Tolerance Comes Out

THREE YEARS AGO, when they were still ducking food thrown in dining halls and fighting to keep their posters from being defaced and torn down, the members of a small and struggling Gay Students Association (GSA) might not have believed they could accomplish so much so soon. This fall, Harvard's first funded student government elected a gay student--in fact, a highly visible gay activist--its first chairman.

Perhaps more significant, though, was the unsensational, almost matter-of-fact nature of the event. Though the national media seem poised to cover "Harvard's election of a gay chairman," students here seemed to have no thought of such fanfare. The chairman, Michael Colantuono '83, has used his GSA experience as a campaign vote-getter but, now in office, he downplays the label "gay activist"; he promised the council while campaigning that he would not impose his politics or "progressive views" on them. For the meteorically successful Harvard gay rights movement, it may seem that a truly wonderful goal has been attained--this is the year that a gay student could be elected to a pivotal post without his gayness figuring as an asset or a liability. The chairman simply happens to be gay.

But such success has its dangers too. This is also the first fall since the movement took off that the GSA president's name has not been one of the most well known on campus. And of the students who have followed the GSA's attempts to win a nondiscrimination statement from the Faculty, to place GSA materials in registration packets, to secure apologies for offensive behavior from the yearbook and from an outspoken scholar, few are even aware this year that the group itself has merged and changed, now calling itself the Gay and Lesbian Students Association (GLSA).

GLSA co-president Robert Mealy '85 says the group has to some extent "turned inward," stabilizing and concentrating more attention than before on enriching the life of the gay community. Efforts so far have been paying off; membership in the now almost evenly gay and lesbian group is up, and more gay freshmen and off-campus students know of its existence. "It's a regathering of strength; we're feeling our way," Mealy says, adding, "There was a real need felt last year for more community."

Such a period of regeneration is healthy for any group, and the present, with the substantive gains in gays' position at Harvard clearly evident, may be the ideal time for it. But for a group facing the GLSA's particular challenges, it also poses a special danger. For anyone who was at Harvard while leaders like Benjamin Schatz '81 and his cohorts were sparking what some called the fastest-growing student movement on campus, it remains impossible to retain the blind and stereotypical views most people bring to college. With gay rights a burning issue, only the most insulated could avoid questioning assumptions and gut reactions.

But the administration, as the GSA and numerous other student groups have found, proved less receptive, and the gains in gay rights that were committed to paper were distressingly few. The Faculty at the time refused even to place on the books a non-discrimination statement, such as nine out of eleven Harvard faculties had adopted already.

That institutional stubbornness means, of course, that the GLSA must now take full advantage of the representation within the system that Colantuono's election affords. But it also means that, in this community where 1600 uneducated and often homophobic freshmen arrive each fall, gays must not only formalize those gains swiftly but continue to maintain the visibility level that made them possible in the first place.

That the student body and then the council could elect Colantuono is a tribute to the success of the movement and to the level of enlightenment it has produced on campus. But if those who were emotionally and not just legally enlightened by the events of the past few years graduate without replacements, it will soon become clear just how evanescent those gains were.