Read this first.
Never begun a diary that way. Never felt the cause or reason. I ... don't often get diary ideas from diaries.
So go read that other diary first. If you read it when it came out, read it again. It will give you or re-place you in the proper context for this diary.
For Eugene and Cyril and everyone else.
If he is expelled, [Ernest Weeks] Roberts[, son of U.S. Rep. Ernest William Roberts,] threatens publicity.
Harvard graduate Joseph E. Lumbard Jr., Class of 1922, Edward A. Say’s roommate, to The Court, Harvard secret body inquiring into homosexual acts at the school
Mr. Cummings has called this evening here at the house. [...] I went to talk with him. He says that he personally is alright but that Roberts is not a ‘moral man’ and is addicted to the same practices that Parker [Harry Dreyfus] is.
Letter from George Wilcox, brother of Cyril Wilcox, to Acting Dean of Harvard College Chester N. Greenough, concerning the ex-lover of his brother, Cyril Wilcox
[Roberts is] certainly the ringleader in the homosexual practices in college.
[Kenneth B. Day, Harvard Class of 1922, Cyril Wilcox's roommate,] admits he is probably a little tainted [by homosexuality]. Mind poisoned.
“Notably effeminate in some degree,” scribbled one Court member in his notes. They asked him if he knew what a “faggoty party” was, but Say said he “could only guess.”
[Nathaniel S. Wollf, Class of 1923,] was fighting hard and felt that he had overcome [homosexuality]. Says he is 90% OK.
The Court
[Assistant in Philosophy Douglas B. Clark] eventually broke down and confessed to approaching “S14” hoping for homosexual relations. Clark told The Court he had “been lying to cure himself and thought he was succeeding.”
While in his Freshman year he met in college some boys, mostly members of his own class, who committed upon him and induced him to commit on them ‘Unnatural Acts’ which habit so grew on him that realizing he did not have strength of character enough to brake [sic] away from it concluded suicide the only course open to him. [...] the most disgusting and disgraceful and revolting acts of degeneracy and depravity took place openly in plain veiw [sic] of all present.
Anonymous Harvard graduate, Class of 1921
Eugene R. Cummings never found out he was judged “guilty.” On June 11, 1920, the 23-year-old dental-school student whose high-school motto was “Never say die!” committed suicide at Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary. The medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was “poisoning by corrosive sublimate taken with suicidal intent probably while mentally deranged.”
Ninety years after Harvard took deliberate and career- and life-ending steps to eradicate homosexuality from its campus:
People in this country are still blackmailed because of their sexuality because in 30 states and in some occupations, they can be fired for being gay. (And then they can absolutely go to court, but meanwhile, you can't pay rent with righteous indignation. I come out very carefully at work; they probably would not fire me for being bisexual, but "probably would not fire me" is not considered legal tender.)
Gay teens are still killing themselves because of stigma we will be working to erase for at least the next century.
The notions of the taint of homosexuality and its status as an illness are alive and well, thanks in no small part to groups like NARTH (I refuse to link to that piece of trash) and Focus on the Family (same).
People still separate homosexuality from homosexual acts. They do not, similarly, tend to separate being tall from having trouble finding long pants.
The notion of gay men as being particularly effeminate and/or bad at sports pervades. (We assume that effeminate men are gay. We often do not ask. Meanwhile, men who are gay but not effeminate do not ping, and bisexuals like me ping when we feel like giving the world rainbow power.)
The notion that homosexuality can be cured is still pushed by, e.g., NARTH, and by other groups more interested in their worldview than the safety of their "patients."
And that unnamed Harvard graduate still can't spell worth shit.
Eugene R. Cummings never found out he was judged “guilty.” On June 11, 1920, the 23-year-old dental-school student whose high-school motto was “Never say die!” committed suicide at Harvard’s Stillman Infirmary. The medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was “poisoning by corrosive sublimate taken with suicidal intent probably while mentally deranged.”
