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That was particularly true in the 1950s, more than a decade before the campus gave rise to the Free Speech Movement. It was at UC Berkeley's first gay dance, in 1971, that Benemann finally was ready to come out of the closet.īut for those who came before Benemann, there were no such opportunities. "For me, it wasn't a political thing, it was a personal thing."Īfter Benemann's first love affair ended, he couldn't talk about his broken heart to his friends. "I wasn't ready to come out with quite the bang that they did," said Benemann. The early gay groups, such as the Gay Liberation Front, which had grown out of the anti-war movement, did not focus on campus life and seemed too radical to Benemann. I never read anything about homosexuality that didn't treat it as a pathology."Īlthough Benemann wanted to explore his feelings, he found no real gay community on campus.
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"I had never read a book that had a gay character and never saw a gay person on TV or in a movie. "When I came here, I knew that I was gay, but I never met another person who I knew was gay," recalled Benemann. It was not unlike his experience when he first entered UC Berkeley as a 19-year-old sophomore in 1969. He is also adjunct curator for the Bancroft Library's Sexual Orientation and Social Conflict Collection, which examines gay and opposing reactions to such issues as same-sex marriages and domestic- partner benefits.īenemann came up with the idea for the Gay Bears collection after searching the archives a decade ago for any record of gay and lesbian history but finding nothing. William Benemann, head of technical services at the Boalt Hall Law Library, has devoted many volunteer hours to putting the collection together. The collection, in the University Archives at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, is the first documentation of gay life on campus. Kelly, Dickemann and five other gay alumni told their stories for an oral history project called Gay Bears. "You always thought that you were going to get married," said Kelly. Many of Kelly's friends did not know Kelly was gay and even though he was having trysts with men, Kelly did not think of himself as homosexual. Kelly remembers that one of his fraternity brothers held his bachelor party at the Beige Room, a drag queen showplace in San Francisco.