CAPE PORPOISE, Maine — Steve Bull got there too late to save Sturgis Haskins’ journals.
“His sister had already burned them,” Bull said.
Bull had driven hundreds of miles, through a spring rainstorm, to a tiny town outside of Bangor — he doesn’t remember which one — to retrieve Haskins’ personal papers. The coastal sailing legend and Maine gay rights pioneer died six months earlier in the fall of 2012.
But Bull’s waterlogged drive wasn’t for nothing.
“What she did have was two garbage bags of his stuff in her garage — and inside one of them was a whole year’s worth of Wilde Stein Club minutes,” Bull said.
Those minutes, now safely inside an archive at the University of Southern Maine, chronicle the early days of Wilde Stein, the state’s first major LGBTQ+ rights organization. Bull and Haskins helped found the groundbreaking student group at the University of Maine in 1973 — then held the first Maine Gay Symposium in 1974, which jump-started Maine’s LGBTQ+ rights struggle, launching it much further ahead toward justice than most other states.
But now, only a half-century later, much of the history surrounding Wilde Stein’s important early work has been lost, scattered as its founders grew up, moved away and got on with their lives. Most of the club’s earliest and most influential leaders, including Haskins, are now dead.
As the #OwnVoices movement grows in literature, pushing for authors from underrepresented and marginalized groups to write stories about people like themselves, the need to preserve Wilde Stein’s history through the voices of those who lived it highlights a necessity for history too to be told through the diverse experiences of those involved.
“It’s important because queer history is difficult to hold on to,” said USM Instruction and Outreach Librarian Megan MacGregor. “As a queer person, you aren’t raised in the history of it, you aren’t taught anything. It’s up to you to go and seek out the history — and not a lot of the history has been sought out at this point.”
That’s why a small group of activists and librarians associated with the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity’s LGBTQ+ archives at USM, including Bull and MacGregor, is collecting personal papers, memorabilia, photographs, T-shirts and newspaper clippings associated with Wilde Stein to preserve the history of the influential group, before more important objects are thrown out, burned or just go missing. They are also organizing a 50th anniversary Maine Gay Symposium in Orono and Portland this fall.
“If you don’t know your own history, it’s going to be written, and it’s gonna be written by somebody who doesn’t know anything and they’ll get it all wrong,” Bull said. “That’s the importance of the archives, to keep this stuff in place and document as much as we can.”
The club’s importance can’t be overstated in Maine’s modern equality movement, which was also informed by the Stonewall Riots and fueled by the 60s protest generation, MacGregor said.
“Wilde Stein is everything,” she said.
Bull, 71, said it all started when he and eight other UMaine students including Haskins, Karen Bye and John Frank, formed the club on Sept. 18, 1973.
They named it Wilde Stein after the famous gay and lesbian writers Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein. It’s also a cheeky nod to UMaine’s famous drinking and fight song, the “Maine Stein Song.”
The club was part of the first wave of gay and lesbian student groups trying to win official recognition from college administrators. Legal battles were already brewing in Georgia, Arizona, Kentucky and New Hampshire.
After winning only provisional status in Orono, Wilde Stein began holding weekly Friday night meetings in Coe Lounge, inside the Memorial Union.
“It had two sets of full length double glass doors and we were on display,” Bull said. “Attending a meeting was really the first step in coming out.”
He remembers some people would walk by the doors several times, at speed, trying to get a glimpse of who was in attendance.
“I came out to my friends and family since I was about to be interviewed on TV in Bangor as spokesperson for Wilde Stein,” Bull said.
Soon after, the Wilde Stein Club held a LGBTQ+ dance on campus. More than 40 people attended. A story about the event was picked up by the Associated Press and the club became national news, staying in headlines across the country right through its symposium the following spring.
Closer to home, Wilde Stein raised the ire of the Maine Christian Civil League’s influential leader Rev. Benjamin Bubar Jr., who took special aim at the dance.
“It could lead many innocent and unsuspecting young men on your campus to being recruited and enslaved,” Bubar told newspapers. “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, therefore they must recruit.”
The argument sounds familiar today, though modern LGBTQ+ critics have changed the word “recruit” to “groom.”
In researching documents for the LGBTQ+ archive, Bull said an archivist in Orono recently stumbled on a 500-page dossier kept by University of Maine administrators on Wilde Stein while contemplating upping its provisional status to official. Inside that, they found alumni pledge forms returned in protest over the student group, many hateful letters and also some in support. The archivist also found old employment application forms used by the university.
One of the questions was, “Do you have any homosexual tendencies?”
“It was great to read the frantic, back and forth memos within administration and how they feared us,” Bull said.
A week before the University of Maine Board of Trustees was to decide Wilde Stein’s fate in January 1974, the club issued a press release about its intention to hold the first Maine Gay Symposium in April. That same week, gay and lesbian students in New Hampshire won their right to organize in federal court. After that, the university trustees gave the club official status and the funding which came along with it, Bull said.
Still, in the following weeks, even more controversy swirled around Wilde Stein.
The Bangor Daily News published upwards of 38 stories about the club between the trustees’ decision in January and the April symposium. About 14 were front page news. The BDN also printed six editorials, three op-ed pieces and around 82 letters to the editor on the subject.
“You can add that to the considerable coverage in the Portland Press Herald as well as radio shows and TV coverage both in Maine and nationally,” Bull said. “We received hate mail and supportive mail from around the world.”
Bull also received a written death threat. The note came, ransom style, in block letters. It was left for him at the Bangor YMCA, where he often played pickup basketball.
“It said, ‘I’ve seen you alone in the shower at the Y. It would be so easy,” Bull said.
Putting on a brave face, he burned the note and told no one but never went back to the Y.
As the symposium approached, Haskins resigned from his post as Wilde Stein’s president because he’d yet to come out to his family. Bull took his place.
The symposium featured organizing meetings, discussion panels and speakers, including Morty Manford of New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance. Manford was famous for publicly going toe-to-toe with the city’s mayor in order to get the police off the gay community’s back.
The symposium’s influence reverberated, leading to the creation of more Maine LGBTQ+ newsletters and rights groups, including the one that would eventually evolve into EqualityME.
It also convinced Maine Rep. Gerald Talbot to introduce a gay rights plank in the state Democratic Party platform. The move passed — making Maine the second state to pass such a party plank — despite a BDN editorial equating gays and lesbians with felons, drug users and draft dodgers.
“We secured a written commitment from the head of the Maine Teachers Association that they would defend any teacher gone after solely for their homosexuality,” Bull said.
But the constant struggle took a toll on Bull and others. After a few years, he felt burned out and left Maine to study at an experimental law school in Los Angeles, where he stayed for the next 40 years.
Coming back to Maine a decade ago, Bull was surprised nobody remembered Wilde Stein’s history. The group still exists but in a smaller form. The symposiums stopped nearly 25 years ago.
Now, Bull and MacGregor are looking to the future — the 50th anniversary symposium, preserving the history and beyond.
“Somebody needs to write a whole book — and I hope it’s Megan,” Bull said. “It was never just me. It was always a group of people that gave me courage.”
MacGregor likes that idea.