Defeating the Purpose

HOMOSEXUAL groups at Harvard have for some time been looking for the ideal way to bring their concerns to the forefront of campus debate, and, for at least a week at the end of last month, it seemed as if they had found the perfect opportunity.

The personal and delicate nature of the issue has made it difficult to bring cases of homophobic harassment to the public eye and to use them to mobilize campus awareness and concern, since victims are generally afraid to come forward with their complaints. Unfortunately, anti-homosexual bigotry is not alien to university life, and it is easy to understand the frustration which groups like Defeat Homophobia feel in trying to deal with the problem. One can therefore understand how quickly Defeat Homophobia was able to organize a Kiss-in at Mather to denounce homophobia after Sunday's confrontation.

BUT the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and Defeat Homophobia's zeal was misplaced. The group's eagerness to advance its cause led it to spotlight the Sunday incident, and to turn what should have been an important consciousnessraising session into the most bitter and divisive event I have seen in my three years at Mather House. If their intent was to educate students about homophobia and intolerance and to help the Mather community to become more open and understanding, the members of Defeat Homophobia were negligent in rallying around the Sunday incident.

As the accounts elsewhere on this page should indicate, an open-and-shut case of homophobic intolerance this is not.

The only thing clear about the whole affair is that by jumping rashly into the fray, Defeat Homophobia dealt its cause a worse blow than any vicious homophobe could have dared hope. Worse, what followed the incident seems to many to be a concerted effort by Defeat Homophobia and a prominent group of Mather students to obscure the issue, and to prevent discussion of the actual incident around which they had built their publicity machine.

Greatly assisted by three grossly misleading Crimson articles, which treated the incident as a straightforward occurrence of homophobic violence and implied that Mather House was thus divided only between enlightened citizens and petty bigots, Defeat Homophobia was able to turn a bizarre and unresolved charge of gay-on-straight harassment into a moral crusade, its alleged perpetrator into a martyr and the Mather debate into a purge of alleged homophobes: anyone who felt the incident to be an inappropriate cause celebre for even the most worthy cause.

The gay community's simultaneous exploitation of the Sunday incident and efforts to distract Mather discourse from any discussion of it raised serious questions about Defeat Homophobia's judgement, if not its true dedication to tolerance and education. In trying to raise our consciousness, it wounded and alienated a large group of Mather students, the friends of the visiting 17-year-old harassee. The tone of the debate at the ensuing Mather House meeting revealed a callous, mean-spirited side of what should be a caring, empathetic desire for tolerance and understanding in campus life. Their thoughtless handling of the situation has created a hurt and embittered group of otherwise sympathetic Mather students who will never in the future be able to take Defeat Homophobia seriously again.

THE real scandal here lies not with the events at the Mather party but with their exploitation by members of the gay community and a number of Mather students--which quickly became divisive and hurtful. The problem is not so much the more general issue of homophobia but the persistent refusal to acknowledge that a mistake was made in linking Mather's exploding anti-homophobia campaign and the party incident.

The present anti-homophobe crusade at Mather would not have happened without the catalyst of 19 February: Defeat Homophobia explicitly cited it at the Kiss-in and manipulated it to turn the subsequent Mather House meeting into a soapbox for speeches against the harassment of homosexuals. Defeat Homophobia talks out of both sides of its mouth: at Mather, the incident on that Sunday and more general concerns about homophobia are "completely unrelated" (as they should be), but for outside consumption the incident of "homophobic violence" that night is the rallying-point for community outrage. In as many days, three Crimson pieces told lurid tales of the abuse of the homosexual in that Sunday's incident, of Mather being "split" by homophobia, of it gaining a reputation as a violently intolerant house, of the gay community rising up in arms over the harasment of its members by vicious bigots.

The bitterness and anger of Mather students whose friends were involved in the original incident is easy to understand. They see themselves as victims of political exploitation and grandstanding, as an incident which should belong to the Ad Board alone is taken out of context and used to galvanize a campaign that portrays them as insensitive, morally constipated bigots for daring to try to set the record straight. Important as are the issues of homosexual rights and the need to end homophobic violence, it did not take long for the debate at Mather to become a sweeping demonization of anyone with the slightest misgivings about the antihomophobic campaign that has grown around the incident of 19 February. The friends of the alleged harassee were dismissed as victims of their own "small town parochial morals about homosexuality," and a chorus of tolerant, sensitive Mather citizens told their peers what it was permissible for them to think and feel about the matter.

The subsequent effort to persuade house residents to put large pink triangles in their windows as gestures of solidarity with harassed homosexuals on campus seemed, in context--to many Mather students--highly inappropriate under the circumstances. The tactics used to push pink triangles on reluctant students were as open and empathetic as the Mather House meeting a few days before: if you felt uncomfortable displaying a large pink triangle, you were aiding and abetting the brainless homophobic thugs of the world. Silence, after all, equals death. Is it surprising that Mather has lived up to the dark prophesies that it was a house divided against itself.

Defeat Homophobia is right when it insists (at least to Mather students) that the harassment of homosexuals and the as yet unresolved incident should be separate issues. But for the present, at Mather, they cannot be. Defeat Homophobia did everything in its power to ensure this. As long as they are not separate issues, they should not be pushed further--for the sake of the very cause Defeat Homophobia espouses. Now it is time for the gay community to show the bit of understanding they correctly urge upon the rest of society: to realize that what will most help all Mather students right now, gay and straight, is a bit of breathing space.

Christopher A. Ford '89 is a Mather resident