Storyline · 1982–1994
From 1982 the Carolina Gay Association held a yearly Gay Awareness Week ending in Blue Jeans Day, and in 1983 a seminar on AIDS and gay civil rights. In 1984 The Landmark attacked its student-fee funding, President William Friday sent an anti-gay letter attacking the University to the SBI, and about 300 people rallied against such letters. In 1985 the group became the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association. From 1985 Students for America, the Chapel Hill Eight and Campus Watch fought the association's student-fee funding. Student government funded it every year through 1989, though a nonbinding 1988 referendum went against the funding, 3,195 to 2,285. Student Congress members tried to end the funding again in 1991 and 1992, and a 1992 budget rider calling for review of the group's publications was blocked by the student court and struck by the next congress. The association renamed itself B-GLAD in 1992, and Student Congress passed its budget 21 to 7 in 1993. In 1993 the Honor Court acquitted the two former congress members who had circulated the list, and in 1994 Student Congress cut all funding for Lambda while B-GLAD hosted a statewide student summit.
The Carolina Gay Association held Gay Awareness Week at UNC from March 22 to 27, 1982, with the film Michael, A Gay Son, discussions on coming out and on gay health concerns and a workshop on the Family Protection Act then before Congress. It declared Friday, March 26 Blue Jeans Day, asking gay students who wished to identify themselves to wear jeans, and members told the Daily Tar Heel the group was mainly educational rather than political. The 1983 week brought nightly programs in the Carolina Union on coming out, gay life in the Triangle, spirituality and mental health, and closed with Blue Jeans Day, when supporters of gay rights were asked to wear jeans; the Daily Tar Heel carried letters in response. On November 15, 1983, during Human Rights Week, the association held a seminar, AIDS and the Struggle for Gay Civil Rights, at which David Jolly of the Gay Men and Lesbian Health Project warned that some wanted to use AIDS to brand gay people a threat to public health; he reported about 2,400 cases nationally and 10 to 15 in North Carolina.
In January and February 1984 Bob Windsor's Chapel Hill biweekly The Landmark ran columns urging readers to press legislators and trustees to end student-fee support for the association. The association's publication, Lambda, answered that its 1983-84 allocation of $778 was 0.3 percent of the student fees given to organizations. The spring week of April 2 to 6, Gay Visions of a New World, brought lectures by Lou Sawyer on lesbian issues, John Stanley of Black and White Men Together on racism among gay people and the Rev. June Norris of St. John's Metropolitan Community Church on gays and religion, and ended with Blue Jeans Day and a dance that doubled as a voter registration drive. On September 26 the association formed a committee to gather suggestions for a new name meant to unite lesbians with the group, and began through UNC Student Legal Services to seek a copyright to stop The Landmark from reprinting articles and advertisements from Lambda.
In October President William Friday gave the State Bureau of Investigation a letter signed for a group calling itself Southern Christians for Helms, which attacked him and the University for a "liberal atheist clique" and claimed homosexuality among faculty and deans; he called it "McCarthy-like propaganda," and the Helms campaign said it had no connection with the group and repudiated the letter. On October 24 about 300 people held a rally and candlelight vigil on campus after a Holly Near concert to protest that letter, which threatened to publish a list of supposedly gay faculty, and another from a group calling itself Triangle Educators for Christ; Faculty Council chair Doris Betts also denounced the letters. A fall Gay Awareness Week from November 26 to 30 brought Tom Chorlton of the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Democratic Clubs to speak on post-election strategy, a session on coming out in the Black community and a Blue Jeans Day dance in Craige dormitory that drew nearly 150. At a business meeting on January 18, 1985 the association voted to add "Lesbian" to its name and become the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association, a bylaw change upheld by a second vote on February 13; a Lambda writer later recalled that it came only after a bitter fight led by lesbian members.
