A curious courage: the origins of gay rights campaigning in the National Union of Students.

In 1973 the national conference of the National Union of Students (NUS) voted to campaign for gay rights, making NUS the first national organisation in the UK to make such a public commitment. Using archive material, this article outlines how NUS came to this decision, and the initial challenges it faced in taking up this work. It explains that NUS was influenced by early liberation politics, but faced difficulties when this clashed with the belief of some on the Left in the primacy of the class struggle. Nevertheless, some important progress was made in these early years, even if some of the wider societal change was still elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]