Students Coordinate BGLTQ-Friendly Hosting for Harvard-Yale

Members of Harvard College Queer Students and Allies are working with counterparts from Yale to provide BGLTQ-friendly housing for this upcoming Harvard-Yale weekend, during which Harvard students will travel en masse to New Haven, Conn., for the annual rivalry football game against Yale.

More than 30 Harvard students have signed up through the QSA to be hosted by Yale students this year, according to Josh E. Stallings ’17, one of QSA’s co-social chairs. This is not the first time LGBTQ groups at Harvard and Yale have worked together to coordinate housing; Stallings said QSA’s board regards the program as a tradition.

“We’ve had this mutual host program for as long as we can remember and, as far as we know, it was existing for multiple years previously,” Stallings said.

Stallings created a Google form in which students seeking a place to stay for the weekend were able to indicate their gender identities and preferences for hosts. Yale students then disseminated a housing form to potential hosts through their umbrella student organization focused on BGLTQ and allied activism, the LGBTQ Student Cooperative.

Stallings added that the purpose of the program is “to make sure that all students, BGLTQ students included…are safe and happy during Harvard-Yale weekend.”

Stallings noted that, while the hosting program “may seem like something very institutionalized…it doesn’t require that much effort.”

Coordinating the program is “a relatively easy thing to do because people are interested in doing it [and] because people will sign up,” Stallings said.

Alex Borsa, a senior at Yale and former president of Yale’s LGBTQ Co-Op, lauded the BGLTQ hosting program.

Borsa said the program allows LGBTQ students to know “if they are going to a foreign place for a weekend, that they can be hosted by people who understand their identity.”

Borsa added that although this hosting program does not necessarily encapsulate all the hosting that occurs within the BGLTQ community, “it’s great for Yale to show the same hospitality” Harvard shows when The Game is hosted in Cambridge.

“Harvard-Yale is a special time for symmetrical groups from both communities to meet,” Borsa said, adding that the program provides an opportunity to “foster an inter-collegiate community.”