In April 1985 the Campus Governing Council's Finance Committee, which included members of Students for America, recommended no student-fee money for the association after a session that ran until 6:30 a.m. on April 18. Campus leaders and members of the Black Student Movement, the Association for Women Students and the Campus Y spoke for the group, and the association later wrote that the Cellar Door literary magazine and the Campus Y gave up funds of their own; on the night of April 20 the full council restored $900 in a compromise that gave the association a $2,700 budget. On September 2 the national advisory board of Students for America, a conservative group, expelled its UNC chapter's vice chairman, who was also president of the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, for backing the funding before the council, and two other local officers resigned in protest. On September 17 he asked the Student Affairs office to revoke the chapter's campus charter, saying the expulsion violated his rights to free speech and due process; in a letter dated September 20 Dean of Students Frederic W. Schroeder declined, writing that private groups were not bound by the First Amendment and that recognition did not make them state agencies.
At all-day budget hearings on April 19, 1986 representatives moved to defund the association outright, citing a district poll, while Student Body President Bryan Hassel told them the real motive was moral opposition and compared it to opposition to Black civil rights; after more than three hours of debate the Student Congress voted 11 to 9, with one abstention, to give it $905, below the Finance Committee's recommended $1,697. By September Students for America had set out to collect more than 2,000 signatures for a referendum on the February 1987 ballot on whether the association should receive student fees; co-chairman Greg Johnson called the drive one of several attacks on the group, and Hassel said such a vote would not bind the Student Congress. On February 23, 1987 eight students wrote Chancellor Christopher Fordham calling the association's way of life immoral on Christian grounds, asking refunds of their student activities fees and threatening to stop paying fees while any money went to it. After their spokesman met Vice Chancellor Donald Boulton on February 25, the group, calling itself the Chapel Hill Eight, said it would fight the funding in Student Congress and the Student Supreme Court; Boulton said the administration would not interfere with student government's power over fees, held since 1947. A petition against the funding drew heavy coverage in the Daily Tar Heel, but in April the association's co-chairs reported that it had defended itself successfully. At an 11-and-a-half-hour final budget hearing on April 12, the Congress defeated 16 to 6 an amendment to give the association nothing, voted 15 to 7 to keep its $1,000 for speakers and granted the full $2,077 its Finance Committee recommended, more than double the year before; opponents cited religious beliefs and the state sodomy law, and supporters called it a matter of free speech.
On January 20, 1988, after heated debate, the Congress voted down a bill that would have barred it from weighing a group's members' race, creed, sex, sexual preference, national origin or handicap in allocating student fees, which opponents said would have ended debate on funding the association. On January 30 about 200 people carrying signs and purple balloons marched from the steps of South Building down Franklin Street to the Chapel Hill post office to support the funding and oppose a nonbinding defunding referendum set for the February 16 ballot; Town Council member Joe Herzenberg, Hassel, now a former student body president, and Black Student Movement president Kenneth Perry spoke at a rally there, and the group told the Daily Tar Heel it had never held a march in its 14 years. On February 3 a petition of 2,425 signatures, gathered by two Student Congress members and presented to the student body president, put the referendum on the ballot, one of six that year. On February 16 students voted 3,195 to 2,285 against funding the association; the vote was advisory, and Lambda noted that most newly elected Congress members and both candidates in the presidential runoff backed continued funding. On April 17, after rejecting a motion to defund it, the Congress gave the association $1,779, $124 more than its Finance Committee had recommended, in a year when a failed student fee increase forced cuts for almost every group.
Campus Watch, a conservative group founded in late August 1988 by a Durham resident and former UNC student to oppose what it called campus radicalism, was lobbying the General Assembly by early October to bar student-fee funding of the association and had sent a questionnaire to legislators and candidates. At a press conference at the Carolina Inn on October 11 it said 120 candidates for the General Assembly had told it they generally favored such a law; CGLA leaders, several of whom attended, said the group misstated their purpose, and Herzenberg also came. On October 23 Jim Gardner, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, endorsed the Campus Watch position, and Lambda later reported that, newly elected, he had voiced support for the effort; in a funding forum Lambda ran, a Student Congress member opposed the funding and also opposed Campus Watch's bid to take the decision away from students. By March 1989 a motion to defund the association had failed 19 to 5 and the Congress had voted 18 to 6 to give it $2,131 for 1989–90, the whole matter taking about ten minutes; it held speakers' fees at $750 and added $30 for outreach.
