ABSTRACT
Although some students continued to understand their identities as closeted or homosexual, by the 1960s, non-heterosexual collegians identified themselves in opposition to those identities; these collegians chaffed at what they viewed as religious and medical models of pathology and/or abnormality. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, countercultural movements in the United States led non-heterosexual students to reexamine concepts of gender, sexuality, and the norms of the dominant society. Such changes fostered opportunities and contexts to position themselves alongside others who questioned the norms, as well as against the norm of heterosexuality; no longer was the marker of identification based solely upon an individual’s sexuality (almost exclusively furtive and nonsanctioned) but also by social interaction and political goals.
