Word: gsa
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...GSA never managed to expand its limited membership in those days--averaging about 50 students--RLA drew even more insignificant numbers. Ruth Colker '78, a third-year student at Harvard Law School, former president of Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS), captain of the crew team and member of RLA, remembers its creation. Ann W. Merrill '77 "announced the foundation of a lesbian group. And the women who showed up had never met other lesbians at Harvard; they weren't even sure they existed. She posted notices announcing the first meeting and the posters were defaced and torn down as soon...
...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...
...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...
...break into politics, gay students first had to let go of the self-imposed secrecy that had been their only defense in a hostile environment. Patrick J. Flaherty '83, treasurer of GSA, says. "Secrecy was our greatest enemy. The first step to being political is not being afraid to make a public stand. On other campuses I have visited, the students refuse to have their names in the paper, they are unwilling to do anything that will involve publicity." The opening scene for the movement then, Flaherty believes, was the day Ben Schatz "was willing to say out loud...
...first of many excursions out of the protected world of GSA's Saturday night dances at Phillips Brooks House (PBH), Schatz and a few other Adams House friends would try going to House parties, attempting to integrate Harvard social life with tactics reminiscent of 1960s Freedom Riders. "So many times, I remember, we would go to a Mather House party, start dancing and the party would stop all of a sudden and we would be told to leave. It was pretty ridiculous; there were four of us out of 40 people at a party and people would get upset...