Inclusive Histories of Davidson College

Presbyterian Heritage and Queerness

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“Established in 1837 by Presbyterians of North Carolina, Davidson is a liberal arts college dedicated to cultivating humane instincts and disciplined, creative minds.”1“History and Traditions,” Davidson College, accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.davidson.edu/about.

Official histories of Davidson College, such as the quote above, pulled directly from Davidson College’s main webpage, emphasize the college’s Presbyterian origins when discussing the goals of the institution, rooting its values within a particular faith.2Ibid; Jan Blodgett and Ralph B. Levering, One Town, Many Voices: A History of Davidson, North Carolina (Davidson, NC: Davidson College Historical Society, 2012). Though Davidson College was founded by Presbyterians, with early leaders utilizing Presbyterian codes to define normative behavior and impose moral regulations on the town (for example, limiting the sale of alcohol), the College’s relationship with this faith has evolved.3Blodgett and Levering, 7-21; W.D., Blanks, “Corrective Church Discipline in the Presbyterian Churches of the Nineteenth Century South,” Journal of Presbyterian History Vol. 44, No. 2 (June 1996).  This relationship between Davidson College and Presbyterian moral values came into question following the intensification of the AIDS epidemic in North Carolina during the mid-to-late 1980s.4Stephen Inrig, “Introduction in a Place So Ordinary: The Problem of AIDS in North Carolina and the American South,” in North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1-12. During this time, heterosexual people became more aware of the queer folks in their communities, not because of a sudden recognition of the humanity of queer people, but rather because they perceived them, particularly gay men, as sexually immoral and a threat to public health.5Karen J. Leong, Andrea Smith, and Laura Westengard,  “MONSTROSITY: Melancholia, Cannibalism, and HIV/AIDS,” in Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 99-140. As recent as 2017, a working group tasked with reflecting on the College’s relationship with the Reformed Protestant Tradition and Presbyterianism released a report that posed the following question as one of its primary challenges: “In light of the broader climate, how can the College publicly affirm that its inclusive, humane, social-justice oriented vision is rooted in its Presbyterian heritage and identity?”6Report of Reformed Tradition Working Group (Davidson, NC: Davidson College, 2017), 10. The task, then, was to identify ways in which Davidson’s Presbyterian roots fostered a spirit of social justice on campus.

In this essay, we examine the intersections between Davidson’s emphasis on “humane instincts” associated with Presbyterian values and the presence (and, sometimes, lack thereof) of queer community members in the college’s official histories. In doing so, we critically interrogate the exclusions that accompany the sense of tradition and community that some groups associated with Davidson derive from Davidson’s Presbyterian identity and heritage.

Queer Organizing and FLAG

Queer students are absent from most archival documents that record the earliest histories of Davidson College. When we use the term “queer” in this essay, we mean people of sexual and gender identities diverging from the cisgender and heterosexual identities frequently deemed normative. Reflecting on the history of sexuality in the United States, students whose identities, desires, and self-definitions that might fit under the umbrella of queerness today would have used other terms, including homosexual and gay, in the past.7Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, Queer: A Graphic History (London: Icon Books, 2016). Many words used commonly among students at schools like Davidson College were, and continue to be, pejoratives (derogatory terms) and therefore unlikely to have been recorded in official college records. Likewise, behaviors associated with queer students were often suppressed or denied by religious and educational leaders. Because of this lack of recognition of diverse expressions of gender and sexual identity by those empowered to record the histories of institutions like Davidson College, institutional archives tend not to include evidence of same-sex desire and non-normative gender expression until the late twentieth century, and this evidence often appears in student publications before institutional records. Davidson College’s archives are typical in lacking information about this topic for most of the college’s existence, but we cannot assume that these gaps prove a straight past. In fact, an anonymous Davidsonian editorial published in 1986 (seen below) suggested that gay students comprised a large minority of students.8Anonymous, “The Silent Minority,” Davidsonian (Davidson, NC), February 7, 1986, 13. To continue challenging these archival silence, scholars researching queer histories seek out primary sources such as personal papers and memorabilia and conduct oral histories.

Some of the earliest discussions of queerness in Davidson’s archives reference to heterosexist violence and feelings of precarity experienced by queer individuals; peer pressure also helps explain archival silences. In the 1986 editorial referenced above and seen below, an anonymous gay Davidson student wrote that with “the current AIDS crisis and the accompanying cacophony of sick jokes and God’s wrath sermons…Davidson is the worst place on earth to come out.”9Anonymous, “The Silent Minority,” Davidsonian (Davidson, NC), February 7, 1986, 13. Only five years later, in 1991, a first-year student who came out as gay was severely harrassed, even receiving death threats from fellow students.10“Why Did We Have to Stage this Picture?” Libertas (Davidson, NC), January 19, 1998, 5-8.

