Published since 2005. San Francisco is a city that belongs to the people of the world. Hence this blog has a global focus. The name "Sam Spade's San Francisco" refers to an exciting era in the City's history, the time of Dashiell Hammett's fictional gumshoe and San Francisco character, Sam Spade. My name is Tom Dunn and I edit the blog. I'm not as exciting as Sam Spade, but I am definitely a San Francisco character.Contact or on Twitter -- Search blog below.
Search This Blog
Loading...
Sunday, September 09, 2007
CCSF & Queer Rights - First in the Nation
The big organizations with lots of money almost always steal the thunder from smaller groups with little or no money who are oftentimes the real heroes. Such is the case with City College of San Francisco (CCSF).
While the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, among others, are well known to San Franciscans as champions of the queer community, there is more to the story than some may think.
We have some unsung heroes in our midst.City College of San Francisco is one of our bashful heroes. In 1989 CCSF established the first gay, lesbian and bisexual studies department of any college or university in the United States. That was 18 years ago.
Art Agnos was San Francisco's mayor. The Loma Prieta Earthquake reduced many pristine upscale marina homes to vermin-infested rubbish. Princess Diana was on a high-profile visit to New York. Intel introduced their 80-486 chip. President Bush Sr. sent 1,000 U.S. troops to Panama. Ronald Reagan was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. It was a different world in 1989.
It would have been a dramatic accomplishment for any of the major universities in our country to take a bold and daring step forward by creating a gay, lesbian and bisexual studies department - but it didn't happen. Higher education in this country was silent on the issue of queer studies. Every educational institution of higher learning except one stood silent in this regard even as the gay community was being blamed for the AIDS epidemic. Every institution, that is, except one.
It was not one of the great ivy league universities that stepped forward to create a queer studies department. It was not a student movement at Berkeley or Stanford or UCSF that brought it about. They were all silent.
It was a two-year college in San Francisco that stepped up to the plate and blasted a home run that called attention to the need for gay, lesbian and bisexual studies and started an academic civil rights movement that today spans the globe. It was City College of San Francisco.
Amidst a plethora of egocentric verbosity I want to quietly call attention to our own City College of San Francisco - the folks who first brought the issue of gay and lesbian civil rights to the attention of American academia.
Thank you, City College. All the others stand on your shoulders.
0 comments:
Post a Comment