Word: lgbt
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...Reconnecting with classmates often offers a second challenge. Having attended Harvard-Radcliffe in a different time, many LGBT alumni were not “out” as undergraduates. Coming back can mean having to come out all over again and potentially have a set of awkward conversations and even encounter rejection – an experience few want to relive. And then add in the fact that, even for those of us (like me) who were “out” and don’t have to worry about having to come out all over again...
...closer analysis of why people come to reunions, however, makes it pretty clear why this would be the case for LGBT Harvard-Radcliffe graduates of a “certain age.” People basically come back to reunions because they want to reconnect with Harvard, their classmates, and their younger selves. The idea of such reconnection can be quite unappealing for an LGBT graduate...
...Harvard, our alma mater has a checkered history when it comes to LGBT issues. As detailed in William Wright’s Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, a book inspired by a story uncovered by an intrepid reporter for The Crimson, the university once carried out active purges of its LGBT members. Those from the classes of 1970 and before, who attended Harvard pre-Stonewall—Stonewall being the 1969 New York riot which moved the modern LGBT rights movement towards a strategy based on widespread “coming out?...
...While the days of institutionalized repression might have faded by the time those of us in our 40’s and 50’s came to Cambridge in the seventies and eighties, there was hardly an affirmative environment. LGBT people have only been an organized presence at Harvard for a short time (the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, an alumni group, was only founded in 1984), there were very few openly LGBT faculty and staff, and no LGBT-oriented classes. Alumni don’t come back to the Harvard of today: they come back to the Harvard...
...then there is reconnecting with one’s younger self. For many LGBT people, youth was not a happy time but instead one filled with loneliness, confusion, and self-doubt. Having fought very hard to put the shame and pain of those years behind them, LGBT adults often have no desire to revisit those days. Why voluntarily go back to a time in one’s life that is remembered as so painful...