An anonymous article from 1986, detailing the stigma experienced by non-heterosexual Davidson students.

Although these instances indicate an increase in heterosexist violence on campus following increased queer visibility during the AIDS crisis,11During the 1980’s, an sexually-transmitted virus disorder known HIV spread rapidly among queer communities in the United States, harming and killing many queer people as it eventually progressed to an autoimmune disease known as AIDS. This crisis led heterosexist politicians and leaders to condemn non-heterosexual lifestyles as the cause and vector of disease.  this period also marked historic queer organizing among students at Davidson College. Amid the unfolding AIDS epidemic and movements for justice for people of color and women, queer students in the late twentieth century began organizing and speaking on their experiences of marginalization nationwide.12 “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS,” HIV.gov, accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline; Inrig, 26-42; Jonathan Thomas Pryor, “Queer Leadership: An Exploration of LGBTQ Leadership in Higher Education,” (PhD Diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 2017), 22. Students at Columbia University established the first official student organization for gay students in 1967.13 Jim Burroway, “Columbia University Registers Nation’s First Gay Student Group,” [Emphasis Mine] – By Jim Burroway, the LGBT History Project, accessed August 10, 2020, http://jimburroway.com/history/columbia-u-registers-nations-first-gay-student-group/. In 1991, students founded Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or FLAG, the first pro-queer student organization to receive a charter from SGA. Unlike any student organization before it, FLAG members worked to “ensure that [Davidson’s] campus is a safe and comfortable place for every individual, regardless of their sexual orientation.”14 FLAG Brochure, undated, Homosexuality at Davidsoniana File, Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC. Though the founding of FLAG, in many ways a direct response to heterosexist violence on campus, represents a historic moment in queer organizing among Davidson students, we must not assume that FLAG represented the beginning of queerness at Davidson. Rather, documents like the 1986 editorial prove that queer students existed at Davidson, and found each other, even before they were officially recorded as an important community population within the documentary record.

Two panels from a brochure published and distributed by members of FLAG at Davidson College.

Protestantism and the “Debate” over Queer Inclusion

Though many individuals in the local Presbyterian community were supportive towards queer students, some external community members (especially parents and alumni) who spoke out against FLAG did so citing Davidson’s Presbyterian heritage and identity.15  Rob Spach, interview by Isabel Padalecki, Davidson, NC, August 14, 2020. For example, a parent of a Davidson student expressed in a 1991 editorial published in the Davidsonian that “as a Christian I see homosexuality as a sin…some of the reasons for selecting Davidson..were its Christian heritage, honor code, and lack of such groups on campus.” This parent, among others, lamented paying their child’s student activity fee and indirectly supporting FLAG as an SGA-chartered student organization.16A Davidson Parent, “Parent Opposed to F.L.A.G.,” Davidsonian (Davidson, NC), November 11, 1991, 4. In making such a statement, this parent utilized their own Christian belief, as well as Davidson’s continued association with Presbyterianism, to justify the exclusion of queer student organizations on campus.

Letters to the Editor published in the November 11, 1991 issue of The Davidsonian.

Additionally, in the 1994 and 1995 editions of the Davidson Journal, many alumni responded negatively to a student who called on the community to celebrate “157 years of homosexuality at Davidson” in reference to FLAG’s chartering. They pushed back against the idea that homosexuality had always existed at Davidson, citing strong Presbyterian values of the past as evidence to this end. One alum, who graduated in 1950, argued in an issue of the Davidson Journal (shown below)  that “the 1950 Davidson always had a great reputation as an academic and Christian college….during my two years of required Bible courses, the 1950 Davidson taught me that homosexuality is an abomination.”17Dave Erwin, “Forum/Letters to Editor: FLAG,” Davidson Journal (Davidson, NC), Spring 1995, 4.

Letter to the editors of the Davidson Journal from the Spring 1995 edition.

These alums and parents of students, among others, suggested that an embrace of or support for FLAG on Davidson’s campus represented a rift with its Christian heritage. The critics of FLAG discussed here, primarily alums and parents of Davidson College students, used their position as donors and stakeholders in the college’s reputation to mobilize anti-queer exclusion through the language of religiosity and tradition. By evoking religiosity as the primary lens through which change at Davidson should be viewed, they helped to construct a notion of community belonging that permitted and even depended on the exclusion of those who did not fit the heteronormative social codes of the Presbyterian church.

