A 1968 Bucks County PA Gay Rights Protest Preceded Stonewall by Year
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Bucks County Community College was the site of a gay rights protest a year before Stonewall and one of many smaller protests that occurred across the country that occurred before gay rights took the national stage.
The origins of the protest stemmed from a scheduled speech by Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York City chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early national gay rights organization. When the Student Government Association president, Ralph Sassi Jr., approved a payment for $450 to pay for the speaker and was called into meet the dean who was furuious.
Word of Leitsch’s presentation, billed as, “The problems of the Homosexual in Our Society” had leaked off campus into Newtown, a small suburban city that’s part of the Philadelphia suburbs. After fielding complaints from the community, the dean cancelled the event.
As word spread on campus, a protest grew that eventually culminated in over 200 students walking out of classes.
The resulting student protest was big news in the local and campus newspapers, but no one realized its historical significance until two years ago, when a San Francisco history professor confirmed it as one of the largest and earliest known gay rights demonstrations in the United States.
The campus protest took place a year before the 1969 Stonewall Inn uprising in New York City, which historians credit with launching the modern LGBTQ+ movement into the mainstream American consciousness.
Gay historians, like San Francisco State’s Marc Stein, consider these early protests as the “Holy Grail” since only about 30 have been confirmed, Stein said. What makes them important is they provide a better understanding of the path that led up to the Stonewall Inn, the largest gay rights demonstration of its time, he said.
They also provide historical evidence of the changing attitudes about gay issues among college-educated youth in the late 1960s, a prelude to more widespread discussions about LGBT issues on college and university campuses in the 1970s, according to Stein.
The BCCCC library newspaper archives, along with Sassi’s recollections, allowed Stein to confirm the 1968 protest as only the second to take place on a U.S. college campus before Stonewall. The other happened at Columbia University in New York City.
The protest also occurred at a time in American history where college students were seeking to break with traditional societal norms and rules, and openly challenged college administration to treat them as equal adults, Stein said. This was also the beginning of colleges being viewed not only as academic enclaves, but as places of debate and discussion including controversial topics.
Beyond it being one of the largest documented early gay rights protests, what also makes the BCCC uprising extremely unusual is it was organized and attended by students at a predominately white, middle-class, heterosexual suburban campus, who likely knew nothing about Leitsch, Stein added.
At that time, gay rights rallies were virtually exclusively organized and attended by activists within the movement. Media coverage was mostly confined to the alternative and gay press, Stein said.
The BCCC students likely did not see themselves as strictly advocating for gay rights, but more motivated by opposition to censorship and in the support of free speech, he added.
“This BCCC episode shows how the gay movement was already having significant effect on mainstream society,” Stein added.