On May 21, 1991, after an hour and a half of debate, the Summer Student Congress voted 8 to 5, with one abstention, for the speaker's resolution urging the full congress to give the association no student fees, on the ground that it promoted conduct illegal under the state's crimes against nature law; five of the votes came from members the speaker had appointed for the summer. The resolution had no direct effect on funding, and on May 28 Student Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Bibbs barred the summer congress from meeting while a suit over the appointments was heard. Lambda later reported that six Student Congress members had tried that year to cut off the funding on that ground and failed, and that the Office of Student Affairs had stood ready to give the association space and resources if it lost its funds.
On February 23, 1992 Student Congress passed the association's budget 14 to 13 but attached a rider, written by the speaker, requiring the group to submit its publications to a congressional committee and barring it from using student fees to advocate on legislation, government actions or candidates. Co-chair Svati Shah called the rider a gag law; a later motion to rescind the vote, made after the group's supporters had left, failed narrowly. On February 26 the association sued Student Congress in the student courts to remove the rider, and Shah said it rested on the claim that the group had done something political. On April 7 about 150 people gathered on the Pit steps as leaders of the Feminist Alliance, the Campus Y, student government and other groups spoke against a run of anti-gay acts, among them fliers mocking Lesbian and Gay Awareness Week, a defaced association flier in Cobb Residence Hall and fliers left at the Daily Tar Heel urging violence on April 8; Shah said the year's trend demanded a response, and a member had filed a complaint with University Police. In May the chief justice of the Student Supreme Court issued restraining orders keeping the Summer Congress from enforcing riders that required the association and Graduate Students United to submit material to the congress three days before publication, until the full court could rule in the fall. Lambda later described the restrictions as a second defunding attempt and reported that the student court suspended them and that they were later removed.
That year the association renamed itself Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians, and Allies for Diversity (B-GLAD) to recognize bisexual members and straight allies, and Lambda changed from a newsletter to a monthly newspaper. On September 27 the Student Supreme Court dismissed the group's complaint because it named the previous congress, and B-GLAD refiled against Student Congress its challenge to the rider barring it from endorsing candidates and subjecting Lambda to review. On October 28 Student Congress voted 21-3-3 to strike the two riders the previous congress had placed on the budgets of B-GLAD and Graduate Students United: a ban on using student funds for political endorsements or lobbying, and the congress's review of their publications.
At an evening budget hearing on February 28, 1993, two congress members passed around copies of a confidential list of the names and telephone numbers of 63 people who had attended a B-GLAD meeting, with other B-GLAD files, to argue against funding the group. B-GLAD said the files had been stolen, reported the theft to University Police, warned the people on the list and filed Honor Court charges, which were set for hearing on April 26. The congress's finance committee had declared the group politically partisan, by barely the two-thirds needed, and recommended cutting its funds, since politically partisan groups could not receive student fees, but Student Congress approved B-GLAD's funding request 21 to 7.
The first issue of Lambda as a newspaper came out on January 29, 1993. On April 30 the Honor Court voted 3 to 2 that the two former congress members who had passed around the attendance list were not guilty of a knowing abuse of a position of trust; it called the act reprehensible but found the charge unproven, and B-GLAD called the verdict unfortunate. Late on December 1 Student Congress voted down, 9 to 5 with three abstentions, a bill to put a referendum before students on whether their fees should fund gay and lesbian groups. On March 19, 1994, after heated debate over whether the group was politically partisan, Student Congress gave no money to Lambda, which B-GLAD called the longest-standing gay publication in the South; its leaders called the cut discriminatory and said they would try to put Lambda out as a newsletter. B-GLAD opened its Celebration Week on March 28 with a rally of about 40 people in the Pit against the congress's cuts, and on March 29 it hosted a summit of about 30 people from campuses across the state to lay groundwork for a statewide coalition of college gay and lesbian groups. On October 11 it marked National Coming Out Day in the Pit with an open microphone and a dance in New East, the first year, the Daily Tar Heel said, that B-GLAD had taken part.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
An inspection report from the North Carolina Department of Insurance, issued at Raleigh in 1935, on two buildings at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The report condemns Gerrard Hall for structural damage and directs that the gymnasium known as the Tin Can be cleared of equipment unrelated to athletics and used only for the purposes its original plans set out.
