The Gay Old Party

Harvard’s Republicans today are much like the hippies of the ’60s: both love to see themselves as provocateurs of convention, and both revel in the coolness of their dissent. They disperse in a righteous flurry of t-shirt making, protests, and campaigning, all with truly touching outrage.

Last December, the Harvard Republican Club (HRC), of which I am a member, proved its unnecessary belligerence by electing a man with the subtlety of a falling brick to the post of presidency. I will not be mentioning his real name because there is no need to taint posterity—and by posterity I mean Google—with his folly forever; people deserve a second-chance, after all. But actions also have consequences, and so this is one. Let us call him W.

W is a man renowned for making irresponsible statements on open-lists, in person, and in public. The HRC did not sidestep W for such yelping; rather, they rewarded him with their highest honor, leadership of a group of self-appointed watchdogs.

A rather extraordinary e-mail he sent to the Harvard Political Union open-list on September 7, 2005—and unearthed on the Cambridge Common blog— aptly illustrates this.

“I have only unmitigated hatred for the queer movement…I fully believe that queer activists’ picture of an ideal world is a thousand-member man-animal BDSM orgy in the center of Copley Square on videotape, and I say that with all sincerity.”

What a flaming imagination.

Then W proceeds to gently thrust his point home: “I am convinced that A) queer activists don’t need rights, they need psychological counseling and B) they’re basically being led by the Devil…giving a victory to an ideology of evil that will probably eventually spawn the Antichrist.”

Apart from the faulty theology—the Antichrist is supposed to be a sea-beast, not a fairy—what’s more troubling is how similar W sounds to the extremist group he criticizes. Like other radicals, W first tries to legitimize his own position by exaggerating the significance of his opposition. This is done to make the threat seem greater than it really is—thereby requiring an equally extreme response.

The threat now conjured, W then resorts to ridicule and caricature; he taints the queer movement as being fringe and ludicrous with his image of mass copulation at Copley. The irony, of course, is that such a statement only makes Harvard’s Republicans seem absurd. Indeed, W cannot even come close to tainting the queer movement because his rhetoric has ensured suspicion of his judgment.

W’s deviant fantasies lead us to a troubling conclusion about Republican activists at Harvard, if W is representative, as I think he is. This bunch has developed an entire narrative of victimhood, of severe oppression at the hands of some tyrannical liberal hegemony. They, and they alone, are those who courageously stand defiant in the face of the progressive bulldozer. And so they must fight mercilessly for what they see is right, even if it they end up doing it with the intellectual rigor of a napkin.

W’s statements I use not as proof, but as an illustration of the mentality of many of the Republicans I have encountered during my time at Harvard. Sure there are moderates; there always are, and they don’t deserve to be tainted by the same brush. But that W was elected to lead the HRC in the first place suggests something about the people who elected him.

Belligerence, hyperbole, gracelessness, flamboyance, and uninformed rhetoric. I expect this from other, more traditionally “martyr complex” groups on campus, like members of the BGLTSA (Harvard’s Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance) or the Harvard College Democrats for example. Instead, their collective mantle seems to have been passed down to the Republicans. And if W’s election is any indication, conservatives at Harvard are, sadly, destined to have a bad name.


Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, an associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.