Between Sex and Politics

Jeffrey C. Aguero ’07-’06’s date was going great. He was hitting it off with a guy from Northeastern, a friend of a friend, over hot chocolate at a Starbucks in downtown Boston. After a while, the conversation turned political, and Aguero mentioned that he was a Republican.

“All of a sudden, the guy completely cooled off and started acting really weird and standoffish,” recalls Aguero. “After I finished my hot chocolate, we said ‘bye,’ shook hands, and that was that. He removed me from his Facebook friend list a week later. I never heard from him again.”

Both members of the gay community and Republicans—many of whom cannot comprehend how a member of their group could possibly belong to the other—often spurn people like Aguero. “When some people find out I’m gay and conservative,” Aguero says, “they act like I’m a mutant or something.”

While the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and the Harvard Republican Club (HRC) profess to welcome students of all ideologies and sexual orientations, respectively, neither has proved itself to be a welcoming place for gay conservatives.

Conservative voices are met with hostility on the BGLTSA open e-mail list, according to both liberal and conservative members. The HRC, as evidenced by an internal conflict last year, has not found a position on gay marriage that satisfies to its entire membership. As a result, gay conservatives at Harvard, members of a super minority of “pink elephants,” seem to lack a home.

A GAY REPUBLIWHAT?

“Gay Republican” is, for many, a confounding classification. It can appear ludicrous for members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) community to vote for a party that explicitly and implicitly condemns their sexual orientation. Opposition to gay marriage is written into the Republican party’s official platform and the supposed tension is only perpetuated through high-profile “outing” incidents involving conservative public figures like former Virginia congressman Ed Schrock and Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz.

But gay conservatives at Harvard and across the nation see no contradiction—they believe that sexual orientation should not define political philosophy. “I always thought it was sort of odd that gay and lesbian people are perceived as being quite liberal,” says Joshua A. Barro ’05, a gay Republican who now works for a New York City bank. “I don’t think there’s any reason being gay should lead you to support bigger government and high taxes. These are issues that have nothing to do with being gay.”

Aguero adds that “being gay is part of who I am as a person and it in no way interferes or changes the political and social views I hold. How does being gay relate to what I think about tax credits? Why does my sexual orientation have to determine how I feel about the death penalty?”

“I would believe that being gay is just one part of their political identity,” suggests Institute of Politics President David M. Kaden ’06, who is also a Crimson editor.

WELCOME AT THE BGLTSA?

Still, Aguero says he feels alienated—not least of all from the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA), because it is too hostile towards his conservative ideology.

“I feel that the BGLTSA at Harvard is an extremely liberal and radical group with views that are almost entirely divergent from my own,” Aguero, who is also a Crimson editor, writes in an e-mail. “They politicize their events and activities so much that I have no desire or interest to go to anything because they always seem to be the same argument against the President, the government, the conservatives, the military, the Republicans, over and over again.”

Kara A. Levy ’06, a gay libertarian, says that while the organization has inclusive intentions, it is still not a comfortable place for conservatives. “Their behavior often seems to imply that being gay makes you automatically liberal about every issue, and anyone else is crazy and brainwashed,” Levy wrote. @They mean well, but it can be sort of insulting.”

Barro says the group aligns itself too often with liberal causes that don’t relate to sexuality. “The BGLTSA is this image of political radicalism,” says Barro, who some identified as the unofficial gay conservative spokesman in the club. “I’ve always found it strange when the BGLTSA allies with liberal groups on policies that have nothing to do with being gay or lesbian.”

BGLTSA political chair Joshua D. Smith ’08 confirms Aguero’s account of hostility to conservatives. “There have been quite a few times in the past when a gay conservative voice has posted on our open list and has been verbally criticized by many people on the list just based on what they said,” says Smith.

But Smith adds that those attacks are not representative of the BGLTSA as a whole. He believes that criticism of conservatives on the open e-mail list has lead to a problematic perception of the organization as unwelcoming. “I feel really bad for gay conservatives because I feel like there can be a wall between them and our community,” he says. “The majority of our community wouldn’t have a problem associating with them, but there’s a split in the community and that’s a problem that needs to be fixed.

Michael “Mischa” A. Feldstein ’07, co-chair of the BGLTSA, rejects the notion that the organization is unreceptive to conservative members of the gay community. “We try to make the BGLTSA welcoming to people of all political beliefs,” says Feldstein. “It’s definitely something we’re cognizant of. Whether we succeed or not, you’d have to ask people who identify themselves as conservative queers and their supporters. To the extent that any group implicitly endorses a political agenda, people who don’t support that agenda are going to feel alienated.”

