and scope. This historical analysis traces the actions of the legislative committee, the State Department of Education, the Florida Education Association, and the Florida Supreme Court in pressing discrimination against gay and lesbian teachers into law as the locus of oppression shifted from a renegade legislative committee to a permanent state institution. Homosexuality is not an illness like chickenpox—you cannot see it by looking into another persons face …. The revocation of a teaching certificate is the publics business …. The presence of even one homosexual teacher in our schools is not to be tolerated. (Bailey 1961, 2–3)

The History of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Issues in Higher Education

This historiographical essay surveys histories of higher education that have examined lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) issues as a central theme, or included substantial analysis of LGBTQ issues as part of a larger argument. The focus is decidedly on experiences of sexual minorities in higher education, as students, professors, or administrative staff, and related issues. The thematic overview of this literature begins with early work that simply established the presence of LGBTQ people in the academy. Sexual politics shifted in the middle decades of the twentieth century so that by the post-World War II era government purges of homosexuals made their appearance on college campuses. A considerable part of the bibliography on the history of LGBTQ issues in higher education addresses these purges. Scholarship on LGBTQ students’ efforts to organize on campuses, and work on gender and sexuality that intersects with LGBTQ themes in higher education (in particular, studies of masculinity and the late-twentieth century sexual revolution) round out the analysis.