Alum Offers Yale $5M for Gay Studies Initiative

On Monday, Yale University celebrated gay writer and activist Larry Kramer and his recent donation to the university-over a million dollars-to fund programs for gay and lesbian studies.

The gift has been four embattled years in the making. In 1997, Kramer offered Yale a gift of about $5 million to fund a professorship in gay studies. The school balked, saying it would be unable to sustain such a position for financial reasons.

Kramer responded by calling Yale, where he graduated in 1957, a "homophobic institution."

This year, Kramer's ire seems to have cooled.

As part of a compromise with Yale officials, Kramer has agreed to donate his political and literary papers to Yale's Beineke Library.

At Monday's reception, Yale President Richard C. Levin welcomed Kramer's gift, saying his writings will join those of Gertrude Stein and others in the university's collection.

In addition to the papers, Larry Kramer's brother Arthur, also a Yale graduate, is giving the school $1 million.

That money will go toward transforming Yale's Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS) into the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Marianne LaFrance, a professor of women's and gender studies at Yale and the faculty chair of FLAGS, said both she and Kramer think this year's gift is the better for the university than what had first been proposed.

LaFrance said that originally, Kramer wanted to endow a professorship strictly for gay studies, excluding lesbian and other queer studies from the gift.

She said Kramer warmed to the idea of a more inclusive program, eventually himself pushing to have the word "lesbian" in front of the word "gay" in the program's name.

LaFrance said she felt that having only one permanent professorship in a field can cause a single voice to dominate the campus-a detriment in an emerging field like queer studies. Instead, she said Yale would continue to fund a semi-yearly fellowship in gay and lesbian studies.

"We can get really good people from a number of different fields," she said, including sociology, film studies, and cultural studies.

The controversy over Kramer's gift to Yale, which LaFrance called the "Kramer fiasco," has raised the question of what kinds of programs other schools, including Harvard, should offer in queer studies.

Bradley S. Epps, a professor in Harvard's Romance Languages and Literatures department who teaches the course "Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies," said the University has a long way to go in developing its programs.

"There is very, very, very little movement on the part of the Faculty to have a program in queer studies," Epps said.

Epps said Faculty from various departments, such as women's studies, English, or romance languages, have historically been pulled from their other duties to teach courses in queer studies.

"The positions should be created that would take some of the pressure off Faculty that should be teaching romance languages [and other subjects]," he said.

Epps outlined three steps Harvard could take to offer more in gay studies: publishing a brochure on such issues, the creation of a regularly offered curriculum in gay studies and "targeted hirings" of professors focusing on sexual orientation and "queer theory."

Epps said the lack of such courses and the non-recruitment of gay studies faculty makes Harvard "not exactly the easiest university to be gay in."