Gerrard Hall, an ivy-covered building on the University of North Carolina campus in Chapel Hill, on a 1915 Albertype Co. postcard.
Eight photographs of Gerrard Hall on the UNC campus, dated 1890. Views include three men near the hall, one with a tennis racket, students around the building, a delivery truck at its side, and a view toward South Building and the YMCA. From the UNC Campus binder, Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
Georgia Carroll Kyser's brief biographical tribute to William Clyde Friday and his wife Ida Howell Friday, published by the North Caroliniana Society in 1984. It runs 25 pages with eight pages of plates and illustrations. Friday led the consolidated state university from Chapel Hill, where the couple made their home.
Robert W. Scott (1929-2009), North Carolina's governor between 1969 and 1973 and son of Governor Kerr Scott, interviewed by William Link on April 4, 1990 for the Southern Oral History Program. Scott discusses his student years at North Carolina State College in the early 1950s and his dealings with university president William Friday, including the food workers' strike at Chapel Hill, college integration, and the consolidation of the state's universities into the UNC System during his term. One hour thirty-seven minutes. Electronic edition 2007.
William C. Friday, UNC system president from 1957 until 1986, was interviewed by Cindy Cheatham in December 1990 about Anne Queen (1911-2005). Queen came to the campus YWCA as associate director in 1956 and led the merged YMCA-YWCA from 1964 to 1975. Friday recalls working with her through the years of student political activity in Chapel Hill and reflects on the place of the Y in university life. About forty minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Papers of Lightning Brown, a Chapel Hill activist for gay rights who was also the first openly gay person in North Carolina to run for public office. Most of the 1,500 items concern the 1984 elections: letters to and from public officials, articles and studies reflecting his work in the Democratic Party, on national legislation and on gay rights.
Records of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Center at UNC, 1975 to 2014, about 900 items in 2 linear feet, in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40433. Student groups represented include the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association, B-GLAD, and the Women's Forum of the Association of Women Students, with student housing at Chapel Hill also covered.
William Ruthrauff Amberson, born 1894, left papers spanning 1919 to 1968 with a small run from 1971. The papers concern the University of Tennessee at Memphis and southern farm politics: the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, the Delta Cooperative Farm and Providence Plantation in Mississippi, the Socialist Party, and figures such as Norman Thomas, Howard Kester and Pauli Murray. Part of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 3862.
Roughly 2,000 items in 6.5 linear feet kept as the papers of Michael R. Nelson, born 1963, dated from about 1890 to 2012, collection 70140 in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. Topics include politics and government in Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Orange County, campaign paraphernalia, and gay activists and politicians in North Carolina, naming Joseph A. Herzenberg, 1941 to 2007.
Twenty linear feet of papers from Joseph A. Herzenberg, 1941 to 2007, about 2,500 items dated 1883 to 2006 in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5367. Diaries are among the formats. The work describes a historian and political activist in Chapel Hill, campaign paraphernalia and Democratic Party politics, and gay activists and gay politicians in North Carolina.
Papers of John Seelye (1931 to 2015), literary scholar and Penguin Classics editor, who taught American literature at Berkeley, Connecticut, UNC Chapel Hill, Dartmouth and Florida. The 26,100 items (46.7 linear feet) run from 1862 to 2015, mostly 1955 to 2007, in series of correspondence and contracts, academic files, research files, writings and personal papers, with Melville and Mark Twain among his subjects.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “The Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association, B-GLAD and student-fee funding, 1982–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/carolina-gay-association-storyline-1982/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
