Remembering Harvard’s Homosexual Purge

Twenty-one years ago on this day, The Crimson broke the news that top Harvard administrators had convened secret tribunals that expelled queer students in 1920.

On May 13, 1920, Cyril B. Wilcox, Class of 1922, a closeted queer student at Harvard, ended his life. In the days after his suicide, two letters arrived at his house. The letters, read by Cyril’s brother George L. Wilcox, Class of 1914, confirmed Cyril’s involvement in homosexual activities.

A distraught George would find Cyril’s former lover, Harry Dreyfus, and beat him into revealing the names of three people involved in Harvard and Boston’s queer community. George promptly told the Acting Dean of the College Chester N. Greenough, Class of 1898.

Greenough, still commemorated by a sculpture in Dunster House and a freshman dorm bearing his name, initiated a disciplinary process immediately. Independent of the “regular channels” involving the Administrative Board and faculty, Greenough, a professor, and three other members of Harvard’s senior leadership — including University President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, whose family name adorns one of the upperclassmen Houses — convened what would eventually become known as The Secret Court.

Over the next month, The Court launched an ‘investigation’ into homosexuality on campus. Those subjected to the queer purge were not afforded any real due process; instead, they were convicted on the basis of anonymous letters, loose links to other LGBTQ+ students, and intense interrogations that pressured students to out other queer people. One purged student, Edward A. Say, was found to be “notably effeminate in some degree” and faced scrutiny in part because he masturbated and did not participate in athletics.

In all, the Court found 14 people guilty in the early 1920s: College students Ernest W. Roberts, Class of 1922; Joseph E. Lumbard Jr., Class of 1922; Kenneth B. Day, Class of 1922; Edward A. Say; Nathaniel S. Wollf, Class of 1919 to 1923; Keith P. Smerage, Class of 1921; Stanley Gilkey, Class of 1922 to 1923; Harvard Dental School student Eugene R. Cummings; recent College alumnus Harold W. Saxton, Class of 1919; Assistant in Philosophy Douglas B. Clark; and four other Boston men.

The guilty students were not just removed from Harvard; they were forcibly evicted from Cambridge and many faced lifelong consequences for their links to homosexuality.

Acting Dean Greenough personally wrote to the Alumni Placement Service, blackballing the expelled students from future job opportunities. He also blocked the purged students’ attempts to finish their education: Greenough contacted his counterparts at Brown University, Amherst College, and the University of Virginia to ensure Lumbard’s application would be rejected. After deciding to deny Lumbard, the dean of Brown University would thank Greenough for his “wise and just” disciplinary actions.

A century later, what’s striking about Harvard’s response is how virulently personal it was. There was no attempt to masquerade the purge as a legalistic proceeding; Harvard leaders instead went to great lengths to shatter the lives of the accused students and erase them from the record books. Lowell himself crossed Clark’s name off Harvard Corporation records.

Unfortunately, Greenough and Lowell’s efforts to bury homosexual purges at Harvard worked. For 82 years, the records of The Secret Court of 1920 were trapped in a locked filing cabinet. Though University procedure traditionally dictates that archival records be made public after 80 years, the College delayed The Crimson’s efforts to view the Court archives in 2002. When Harvard finally relented and released the documents, they redacted all the names of students involved.

In response to The Crimson’s reporting, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers said that The Court was “part of a past that we have rightly left behind.”

But that’s precisely the problem: It isn’t enough to leave behind the buried past. Our institution must actively confront that we walk on a campus that still honors those who sought to exclude the marginalized from education.

Unfortunately, Harvard has largely ignored demands to memorialize the Secret Court. Despite persistent pressure — including a 2002 Crimson editorial, a petition with more than 5,000 signatures, and multiple virtual panels — our College has long refused to honor those purged by The Court by granting them posthumous degrees.

Harvard is unwilling to commit to this simple, nearly costless demand for recognition, let alone engage in the more rigorous — and, truthfully, more substantial — project of creating the infrastructure to fully study Harvard’s past suppression of queerness, like a full-fledged Women, Gender, and Sexuality department.

Harvard must begin to include the study of sexual and gender identity in academic discipline. Without intentional efforts to uplift LGBTQ+ history, the stories of closeted people can easily remain invisible, as the Secret Court was for 82 years. Though The Secret Court now figures as Harvard’s most overt transgression against the queer community, it could well have never seen the light of day. Instead, it became the subject of multiple national articles, and the reporter who broke the story, former Crimson President Amit R. Paley ’04, would later become the CEO of a leading LGBTQ+ organization, the Trevor Project.

This tragedy is by no means our institution’s only failure. Past admissions officers admitted they saw homosexuality as a threat; student organizations targeted queer faculty and peers; anti-queer articles, including one that characterizes the Secret Court as “very appropriate” and another that calls transgender identification a “trap,” appear throughout The Crimson’s history.

Building a queer-inclusive institution begins by reckoning with our obvious failures. After all, if our College can’t even appropriately respond to the Secret Court, then how can we trust it to confront the less visible harms of ongoing queerphobia?

Aaryan K. Rawal ’26 is a Government concentrator in Eliot House. Their column, “Queer Queries,” runs bi-weekly on Tuesdays.