GAY LIB AND SOCIAL CHANGE

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In the October 31 Crimson article about the Harvard-Radcliffe Gay Students Association (HRGSA), the only HRGSA member who discussed the politics of gay liberation dismissed as 'paranoiac' those who link gay struggles with other movements for social change. As supporters of the gay liberation movement, we strongly disagree.

Those who arrest, beat, fire and ostracize gay people are shock troops defending male supremacy. They oppress gay people in order to enforce traditional sex roles--to keep women emotionally and sexually dependent upon men, and to keep men competitive and hostile toward each other. For the people who rule this country, defending traditional sex roles is not joking matter. Male-defined sex roles keep women down within the family and divide workers against each other--conditions which weaken the ability of the working class to control its own destiny. Women's resistance to sexism, especially the post-1965 feminist movement, thus strengthens those of us who seek to build socialist democracy in America. And surely, the feminist movement has been crucial to the rise of the mass gay movement since 1969.

In short, the gay and women's movements against sexism, and the socialist movement, are mutually supportive. If we pull together, as in the antiwar movement, we can win. If we don't--we lose. In Nazi Germany and junta Chile, the fascists were and are impartial--they killed socialists, feminists, and gay people by the thousands. With this in mind, it's realism, not paranoia, to say that if we don't all hang together, we'll all hang separately. Diana Sperling,   HR Women's Center and HR NAM Womens' Caucus   David Price,   HR NAM Equal Admissions Committee