Power, Presbyterian Heritage, and Excellence in the College Archives

Although the 2017 Report of the Reformed Tradition Working Group asserted that the Presbyterian faith could no longer exert direct influence on the social mores of the college community in the twenty-first century, the social mores associated with Presbyterianism have influenced the cultures of morality and heteronormativity in Davidson since the nineteenth century.18Blanks; Blodgett and Levering, 7-21. Though Davidson students are no longer required to take Bible courses as they were in 1950, the institution maintains clear ties to Presbyterianism in the twenty-first century: unlike other historically Presbyterian colleges, Davidson renewed its requirement that the president of the College is Presbyterian in 2012.19Libby A. Nelson, “A Presbyterian Presidency?” Inside Higher Ed., May 9, 2012, accessed August 10, 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/09/davidson-reconsidering-requirement-president-be-presbyterian. Additionally, though the Presbyterian faith has become more inclusive of queer people broadly throughout the early twenty-first century by allowing for queer people to be ordained and married in the church, Presbyterian theology has yet to officially endorse unconditional queer acceptance and liberation.20Erwin C. Barron, “The Bible tells me so? Scripture and experience as sources of authority in debates over homosexuality in the Presbyterian Church,” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 2005); Rob Spach, interview by Isabel Padalecki, Davidson, NC, August 14, 2020. Further, that queerness in the Davidson community has so often been discussed in terms of acceptance or rejection by Presbyterian theology suggests that Presbyterian ethics continue to influence what is considered normative or aberrant well into the early twenty-first century.

It is essential to critically interrogate the heterosexist biases at the root of Davidson College community members’ particular claim of Presbyterian identity and how this shapes descriptions of students in college histories. By examining backlash against early queer organizing at Davidson College, including the instances of parental and alumni backlash against the foundation of FLAG in the early-to-mid 1990s, one can see that Presbyterianism has been weaponized by certain community stakeholders as a gatekeeping mechanism, promoting a heteronormative ideology that extends a sense of belonging in the Davidson community only to those who do not deviate from moralized heterosexuality. The social norms associated with the Presbyterian church, rather than bolstering inclusivity above all, have been utilized by community stakeholders to describe queer folks as only conditionally accepted under certain favorable theological interpretations. 


Queer students no doubt existed here before 1991; they were not deemed worthy of noting as part of the humanely oriented and Presbyterian-identified institution of Davidson College except as they responded to direct violence. Therefore, we must recognize that the excellent and exalted Presbyterian “heritage” and “human values” Davidson College continues to support well into the twenty-first century (as evidenced by the aforementioned 2017 Report of Reformed Tradition Working Group) have, for certain stakeholders in the Davidson community, also served as an intellectual basis for erasing the existence of a resilient queer community on this campus before the official founding of FLAG in 1991.

Queerness and Visibility

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In December of 2013, Davidson College made national news when the Huffington Post published an article about disagreements surrounding the College’s policy regarding students hanging flags from their dorm room windows. According to the article, Dean Jason Shaffer, the Director of the Residence Life Office at the time that this article was published, sparked controversy when he informed Max Feinstein, a queer student, that he needed to remove the rainbow pride flag in his window as “a bystander may mistake [it]….as representative of the values of all the inhabitants of the dorm.”1Meredith Bennett-Smith, “Show of Solidarity For Gay Davidson College Student Prohibited From Flying Rainbow Pride Flag,” Huffington Post, December 16, 2013, accessed August 23, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com /entry/gay-davidson-college-student-rainbow-flag_n_4434917.  When we use the term “queer” in this essay, we mean people of sexual and gender identities diverging from the cisgender and heterosexual identities frequently deemed normative. Reflecting on the history of sexuality in the United States, students whose identities, desires, and self-definitions might fit under the umbrella of queerness today would have used other terms, including homosexual and gay, in the past.2Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, Queer: A Graphic History (London: Icon Books, 2016).

Many students protested Dean Shaffer’s statement by hanging rainbow flags out of their own windows (shown below). This included students who Feinstein initially thought “didn’t care” about or recognize the queer community at Davidson College. As a result, these students helped thwart Davidson College’s efforts to disassociate queerness from its visible brand as an elite institution that educates and graduates students who excel at socially acceptable standards of academic and athletic achievement. These otherwise mainstream students acted in solidarity with students who eschew gender binaries and heterosexual norms; together, they increased the visibility of queerness within the physical landscape of the institution.3 Bennett-Smith; Local News: Campus Debates LGBT Student Life, Flag Policy, January 27, 2013, Homosexuality at Davidsoniana File, Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC.

