Inclusivity and Exclusivity Beyond the Frats

In 1984, a member of the Gay Students Association told The Dartmouth, “The only group truly discriminated against on this campus is gays. But we’re the only ones who, out of fear for emotional and physical safety, can’t fight for our rights publically – at least in this area.”¹ The idea that sexual minorities make up the most oppressed class – let alone the only oppressed class – is far from true even now, 36 years later. Although it was probably unintentional, this statement overlooked the issues women and people of color were grappling with in those years, and this attitude would have made it difficult for anyone other than white men to feel understood in such a vulnerable group as the GSA. Fraternities were not the only spaces that had problems with exclusion.

Women seemed to be the most outspoken about feeling excluded from the GSA, and their absence was the most obvious. Ever since the SSA era, predominantly gay student groups had “never successfully incorporated women into their membership.”² Claudia Card, one of the GSA’s faculty advisors, saw it as “basically a men’s organization.”³ Some of the issues women had with the group included the men’s focus on sex, which they were already tired of hearing about from straight men – “whether they wanted to bop each other or bop women, it felt the same”⁴ – and the worry that the men in the group would not take women’s issues seriously.⁵

One of the gay women’s most pressing concerns, however, was that these organizations would not do enough to promote “radical change.”⁶ The GSA had rather “moderate policies and goals,”⁷ and the SSA had been altogether “apolitical.”⁸ The goal of the GSA was “to provide a safe social space for gay men within [Dartmouth’s hypermasculine community] structure.”⁹ Women who wanted to challenge that structure would not have much luck in the GSA.

Some male members of these groups did recognize that they had problems with including women. When Stuart Lewan was first starting the Gay Student Support Group, he told The Dartmouth that “it was ‘twice as hard’ to be a gay woman at the College as a gay man because, ‘not only do they have to deal with being a woman at Dartmouth, they have to deal with being a gay woman at Dartmouth.’”¹⁰ Leroy Knight ’81 recalls that he “was determined to try to get women involved in the Gay Students Association,” and, along with others, “really made the effort to reach out and make women feel comfortable there.”¹¹ But contrary to what Card and Smith observed, Knight saw these efforts as “successful,” resulting in women making up “a quarter to a third of members,” which would approximately align with Dartmouth’s gender ratio at the time.¹² It was not for lack of good intentions that women did not feel comfortable joining the GSA at first, but even the well-intentioned male members had trouble seeing the extent of the issue.

For alternatives, lesbians often turned to the organization Women at Dartmouth. The D article about the GSSG’s first meeting mentioned that “some gay women at the College are involved in Women at Dartmouth as well as the Gay Student Support Group. Women at Dartmouth has had several discussions on lesbianism and offers its support to female gays.”¹³ Having these discussions could be difficult for Women at Dartmouth’s first openly lesbian members, like Mary Klages ’80. During her sophomore year, WAD held a “consciousness raising session” on lesbianism, and Klages volunteered to speak as an out lesbian.¹⁴ The experience was “traumatic” for her, because after coming out to a group of women who were mostly ignorant about what it means to be a lesbian, she was confronted with questions like, “Why do you hate men?”¹⁵ But she was willing to speak anyway, “because the conversation needed to happen,” and she found that as a result, she and others in the women’s group felt freer to come out and identify themselves as lesbians.¹⁶ Although Women at Dartmouth did not start as a welcoming space for lesbians, the group was able to meet lesbians’ unique needs by reaching out directly and educating themselves. They succeeded in this in a way the GSA could not.

Notes