Left, Right Extremes Clashed on Campus

“I was literally a pariah,” Sean P. McLaughlin ’91 said, summarizing his college years.

An outspoken Catholic conservative and a member of Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, he remembered being forced to train off campus at MIT due to Harvard’s Vietnam War-era ban on ROTC. “I think that more than anything else defines my time at Harvard: feeling like an outsider in the University,” he added.

Conservatives on campus in the early ’90s felt they lacked an outlet for their voices and their opinions, which gave rise to the formation of organizations such as the far-right aligned magazine Peninsula, or the Association Against Learning in the Absence of Religion and Morality, AALARM. On the flip side of the political spectrum was the burgeoning gay rights movement, building momentum but still facing opposition on campus.

The Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Students Association holds an “eat in” at the Kirkland dining hall where several days before, slurs were allegedly hurled at two students tabling for Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Awareness Days. By William H. Bachman

Members from each side cited the feeling of being a minority in an at times oppressive community, despite bearing wildly different opinions. As the extreme viewpoints became more and more outspoken, Harvard was thrust into a period of fierce political debate.

AN 'EMBATTLED’ VIEWPOINT

Scott L. Merriner ’90 describes the Harvard of his time as a hard place to be conservative. “It was not very welcoming from freshman year to senior year,” he said. While not often faced with outright hostility, Merriner said the conservatives of the ’90s encountered an absence of venues for discussion of their views, be it in the classroom or the dining hall.

“For conservatives on campus, it was a little bit less than hostile. Something like ‘embattled,’” said Government professor Harvey C. Mansfield ’53. “You were always on the defense; you had to have your arguments ready and have to face the surprise of most other students who are liberals who usually don’t hear conservative arguments and view conservatives as morally and intellectually defective.”

McLaughlin echoed these sentiments and said he felt that his own convictions were poorly represented at Harvard.

“I was always very strongly pro-life. Anti-abortion. I felt that there was just no voice for that on campus,” he said. Even in traditionally conservative circles, such as the Catholic Students Association, McLaughlin said he struggled to find like-minded students.

“I was bummed that here I am at the highest seat of learning and that’s been compromised,” said McLaughlin, discussing an event at Mass on campus where a student led a prayer in support of a pro-choice march. “It was just sort of another example of some of the key players that you would think would be in the debate having been muzzled and chained.”

McLaughlin’s viewpoints were frequently pitted against those of Thomas B. Watson ’91. An openly gay leader in the Catholic community, he and McLaughlin said they rarely saw eye to eye.

McLaughlin looks back lightheartedly on the perceived rivalry. “We became sort of the poster children for two different positions,” he said. “It’s almost more comical than anything else.”

A CAMPUS FOR ‘EVERYONE’

Watson prefaced any discussion of social issues with a portrait of the Harvard climate in the ’90s. “It seems almost inconceivable today, but on campus during that time in 1990, there were very few gay people that were out.” For those who were out, things were not always friendly. “There’s no question that there was intimidation and fear,” he added.

With non-random housing, the Houses developed their own characteristic personalities, which helped minority communities find each other and form cohesive units. Dunster and Adams were considered the hubs for gay life at Harvard, according to Watson.

Despite havens in certain Houses, many BGLTQ students felt that inclusiveness at the University as a whole had room for improvement.

“Having a facial campus policy of non-discrimination without teeth and without an actual culture that was welcoming and safe meant that that was a hollow promise for people,” said Kelly M. Dermody ’89-’90, a former leader of the Gay and Lesbian Students Association. “There needed to be many more expressed statements of fairness that manifested in systems.”

Dermody and others created a list of demands for the Harvard administration, including having a designated BGLT-sensitive tutor in each house and training freshman proctors to know how to engage effectively with newly-arrived BGLT students, often coming out for the first time while in college.

“We also did things that were really fun,” Watson said. “Our dances on campus were the best dances by far.”

But still, their progress was often met with resistance. Some Harvard students had strong reactions to the rising gay rights movement. “The political nature of the gay groups I think really did—I don’t want to say caused—but was part of what gave rise to the far-right-wing groups that sprung up on campus,” said Watson.

PENINSULA EMERGES

In early 1990, the Salient was the premier conservative voice in print on campus, but some felt that its stance was too weak on important issues. McLaughlin recalled the culmination of his frustration, walking out of a Salient meeting where his pro-life article had been gutted and then shot down. “And a lot of us left that meeting and said, ‘My gosh, are there no outlets for our school of thought here?’”