A photo of Chidsey Dorm after Max Feinstein was told to remove his rainbow flag.4Local News: Show of Solidarity for Gay Davidson College Student Prohibited From Flying Rainbow Pride Flag, December 16, 2013, Homosexuality at Davidsoniana File, Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC.
A local news article regarding the flag incident of 2013, also featuring an image of rainbow flags hanging from the windows of several dorm rooms.5Local News: Campus Debates LGBT Student Life, Flag Policy, January 27, 2013, Homosexuality at Davidsoniana File, Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC.

In an attempt to avoid publicly endorsing the message of the rainbow flag and pride in non-heterosexual identities, Dean Shaffer’s response to Feinstein’s flag sparked a renewed interest among the student body in discussing the experiences of queer students on Davidson’s campus.6Previously, discussions about the experience of being a queer student at Davidson College took the form of anonymous postings in the Davidsonian and events organized by FLAG (Friends of Lesbians and Gays), an organization formed in 1991. For more information on FLAG, read “Presbyterian Heritage and Queerness.”  Such a direct movement towards imprinting queerness onto the public appearance of the campus sparked conversations among students, faculty, and staff, especially in the form of “talkback” events, about the meaning of queer “visibility” that would extend beyond the initial controversy. By analyzing the actions of queer Davidson students advocating for equity, inclusion, and visibility, we can critically evaluate how queer students have been remembered and preserved in the college archives.

Queer “Visibility” and Campus Organizing

Though many scholars, including Mary L. Gray, Rosemary Hennessey, and Lisa Duggan, have presented different definitions of queer “visibility,” many emphasize that demands for increased “visibility” do not just refer to a desire to be recognized as existing. Rather, queer people who call for “visibility” want their non-heterosexual identities to be recognized as possible, natural, and normal in their communities, which have often rendered them invisible.7 Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009), 1-35. According to queer theorist Mary L. Gray, queer organizers in rural areas (such as Davidson College and as opposed to specific urban neighborhoods that serve as magnets for queer people) have often strategically heightened their visibility when organizing for their rights and nurturing a sense of belonging. By creating coalitions with other queer people and heteronormative allies, and taking up or marking physical space within communities that have failed to recognize their existence, rural queers initiate larger conversations about equity and liberation. In this sense, a pride flag isn’t a decoration; it marks queer presence and a challenge to those who would deny it.8Gray, 165-177; José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

Calls for visibility and inclusion in the physical aesthetic of Davidson College are prevalent in the college’s archival records of queer students. When discussing flag policy in 2013, students engaged broader conversations on representation and meaning. This included several students who hung the Confederate flag from their windows in response to the controversy over the pride flag. In the Huffington Post article shown above, Feinstein compared the removal of his rainbow flag to the promotion of ideologies represented by the Confederate flag, a symbol historically used to uphold patriarchal, and therefore anti-queer, white supremacy.9Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1-16. Feinstein feared that the College, rather than addressing its white supremacist heritage and the meaning of Confederate symbols, would deny all students the ability to hang a flag from their dorm window and publicly alter the physical image of Davidson’s campus. Feinstein expressed concern about a universal flag-ban that falsely equated the rainbow and Confederate flags. He argued that  “the person who hung the Confederate flag [would receive] exactly what he/she wanted,” the continued removal of pride flags on campus, while “the LGBTQ community is relegated again to the shadows of campus culture” and made invisible.10Bennett-Smith.

A clipping from the Huffington Post article that ran about Davidson College’s restrictive flag-hanging policy, as preserved digitally by the archives of Davidson College.

After the immediate removal of Feinstein’s flag, the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance), a queer student group established in 2003, hosted a talkback between students, faculty, and staff to discuss “how to increase visibility of LGBTQIA” campus group and students.11Local News: Show of Solidarity for Gay Davidson College Student Prohibited From Flying Rainbow Pride Flag, December 16, 2013, Homosexuality at Davidsoniana File, Davidson College Archives, Davidson, NC. Several students provided suggestions on how queer students could be more visible, supported, and empowered by the larger campus community, including creating an LGBTQ+ “safe space” on campus, revising tour-guide procedures to make queerness a more open part of the discussions prospective students would have about Davidson College, and even creating an art installation of queer presence and support on campus. Dylan Goodman, a member of the class of 2016, summarized the talkback: “We need to make sexual diversity a part of Davidson’s identity.12Sophia Guevara, “Talkback Focuses on Campus LGBTQIA Visibility,” Davidsonian (Davidson, NC), January 19, 2014, 1.

