Before Joe Kramer's historic queer literature course "Out and About," the tri-college consortium [Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore] had few classes with LGBT content. One sociology course about AIDS had been previously taught, but there wasn't much beside that.

The events of the last years of the 1980s cultivated a belief on campus that courses should have more content related to sexual minorities. After all, if so many of the students identified as sexual minorities, why should the academics not represent that? The Sexual Minorities Advocacy Committee was created to fight for the rights of those students, particularly in academia. It's clear that SMAC was influential in the short-term, as multiple classes, including "Out and About," started in the years immediately after its creation.

Beyond the historical notion of LGBT courses is the physicality of queer students in classrooms. If a student comes out in a course, either to the class or privately to the teacher, the student is not assured of their safety. A student may tell a professor their preferred gender pronouns, but that professor might choose to ignore them, committing an act of violence against the student. Classrooms are not always the safe spaces that they intend to be.