SAN FRANCISCO

Before he transferred to San Francisco State University from its sister school in rural central California, Emo Loredo knew only a few other openly gay students.
So it came as a pleasant surprise when he discovered his new college offered not only classes such as Homophobia and Coming Out, Gay Love in Literature and Queer Art History, but a full-fledged undergraduate minor in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that homosexuality was around way back in ancient times,” said Loredo, 24, who enrolled last week in a sociology class called Queer Cultures and Society.

“Before, I thought homosexuality was started in the early 1970s.”

San Francisco State was one of the first U.S. universities to plumb the scholarly potential of gay lives, starting with a single English course in 1972. But with issues such as same-sex marriage, gays in the military and the peccadilloes of politicians continuing to divide public opinion, other schools also are choosing to put them in an academic context.

After years of offering a smattering of gay-related classes, at least 30 public and private colleges now offer multidiscipline minors in LGBT studies, the majority of them established within the last three years. They range from DePaul University in Chicago, one of the nation’s largest Roman Catholic universities, to five of the 10 campuses in the University of California system.

Another 16, including Ivy Leaguers Yale and Cornell, allow undergraduates to earn certificates or to pursue concentrated studies in lesbian and gay subject matter.

The field has become so ubiquitous on campuses that Dr. John G. Younger, a University of Kansas classics professor who maintains a Web site devoted to gay studies, said he stopped counting the number of schools that offer occasional sections in lesbian literature or gay history.

“I began thinking maybe it’s useless to keep this list because every university probably has something,” said Younger, who travels the country advising colleagues on how to gain administrative approval for their proposed gay studies programs.

The expansion has given a discipline once limited to history, English or women’s studies departments a place across the curriculum, encompassing subjects such as religion and the law. Younger said one of the most interesting combinations he’s come across was an anthropology course at Duke University on “queerness in advertising.”

Last year, a Carnegie Mellon professor decided to use polls and studies of gay people as the basis for his freshman statistics seminar. One lesson involved asking students to guess how many people in the class were gay as a way to test their “gaydar.”