Word: gayness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hoped I was leaving anti-gay paranoia behind me when I moved from my intensely conservative and moralistic home town to liberal, enlightened Harvard. But with a cynicism about Harvard one would be more likely to expect from a jaded senior, I asked my journal just before freshman week, "Did I graduate into a more mature world, or just a smarter...
Many of my friends freshman year, including a roommate, submitted me, in their unjustified assumption that I was straight (it never occurs to straights that their friends might be gay), to endless pretentious justifications for beliefs in the inferiority of homosexuality. And, of course, there were the hundreds of fag jokes. [All the evidence necessary to demonstrate the astonishing and brutally insensitive ignorance of straight Harvard is that, although most people at Harvard would become hysterical upon hearing a "kike" joke or a "nigger" joke, a "fag" joke rarely elicits a single protest...
...became aware of the Harvard-Radcliffe Gay Students Association (HRGSA) during the fall of freshman year. Signs appeared one week announcing that the following Wednesday would be Gay Wednesday. Gay people should wear jeans, and straight people should wear "something else," the signs said. The ostensible purpose was to make gay people visible or detectable to enable them to meet each other. In fact, Gay Wednesday was a neat ploy to parody the notion that "you can tell" who's gay. The event tried to get straights to think about their prejudices for a day by making them sweat about...
...homophobic roomate announced with disgust, but with authority, that the purpose of Gay Wednesday was to help the "queers" identify sexual prospects. It never occured to him that gay people did anything but perpetually screw. He was insensitive to the idea that maybe gay people wanted to have sympathetic friends and live normal lives. I certainly wished I had a roomate who didn't heap on anti-gay abuse...
Shortly after Gay Wednesday, the president of HRGSA, Joe for now, wrote to The Crimson to respond to the anti-gay mania, and to try to explain the purposes of Gay Wednesday. He signed the letter. I was positively astounded. I could not believe that there was a human being alive with the courage to sign that letter. As it turned out, I knew him--he was in a class of mine--and because of that letter, I came to admire and respect him as I respected few people in the world...