Word: gay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...light of the recent debate about ROTC presence on campus, we feel that it is important to examine homophobia and the role it plays in the military. Harvard has an explicit policy protecting the rights of gay students. The U.S. military and ROTC are in conflict with this policy because they do not allow gays, lesbians or bisexuals to join the services, claiming that we are more susceptible to blackmail and therefore pose a more serious risk to "national security" than do heterosexuals. Two recent studies commissioned by the Department of Defense (D O D) have shown that the claim...
...Webster's 1980 "newly revised" dictionary does not have an entry for the word, so we point to Audre Lourde's definition: "A terror surrounding feelings of love for members of the same sex and thereby a hatred of those feelings in others." As you might expect, the gay community is painfully aware of homophobia when we experience it in discriminatory policies, in rejection by family and friends, in societal assumptions that we are straight, in our exclusion from mainstream culture, in censorship and misrepresentation of our culture, as well as in incidences of anti-gay epithets and violence...
Massachusetts joined ranks with Wisconsin as it became the second state in the nation to enact gay rights legislation. Ten other state legislatures are considering gay rights legislation, including Connecticut, Vermont, and New Jersey...
Airline Isaacson, co-chair of the the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, the major lobbying organization for the bill, emphasized the victory as proof that the gay and lesbian community "can continue to win in political and legislative arenas...
BOSTON--Gov. Michael S. Dukakis yesterday signed into law the Gay Civil Rights Bill, extending basic civil rights to gay and lesbian citizens and bringing to an end a 17-year-old stuggle in Massachusetts state politics...