Word: schatz
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Leaders of the gay rights movement point to the first GLAD Day, last spring, as the starting line for the movement. Out of nowhere, 1000 people showed up. "Everyone was convinced it would be a failure," Schatz recalls. "And then all these people came. It was the first time something had been organized to make gay students feel good about themselves. It changed things drastically. We talk now about 'Before Glad Day' and 'After Glad Day.' Sort...
...trace the steps of the "AGD" era it is necessary to understand the environment for gay students before Schatz and other senior gay student leaders arrived at Harvard in 1977, and to follow the history of Schatz's political development at the University...
...Schatz remembers his first GSA meeting: A small circle of nervous white men sat around and discussed "topics like, 'Is there anything good about being gay?'" The organization provided a desperately needed but isolating social setting. If a gay student did not go to a GSA meeting, several members noted, the chances that he would meet another avowed gay elsewhere were slim. Most members had not, publicly "come out of the closet," and the few who had were not yet emotionally steeled to speak out politically. "They had to guilt trip somebody into being president each year," Schatz remembers...
...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, 'I am gay.' That has made all the difference...
...Schatz remembers his step out of the closet with less enthusiasm. "The thing that got me started was that I came out and started to lose friends. And it made me very angry." What saved him, Schatz believes, was a "stubborn" attitude. "If other people thought I was peculiar, then I thought there was something wrong with them. Most people, unfortunately, do not feel that...