*Sarah Maske is a senior at UNC Greensboro, with a double major in history and archaeology. She is interning in the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collection and University Archives for the spring 2019 semester. While tartan is a popular pattern in clothing today, it has an important place in North Carolina’s history. In the early […]
Month: April 2019
The initial meeting of UNC Greensboro’s first LGBTQ+ student group, the Gay Student Union, occurred in September 25, 1979, but the first meeting as a university-recognized organization occurred one month later, on October 25th.(2) Immediately after the front page announcement for the Gay Student Union in The Carolinian was published, letters began coming into university […]
Oral histories conducted with early UNC Greensboro campus faculty provide rare glimpses into the lives of LGBTQ students, if only illustrating the population’s need to remain hidden for survival. An interview with Professor Key L. Barkley(1) reveals that early students were having lesbian encounters. Barkley (1900- 2001) was a faculty member in the Department of […]
As any researcher of LGBTQ+ history is aware, tracking a hidden population through the historic record relies upon extracting a narrative from rare and frequently cryptic fragments of information. Even though UNC Greensboro began as a college for women with records dating to the school’s chartering in 1891, unearthing even a passing mention of a […]
To kick off PRIDE! month at UNC Greensboro, Spartan Stories is highlighting Dr. Thomas K. Fitzgerald, a prominent gay faculty member in the 1970s through 2004. Thomas (Tom) K. Fitzgerald was born in Lexington, North Carolina. He attended UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating with an A.B. in Anthropology in 1962. Although he originally intended to study Latin […]