While Feldstein, who is also a Crimson editor, says the BGLTSA board is “overwhelmingly liberal,” the organization is nevertheless nominally non-partisan, and avoids naming either political party in conjunction with its events or goals, which are nearly always related to GLBT issues. But though liberal views are not forced upon anyone in the group, one inevitably encounters them as a de facto consequence of participation in the organization.

AT HOME WITH THE G.O.P.?

The story at the Harvard Republican Club goes a little differently. Nestled within the notoriously liberal Harvard community, the HRC seems relatively welcoming to all conservatives, including queers, according to Aguero. “I think that the HRC does a good job of reaching out, though because of the overwhelmingly liberal climate on this campus its efforts go very much unnoticed,” he says.

Still, gay conservatives often find that the Republican camp is not unified in its support of GLBT students, specifically when it comes to the issue of gay marriage.

In the spring of 2004, the HRC experienced some tumult when then-club spokeswoman Lauren K. Truesdell ’06 told The Crimson that the club supported the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which would define marriage in the United States exclusively as “the union of a man and a woman.” However, the HRC constitution mandates that “the official policies of the HRC shall be based on the platform of the National Republican Party” and that “deviation from these policies must be subject to a majority approval of the board.”

A group of members, including Anne M. Lewis ’07, were upset because the club’s board had not discussed or voted on the issue. Although the G.O.P. included support for the FMA in its platform during the National Convention that summer, Lewis says that when school resumed there was still an “overhanging specter from the spring.”

“I felt, along with other board members, that we shouldn’t take positions on as yet unsettled issues within the party both nationally and locally,” says Lewis. “Issues like abortion, which, though divisive locally, do have ‘settled’ positions within the national platform—given that they have been a part of that platform for several years. FMA had been a part of the national platform for only a couple weeks when school began last fall, and hadn’t even been a component when the offending comment was made in the spring of 2004.”

Lewis and others brought a resolution to the board recognizing the diversity of HRC member opinions about the FMA, but it was unceremoniously voted down. In the end, the club’s official position was in support of the FMA, leaving a number of members with a bitter taste in their mouths.

“I don’t think it was all in vain,” says Lewis. “At least it forced members to think about how the club is perceived.”

HRC President Matthew P. Downer ’07 puts a positive spin on the ideological division: “When you have different wings of a party there will always be something of a tension,” Downer says, adding that the group tries to focus on common ground instead of fractious issues. “It forces us to keep open a dialogue in the club and in the party. The Republican Club, like the party, is a big tent. But I’ve definitely heard students who have said that to be gay and Republican often can feel ostracizing.”

By all accounts, the HRC welcomes its gay members but makes no unusual concessions to them. According to Joshua S. Downer ’09, HRC’s Freshman Member-At-Large, all issues, including gay marriage, are debated by the entire club. He says he thinks that debates about political issues are often framed incorrectly, and that too much emphasis can be put on personal experience. “In general, while personal experience can give you a window into the understanding of an issue, it doesn’t make you the ultimate authority on that issue,” he says. “At the end of the day, the strength of one’s idea is what’s measured, not the experience from which it came.”

For gays in the HRC, this means that their views will be recognized and considered, but that said, their presence will not exert undue influence in deciding the club’s positions on issues related to their livelihood.

Even conservative campus magazine The Salient seems to more or less be willing to consider the traditionally-liberal pro-gay marriage stance. Earlier this year, the magazine took up the marriage issue “through the lens of divorce rates, not gay marriage, which is where any discussion of the traditional family’s contemporary problems should begin and end,” according to editor Travis R. Kavulla ’06, who is also a Crimson editor. In other words, arguably the most conservative Harvard publication chose to focus on problems with heterosexual marriage rather than unequivocally attack the idea of gay marriage.

Still, while The Salient avoids directing its ire at members of the GLBT community themselves, its hostility to the BGLTSA, presumably as a consequence of the latter’s lefty leanings, is overt: an ad for The Salient asks, “Do you cringe involuntarily at acronyms like SLAM, BGLTSA and PETA?”

PINK ELEPHANTS IN LIMBO, FOR NOW

Without a truly welcoming community within the BGLTSA or the HRC, gay conservatives find themselves in an awkward, perhaps lonely, position. But it’s no coincidence that members of this tiny minority are unusually poised in discussing their beliefs, for they have to be. “I think that being in such a minority has really helped me to work out my own beliefs and feel very comfortable in what I believe,” says Aguero.

Nationally, the ranks of gay conservatives are growing, according to Patrick Guerriero, president of a gay conservative organization, the Log Cabin Republicans. “The same coming-out process that happened in more liberal parts of the country is now slowly happening in conservative places,” he says. “There are role models, TV shows, and political candidates who are openly gay and are inspiring a new generation of gay conservatives.”

Now the question is, how long it will take for them to find a home?