<i>Gay Student Services v. Texas A&amp;M University:</i> A Social History of the First Amendment in the Struggle for Equality

Abstract In 1975, students at Texas A&amp;M University created the campus’s first gay and lesbian student organization, Gay Student Services (GSS). When university administrators refused to recognize the group the following year, the student members filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the university had violated their First Amendment rights protecting speech, expression, and association. Nearly a decade later, the students won, and a federal appellate court ordered Texas A&amp;M officials to recognize GSS. The students’ legal strategy differed remarkably from the one employed by the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement of the era, which relied on a constitutional right to privacy to advance queer equality. In this article, I uncover a largely forgotten and discarded strategy in the national movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) equality. I argue that using the tools of social history to study the Texas A&amp;M students’ legal struggle against the university reveals the ways that constitutional arguments about free speech, expression, and association had more liberating potential than arguments about sexual privacy. Although free speech, expression, and association eventually took a back seat to arguments about privacy in the larger movement, the First Amendment may yet hold a key to preserving the rights of queer people today.