Concerned Alumni of Princeton

Transcription

[MUSIC PLAYING] JILL DOLAN: I don't think people who aren't LGBT can quite imagine what it feels like to hear the lyrics of "Old Nassau" and feel both inside and outside of the University's anthem. Can they imagine how it feels to hear, tune every heart and every voice, bid every care withdraw, sung at alumni day or after a basketball game, and want to tune your heart to the song's invitation to community, but to wonder whether your voice is part of the every to which it gestures. Living an invisible subcultural life in a school like Princeton, which takes such pride in its traditions of belonging, is heartbreaking to contemplate, and to many LGBT alumni, painful to remember. BILL THOM: A recurring theme is the sense of isolation, that you were the only one world. AMY CAMPBELL: We separated our work life from our personal life. And as long as we did that, the secret was safe. HELEN ZIA: Being in my early 20s then, I just was like, OK, how do I answer this? Am I a lesbian? ALICE MILLER: I used to go to the university bookstore and flip through abnormal psychology books to try to identify something that looked like how I felt. KAREN KRAHULIK: I thought, well, gee, if I have a chance of being straight, it's probably going to be at Princeton. GARY KING: I can only point to one member of my class who I knew at the time I was an undergraduate who was out as an LGBT student. KAREN MAGEE: It was very much of a kind of secret society, almost. GARY KING: When it comes down to writing a history or researching a history for a group, which may, in a lot of people's minds, be an invisible group. I think it is a challenge. BILL THOM: When I entered in 1959, we were 10 years from Stonewall. Nobody I knew either there or anyplace else for that matter was openly gay, man or woman. ALICE MILLER: I've never heard of another trans person there. There has to be statistically. And I used to like to think I was the first woman to graduate from Princeton. But I don't really believe that. The university in those days was a couple hundred years old, and there has to have been, even if nobody knew what transsexual was and is. PETER LIGHTE: In certain ways, there was nothing easier about sexuality than there was about classical Chinese. And both were dispatched, I'm happy to say, in an environment that let that happen. But it certainly wasn't a walk in the park. HELEN ZIA: For being at Princeton in those days when there was so much activism, there was also so much homophobia. I think there was, not just for me-- I'm sure everyone who might have come out or might have been questioning at that time was also subject to the same homophobia that was there. GARY KING: One of my classmates was the head of the Gay Alliance of Princeton during our time there. On his freshman year dormitory, he hung out a banner for the Gay Alliance of Princeton. So if anybody was walking across near Wilson college, there was no way you could do this huge Gay Alliance of Princeton orange and black banner. Early in the second semester, the room was vandalized. So people broke into the room, vandalized the room, took the banner, and tore the banner, I mean, just tore it to shreds There was a full investigation. Any of the students who were found who broke into the room were suspended. So there was reaction from the university that this kind of action will not be tolerated by the university. We will not tolerate vandalism. We will not tolerate going into anybody's room. And we will not tolerate any prejudice against any of our student body. SUE ANNE STEFFEY MORROW: I'm Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, and I became associate dean of the chapel and religious life. I think for some of us it's hard to imagine, but maybe not for others of us, is how deeply closeted the students were at Princeton. KAREN MAGEE: Thinking back on it, I don't think the world at Princeton back in the late '70s and early '80s was much different than the world at large. I mean, there weren't a lot of people that were out at that point in time anywhere. TIM WU: I came to Princeton in 1980. And that was a time when the campus was really just starting to embrace the ideas of difference and diversity. It was a new paradigm. SUE ANNE STEFFEY MORROW: We wanted to reach out to the gay students. But where were they? And when I came in the fall of '81, I talked, I asked, I asked around. And it took me time to discover that in fact, there was a small group that met in the dark, back corner of the Murray-Dodge Cafe. The first meeting I went to, there may have been four or five undergraduate men there. The lesbians met in the women's center, which was in Aaron Burr Hall on the second floor. KAREN MAGEE: I was very involved in the women's center when I was at Princeton. So there was certainly a community around that. SHAWN COWLS: The role models there were the handful of students who are brave enough to be out and outspoken and known. One professor who was openly gay, Michael Cadden, was definitely somebody I looked up to. KAREN KRAHULIK: I'm Karen Krahulik, class of 1991. I wrote my senior thesis on gay and lesbian marriages, which-- god, I don't even know how I knew about them, but I knew that they existed. I loved doing this work. I loved going out there, finding people who had been married, finding the ministers who had performed the marriages, investigating the legal aspects, the historical aspects. SUE ANNE STEFFEY MORROW: I officiated at the first gay marriage in the university chapel. SUMAN CHARKRABORTY: When I was at Princeton, and because we were such a small community, we really wanted to be noticed on campus. We wanted the issue of closeted students and support for out students to be something that the campus was thinking about and that the administration was concerned about. And we used to have events throughout the course of the year in order to make that happen. Gay Jeans Day was one of them. And the message was simple-- if you support the LGBT community, wear jeans. On the college campus, where most people wear jeans, that was a tough message to sell. We used to have a Gay Jeans Day rally right outside the chapel. And people would be furious with us. They'd say, how can you put a message on something I wear every single day? For us, it was the conversation that it was starting. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMY CAMPBELL: Over time, building upon those quiet conversations, when the LGBT Center came along and the strength of Debbie Bazarsky and the folks in her office really created a climate where it was much safer and where LGBT students across campus were welcomed. [APPLAUSE] SHIRLEY M. TILGHMAN: Hi. Thank you. I can't tell you how happy I am at this moment. This is really a dream come true to have this center here in the Frist Campus Center, but more importantly, to have so many people here celebrating that we have such a center. I think all of you know that none of this, and I mean none of this, would have happened without Debbie Bazarsky. [APPLAUSE] DEBBIE BAZARSKY: When I first arrived at Princeton in 2001, there were very few out students on campus. I could actually name and count the number of students on my hands. There were very few students in general that were out. And a number of students I met chose to come to Princeton because they thought it would make them stay in the closet. They could have gone to more liberal or open institutions, but they thought that Princeton would keep them closeted. I feel like we've come from that place to the place where we are today, where we have 50 or 60 out students coming to campus already out every year. And we have a really vibrant community on campus. TOBIAS RODRIGUEZ: We should have a space like that, but we also shouldn't take it for granted, because there are many other colleges that don't have it. We're one of the few that has that and has a lot of programming come out of it every year. SHEHZAD UKANI: It's incredible to think that in 1972, someone release an ad in The Prince about "Closet Queens Unite!," and it's come to becoming an entire center. And I really feel indebted to so many people because of my very, very positive experience that I've had with a large part of my Princeton career here, particularly to President Tilghman, who is the reason why we have a center in the first place. COLE CRITTENDEN: For me, what was really terrific about Princeton is that it felt like this inclusive and supportive place from the day I arrived. KAREN MAGEE: I had the opportunity to serve as a trustee with both Harold Shapiro as president and Shirley Tilghman. And I think both Harold and Shirley contributed in enormous ways to making Princeton the place that it is today, making sure that all alumni felt welcome there. JEFF NUNOKAWA: What has Shirley Tilghman done for the gay and lesbian community? What has she done for the gay and lesbian community? I suppose just about as much as one single individual can do for a community. SHIRLEY TILGHMAN: This is, I think one of the most dramatic cultural changes that I'd ever experienced in my life, which is the change in people's attitudes toward LGBT individuals. So I think Princeton has benefited from that. But I think it is also attributed to the fact that we now have three members of our cabinet who are openly gay and have, I think signaled to the rest of the University community that this is a place where LGBT individuals can really thrive. [MUSIC PLAYING]