Texas A&M’s campus is currently home to the LGBTQ+ Cultural Center, along with various LGBTQ+ student organizations and has become a safer place for students of any sexuality to celebrate
Editorâs Note: This story highlights sensitive issues and may contain triggering content.
An anonymous hotline run by LGBTQ+ Aggies in the 1970s and 80s paved the way for the pride that we see on campus today.
Six years after the Stonewall riots, a handful of gay and lesbian Aggies founded Gay Student Services, or GSS, a social organization which became the first explicitly gay student organization at Texas A&M. To do this and support other gay students, GSS started the âGayline,â an anonymous referral hotline that connected callers to everything from affirming health sevices to local gay bars. Former students from two generations of GSS said the Gayline did more than kick off a high-profile court case; it provided a support system and safe havens for an acute minority of A&Mâs student body.
âIf God will not let homosexuals into his kingdom, I do not see how we can recognize them as an active part of Texas A&M.â â Letter to Editor, The Battalion.
Campus reaction to GSS was, at best, polite yet unsympathetic. At worst, it was objectively hostile. In his thesis, âLesbian and Gay Student Mobilization at Texas A&M University,â Andrew D. Vaserfirer found that many Aggies at the time âsuggested violence as the best way to deal with the GSS.â Some students went so far as to say they would âbeat the hell out[t]a the GSSO and all of its kooky-queers.â