By Crimson file photo

McLaughlin began gathering like-minded, socially-conservative individuals to start a new periodical named Peninsula, after the sentiment that they were surrounded on all sides but one. They released themed issues, such as those on abortion or gay rights, with articles penned in a characteristically sarcastic style. Peninsula set out not only to provide a voice for their brand of conservatism, but to spark a debate on campus they felt was not present, and deeply necessary.

McLaughlin looked back on his time with Peninsula as a success.

“I think that by carving out the far right we created space for people to argue,” he said.

“Peninsula played a valuable role in bringing those particular sets of issues and those questions and those debates kind of out of the corner and more into the central space in dorm rooms and around the dining halls and even to a degree in the printed pages of The Crimson and the Salient,” agreed Merriner, an editor of Peninsula.

CONFLICT ON CAMPUS

Peninsula contained polarizing opinions that provoked extreme responses on campus, according to a 1991 feature about McLaughlin in The Crimson. Merriner said he remembers receiving a few threatening voicemails due to his work on the magazine, and jokingly attributes his and his girlfriend’s breakup to Peninsula’s first publication.

Merriner said the group was small and sometimes struggled to find the money with which to publish. Members distributed the publication at night, spreading it throughout the Houses and dorms on campus. An incident occurred in Quincy House in the fall of 1990 where an unidentified resident collected and destroyed copies of the magazine after they had been delivered, according to an article in The Crimson.

Despite what was at times vitriolic criticism, McLaughlin remains positive about the magazine’s overall impact on the campus.

“I know a lot of good conversations came out of it. I know we took a lot of hits. We took all kinds of abuse from the extreme sides of the argument,” he said. “In the end I would hope that people appreciated the timing and the difference of view.”

Peninsula targeted the gay community with an issue that chided homosexuality for being misguided and promoted support groups to help gay students change their sexual orientation. The focused nature of its issues evoked a strong response from the groups that found themselves under Peninsula’s critical lens.

“I do not, and did not, believe it was appropriate to discuss whether gay people are equal or not. I thought we were,” Watson said. “In the process they hurt an awful lot of people.”

Even before Peninsula’s time, these issues played out on campus. In one particular incident, Dermody recalled a gay student allegedly being harassed during a dance in Mather House in February of 1989. In response, Dermody and other BGLT activists engaged in a “kiss-in” at Mather Sunday brunch.

“We wanted to get across to the Harvard community that we are allowed to be visible. We are allowed to be here. We exist,” Dermody said.

Following the Mather incident, many residents of the House, in solidarity with the BGLT students, hung pink triangles outside of their windows, a symbol used by the Nazis to mark gay citizens that had been reclaimed as a symbol of pride by the gay community.

In solidarity with the BGLT students, many students hung pink triangles outside of their windows following the Mather incident. By Gavin R. Villareal

In a plan organized by AALARM, more conservative-minded House members displayed blue squares in their windows or on their persons in defiance of the BGLT activism.

Watson recalled the blue squares in Mather windows. “That was extremely intimidating and terrible for so many students,” he said.

According to Dermody, the extremity of the conservative response alerted uninvolved segments of the student body to the issue of gay rights on campus.

“We got so attacked by the conservative groups that I think it alerted people who didn’t think once about the existence of gay people to sympathize immediately,” said Dermody.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

Despite the clashes between liberals and conservatives, the editors of Peninsula look back fondly on their contributions to political discourse on campus.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of debate and argumentation and thought that accompanied my time there,” McLaughlin said. “I think that’s what college is about. You’ve got to push everything. No other time in your life you feel that vibrancy.”

Merriner recalled the camaraderie he found as a member of Peninsula.

“I found the undergraduates that got involved with Peninsula were some of brightest, most engaging, most generous people I ever met at Harvard,” he said. “They were great young people. They weren’t out to pick fights. They genuinely believed that those perspectives needed to be voiced and that everyone would be better off with further dialogue.”

Watson looked back somewhat differently on his involvement in political debate at Harvard.

“The most positive thing I can say is that Harvard was in many ways a lab that launched many different activists,” he said. “We could see that history was changing and that we were right and that we knew it.”

Staff writer Ben G. Cort can be reached at ben.cort@thecrimson.com.

Staff writer William C. Skinner can be reached at wskinner@college.harvard.edu@thecrimson.com.