An article written in the student publication, the Davidsonian, after the 2014 talkback regarding queer visibility on campus.

The conversation surrounding the flag incident quickly evolved from a matter of one queer student expressing his identity to that of queer students collectively being recognized as important and valued members of the college community. Queer students and allies alike stood in solidarity with Feinstein to take up space, represented by the hanging of many rainbow flags from dorm windows. By organizing, attending, and participating in talkbacks such as the aforementioned GSA event, students championed the idea that queer students could, and should, be recognized and affirmed publicly by Davidson College. Queer students and allies asserted the right for queer stories to be heard, addressed, and acknowledged. Their calls for visibility, when examined closely, are calls for inclusion in the identity and history of an institution that, for more than a century, failed to record even minimal acknowledgment of queerness in its archival record.

Visibility, Community, and Institutional Identity

Queer organizing and advocacy that centers visibility is not without scholarly critique. Rosemary Hennessey and Lisa Duggan have argued that the visibility politics utilized by many mainstream movements for the rights of queer people have dangerously led into moments of cultural assimilation and a desire for queer people to be recognized as respectable deviants while still upholding heterosexuality as the norm.13Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 175-194; Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018). Even students who took issue with events that made visible expressions of queerness, such as the editors of the 1998 edition of student publication Libertas, which described fashion shows put on by FLAG (the prominent GLBTQ student group at Davidson College before GSA) as unimpactful and voyeuristic, recognized widespread feelings of invisibility as harmful to queer students and an urgent matter demanding redress.14“Why Did We Have to Stage this Picture?” Libertas (Davidson, NC), January 19, 1998, 5-8.

The Libertas article, “Why Did We Have to Stage This Picture?” sought to document what it was like to be queer at Davidson in 1998. A quote is highlighted: “There seems to be an invisibility of queerness on campus. Many students and professors, administrators, staff…etc seem to act as if there were no queer people on campus.”

As we elevate the activism and coalition-building between queer students and other community members and their calls for increased visibility, we must be cognizant of the limits of what can be known about that past. That the best-preserved elements of queer activism on Davidson’s campus center the notion of visibility does not indicate that other, perhaps more radical calls for justice and liberation, did not exist during the period discussed here, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example, during this same period, queer people on other campuses organized for access to queer-affirming sexual education, counseling services, housing, and health care; the creation of academic units centering Queer Studies; and the hiring and tenuring of openly queer faculty. Many of these initiatives sought to fundamentally change institutional structures rather than include a previously marginalized group within them. Did queer students then attending Davidson College also care about these things?

The archives are silent, but this lack of documentation of more radical calls for institutional transformation underscores the limitations of relying primarily on college-sanctioned written material and the importance of preserving personal papers and non-written archival evidence including photographs and oral histories. Until the latter decades of the twentieth century, college archives existed to maintain records created by the institution rather than document the range of student experiences. For this reason, the perspectives of whole groups are silenced or obscured. Davidsonian articles, one of the few sources documenting student experiences, often have filtered queer voices through the words of straight writers and editors. The result has been a loss of nuance. For example, the Davidsonian reduced the 2013 flag debate to an “anti-queer” versus “pro-queer” debate. Personal papers, including objects like flags and candid photographs of student life, and oral histories enable a more complex understanding of the past, and along with institutional records, their collection and preservation should be a priority of college archives. Oral histories with marginalized groups are particularly important. According to scholars Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque Rodriguez, oral histories that allow queer folks to tell their own stories of queerness, identity, and belonging do the necessary work of “disrupt[ing[ historical paradigms that do not or will not acknowledge the existence of bodies, genders, and desires invisible to previous historical traditions.” Oral histories, then, are necessary archival materials towards to goal of increasing and understanding queer visibility on-campus and within the archives.15 Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio N. Roque Rodriguez, Bodies of Evidence: the Practice of Queer Oral History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

Queer students’ activism for visibility at Davidson College and claiming of both physical and archival space corrects past presentations of the student body as uniformly cisgender and heterosexual. Open queerness is now part of Davidson’s brand, and the collection and creation of records documenting the experiences of Davidson alum who identify as GLBTQ would further foster the well-being of queer students here today and those who will attend Davidson College in the future. In this way, inclusive archives can support the work done by queer students who, despite seeing very little of themselves in the College’s history and aesthetic, insisted on being visibly represented as integral, historically relevant stakeholders in the identity of the institution that is Davidson College.