In October 2011 I did go down to Williamsburg for a weekend to participate in a weekend for William and Mary GALA. which was founded in the 1980s.
This article by Paul Brockwell JR (2007) appeared in the Alumni magazine and is on the WM site in 2014, here, titled "Pride and prejudice: LGBTQ history at W&M". The article mentions my 1961 Thanksgiving weekend expulsion except the person I told directly (and who called my parents, themselves on a road trip visiting friends in Charlotte, out of the blue, with my permission) was Dean of Men Carson Barnes, not Dean of Students Lambert (whom I remember). I was told that the president of the college David Young Paschall (do I remember the name right?) was contacted. On a certain level, given the norms of the time, they felt confronted with the idea that a 'non-male' person was living in the men's dorm (which is completely wrong by today's understanding and is totally different from trans-gender or non-binary). It's also notable that William and Mary did not have as many female students as male, which made male students feel more uncomfortable about finding dates and proving themselves socially.
Indeed, college dorms in those days of in loco parentis had sign-in curfews for women but not men, to "protect" the women from the men, an odd irony in that I was not a conceivable "threat" in that sense.
The article also mentions the story of author Tom Baker, a couple years later than mine. I've read his novel "The Sound of One Horse Dancing" from iUniverse (as are the first two of my three DADT books). Kirkus Reviews gives a good summary of the plot of his book.
It will be indeed interesting to compare WM in 1961, to 1986 (when GALA was formed) to now.
My experience, concerning the supposed 'privacy' of other young college men in the dorm, would parallel arguments made by Moskos and Nunn three decades later about allowing gays to serve (openly) in the military, leading to the Clinton-era DADT policy. But it could also be seen as a parallelism to today's intractable debates over educating kids about sexuality and especially gender identity issues. I would tend to believe schools have gone too far with their SEL programs, seeming to indoctrinate kids with quasi-Marxist collectivism and anti-meritocracy. But I also understand it is partly a matter of what the public 'gets used to'.
(Posted: Thursday, February 10, 2022 at 11 PM EST by John W. Boushka)