Word: colker
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Unlike GSA, the RLA founders started out with educational, rather than strictly social, intentions. But the aim was self-education, not the education of an outside public that GLAD Day organizers now designate as their goal. "They met at Phillips Brooks House and Ann passed around a reading list," Colker says. "They called it the Lesbian Study Group, and we all did readings and discussed them at meetings...
Lesbians at that time also believed their first obligation was to the women's movement. "Lesbians were not working on 'lesbian issues,' but on women's issues and we considered lesbian issues to be women's issues," Colker says. "We were fully integrated into the women's community and most of us were very quiet about being lesbians. We were working on affirmative action, women's studies, abortion funding at UHS, equal treatment for women's sports, the housing sex ratio at the Quad...
...coalition of gays and lesbians this year--one of the keystones of GSA's and GOOD's new strength--was unimaginable back then. "We looked down on the women who went to GSA meetings," Colker recalls. "We would say, 'Why are you doing that? Why are you hanging out with the boys...
...about gay rights has to do with a better integration of women into GSA." Knight says. Why lesbian women chose to direct their political energies toward gay rather than feminist issues when they did is unclear. Knight attributes it to the deterioration of the women's movement on campus. Colker believes that lesbians today have changed. "Lesbians at Harvard now are a different breed. We were pretty much separatists; the women now seem able to see men as feminists. And, on the other hand, men have now taken an interest in feminism...
Despite a legal memorandum from Ruth Colker, outlining the lack of protection afforded gays by state and federal law, despite a list of gay student testimonies recounting incidents of harassment and physical assault, despite a large collection of defaced posters (including one that said, "Hitler was right, Gays should be exterminated."), despite private assurances from the general counsel's office that such a policy would pose no legal difficulties for the College, the Faculty Council chose to reject a flat statement of non-discrimination policy because of its "legal implications." The Council did quietly agree, however, to make permanent...