Brian J. Bergquist Papers, 1968-1998

Brian Joel Bergquist was born on July 2, 1958, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, son of Reuben and Joan Bergquist. He grew up in Council Bluffs, where he won awards for debate and public speaking, acted in student plays, and served as student body president at Abraham Lincoln High School. In 1975 he moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend Northwestern University and graduated in 1980 with a degree in communication, concentrating in radio, television, and film. While a student at Northwestern he went to work in its student center, and after graduation, from 1980 to 1984, was its facility and events manager. He was also active in theater, film, and radio work in the Chicago area. He developed weekly radio specialty shows for WNUR-FM, organized and produced for a student-run video production group, and designed and directed scenic and lighting installations for theater productions. Infected with the Hollywood bug, he moved to southern California in 1984 went to work in production there. He was in Hollywood only three years, however, before he applied for the position of assistant director and coordinator of conference services in the Student Union at Boise State University in Idaho. He wrote to the student union's new director, a former colleague freshly hired from Northwestern University: "You may wonder why I am interested in the position at Boise State University after leaving the staff at Norris Center to try my luck in Hollywood. To be blunt, I don't find the work here to be as personally or professionally satisfying....I miss the vitality, the inspiration, and the stimulation of being part of a University community."

Bergquist was hired at Boise State and went to work as part of the administrative team in the Student Union in 1987. He also quickly immersed himself in the activities of the local gay community. He was a founder of the advocacy and lobbying group, Your Family, Friends, and Neighbors (YFFN) and led the effort to organize the first Gay Pride parade through the city in 1990. Although the gay community in Boise had celebrated Gay Pride Week with a picnic and other low-key activities for several years, it had never staged such a public event. "The very idea of a Gay Pride Parade sends chills down the back of many in Boise...," he wrote in the November 1989 issue of Out!, Boise's gay newspaper. "But why a Gay Pride Parade?" He enumerated the reasons. "A Gay Pride Parade would create a focus for the community. It would create a spectacle. It would create momentum. It would create visibility. It would create controversy. It would create interest. It would cry out to the greater Boise community that we are here and we exist and we deserve to be able to have our day in the sun." He continued: "A Gay Pride Parade will help us to understand that we are part of a larger, national movement. A movement that is making progress. We are not an isolated island, but part of the great tide of human diversity." The parade was held in June 1990, with an estimated 350 marchers, the first of what became an annual event.

Three years after that first parade, a reaction to the growing visibility of the gay community came with the organization of a petition drive by a newly-formed group called the Idaho Citizens Alliance to place what was termed the anti-gay initiative on the ballot at the next general election. The initiative addressed a wide range of issues, from pro-gay books in public libraries to references to homosexuality in the classroom. Bergquist led the statewide effort to defeat the initiative, first as co-chair of the organization Don't Sign On, which urged citizens not to sign the initiative petition, and then through the No on One Coaltion, which campaigned against it once it was placed on the 1994 ballot as Proposition One. With a broad coalition of support, the proposition was defeated at the polls, though only by the slim margin of 3,000 votes statewide.

Brian Bergquist died of a sudden heart attack four years later during Gay Pride Week in Boise in 1998. He was memorialized by tributes in Boise's daily newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, and in the pages of Boise's gay newspaper, Diversity. A student lounge in the Boise State University Student Union was named for him. A wall display of photos, newspaper articles, and other items commemorates his life there. He was survived by his mother, a brother, and his partner of nine years, John C. Hummel.