"I don't think Colby was significantly more conservative than the society in which it existed," the alumnus told Lindquist. Lindquist finds the first mention of homosexuality in The Colby Echo in 1971, in an article intended to explain what it meant to be gay at Colby and to present homosexuality in a positive way. It wasn't until the 1980s that the issue came to the forefront again as gay and lesbian students decried "the heterosexist atmosphere" on campus.

Lindquist also traced changes in the College curriculum, noting Professor of English Phyllis Mannocchi's first gay-lesbian-oriented course, offered in 1985. Amid outbreaks of homophobic graffiti and other, more subtle forms of harassment, faculty expanded the course offerings to increase students' exposure to alternative lifestyles.

Lindquist said her experience doing the research was both discouraging and heartening. She felt it was important to capture the history of these issues, to tell "the untold story." She also wanted to remain a historian, detached from her subject, but found herself moved by the stories she heard. Sometimes she was so saddened by accounts of discrimination, some decades-old but still heart-rending, that she would want to take a break. "There were days when I said, 'I can't work on this today.'"

But she said she was encouraged when she received responses from every person she contacted about the project and by the fact that no one on campus ever asked her, "Why are you studying that?" Her father, a Massachusetts business owner she described as "conservative" and initially surprised by her choice of topic, ultimately urged her to forge ahead when she was discouraged. "He said, 'This is something important. It's something that means a lot to people,'" Lindquist said.

She predicts that the protests of the Coalition for Institutional Responsibility in 2002 will not have been in vain and that future generations at Colby will benefit from that group and other pioneers. Lindquist quotes an alumnus from the Class of 1969 who told her, "Colby still struggles with its soul."

Lindquist, who will teach at the Taft School in Connecticut in the fall, also quotes Martin Luther King Jr., who said, "All progress is precarious. . . " Her thesis concludes, "Indeed, it seems that each time the College makes a step forward in fighting discrimination, another obstacle appears, daring us to keep fighting, to keep working for change."

- Gerry Boyle '78