38 ForOregonState.org/Stater COURTESY OF DAVID AND MARY LOU WAGNER S SOMETIMES, LIFE AT OREGON STATE aligned with — and was quickly changed by — larger, national social phenomena. Following World War II, the university experienced an influx of veterans and married students. Birth control was legalized for married couples in 1965 and then for all Americans in 1972. College campuses became focal points for civil rights activism in the ’60s and ’70s. There was the Vietnam War and the countercultural movement. All of this had a profound impact on student life. Codes of conduct and dress codes relaxed. Modesty-maintaining rules for women’s attire dropped from the student handbook in 1970, and co-ed dorms were established soon after. “There were a lot of overhanging traditions that were kind of going by the wayside because it was a different era,” says Binker,who attended Oregon State from 1969 to 1973. The atmosphere trended toward giving women more agency, including in their relationships; at the same time, she noticed that there was still strong pressure to couple up: “Even with all that broader political, social change,” she says, “the actual way things played out, people wanted to find somebody and to get married.” It’s also worth pointing out the implicit assumption, demonstrated across a range of traditions and practices, that romantic relationships would develop between men and women largely excluding Oregon State’s queer students. Dating among men and women “was very public on purpose,” said Natalia Fernandez, curator of the OSU Queer Archives, “whereas in this community, it was private for so many reasons, whether it was people were being actively discriminated against [or] people were still figuring out identities for themselves.” After all, consensual same-sex sexual activity was illegal in Oregon until 1972. Well into the ’90s, the decade of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act, gay rights were still furiously debated in op-eds in the Daily Barometer: “How anyone can call love perverted or immoral is beyond me,” one student wrote in response to a conservative piece published in 1992. “Who cares whether people in love are of opposite genders or the same?” But queer students began carving out more space forthemselves on campus in the’70s.With the emergence of organized national civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights movements, students were increasingly organizing around identity, according to Cindy Konrad, the director of Oregon State’s Pride Center. In 1973, the Women’s Center opened and became “a real focal point for LGBT people,” Konrad says; four years later, students established the first LGBT club to gain university recognition. In 1999, Carolyn and Ellen (Weigant) Dishman, who had recently begun dating, started attendDavid Mary Lou Wagner When David and Mary Lou Wagner married in 2017, it was not the first time they had gotten together. They actually first dated back in 1955, when Mary Lou, ’57, was a dance instructor at the Memorial Union and David, ’56, was her student. Things seemed to be going well — until the summer, when something went sideways. David, who had gone home to Aurora, called Mary Lou down in Boulder, Colorado, and when she came on the line, “It was a flat phone call,” he says. “It was like, ‘Huh, what happened?’” The relationship was over, but he never forgot her. More than 50 years later, after they each had been married twice, David reached out, reigniting their old flame. At first, they just spent hours on the phone; David called Mary Lou mornings on his commute to Salem, where he works as a physician. (When David told his son and daughters that he was dating Mary Lou, they were ecstatic. “One of them almost knocked me over,” he says.) Seven years ago, they married. Asked what had changed in their relationship more than 50 years on, David says, “No more flat phone calls.” They live up in what’s now Wilsonville, on the site of David’s family farm. And they’re regular attendees at Oregon Statebaseballgames. ڿ More than 50 years after their college relationship abruptly ended, David and Mary Lou reunited.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==