Eugene Cummings had studied five years to become a dentist. The senior wouldn't graduate. A note was added to Eugene's file: "Proved guilty, but took ether upon receiving news. Died on morning of June 11, 1920."
May I never stop crying as soon as my eyes run over those words.
Proved guilty. Guilty of having sex with men -- which was, if the research on Josephine Butler was any indication, hardly rare in boarding schools. (There were no girls. There were, instead, a bunch of boys. Boys will experiment, and some of them will like it. And they'll find each other.)
Everything he had worked for was gone because he was gay. Because one student's brother decided to rail against not what had killed his brother but against what he blamed for his brother's death.
And so he killed himself. "While mentally deranged," the medical examiner adds. The final piece of garbage. Yes, he must have been deranged. What other reason is there? People lose their hopes and dreams daily and just say, "Aw, shucks," and then go about finding new hopes and dreams.
Incidentally, the corrosive sublimate was also used to treat syphilis. And it was used to develop photographs and preserve medical specimens.
But go to that page and you'll see a picture of an old bottle of mercury (II) chloride. See that big ol' word two-thirds down the bottle?
Ether, corrosive sublimate, a pistol, a rope, whatever. As long as it'll work quickly. As long as you know it'll work.
Harvard contacted the deans of the other schools and blocked Lumbard’s application. “You have given me just the information which we needed, and it goes without saying that we shall inform Mr. Lumbard that we do not care to consider his application for admission to Brown,” Dean of Brown University Otis [E.] Randall wrote to Greenough. “I feel that your action in the matter was wise and just, and that you deserve the support of the colleges to which young Lumbard may make application for admission. How frequently we uncover in the undergraduate life messes of this sort, and how disagreeable it is to deal with such matters!”
For those of you who are not familiar, Brown and Harvard and Yale and Columbia and probably Penn and a few others were fed in the 1910s and 1920s and probably for a few more decades before and after by those all-boys' boarding schools, like Exeter and Groton and Deerfield. I applied to Exeter and Groton and a few others, including the one that accepted me (my father'd gone, which helps in those places entirely more than it should).
I attended one from 1995-1999. (Because of other reasons, I say I escaped and graduated on the same day.) And while the man who was in charge of college placement back in the day had long since been placed in the ground by the time I got there, the stories were still around.
For example, one year, he had, say, 15 boys who wanted to go to Ivy League schools. So he had, oh, six placed with Harvard, four with Yale and five with Brown. He called the admissions office and described the boys and gave each school a gift student and a student not quite up to the standards but who would work hard and might play a sport. And then he told the boys where he had gotten them in for college and they were all quite happy. (The specifics are invented; the concept is as accurate as I can imagine it being.)
Wellllll, what happens when you turn a blind eye toward teenage homosexual behavior and teenage nonheterosexuality is that it ... continues. A 15-year-old boy who discovers that he doesn't mind having sex with another boy and in fact quite likes it is going to bloody well keep going until there is a reason to stop.
And he will get a clue somewhere in there about how he should be showing an interest in girls, and he may well be interested in them -- or at least interested in marrying a woman who will let him do his thing while she does her thing and they have a child so nobody will suspect anything (and because they actually do want a child).
Or he may be uninterested. Utterly uninterested. And so if some strong-willed woman doesn't decide to capture him and then discover she's in a sexless, unhappy marriage with a husband off doing the poolboy daily ... he'll just be an intellectual very dedicated to his work with a whole heaping helping of men in an office with a cleaning lady who gets paid to stay out of the way and not ask questions.
So if the dean of Brown was really quite horrified by these constant findings and constantly dismayed, as the tone suggests, I sure as holy heck hope he never attended any camping (or campy) retreats with those prep schoolers who were being fed into his school. However, there is an alternative -- that he knew and turned a blind eye toward it ... and turned the two seeing eyes toward it at the same time, if you catch my meaning.
A human streak in me makes me feel rather sore at being one of eight expelled when I am one of at least ten times that number.
Keith Smerage, letter to Harvard, June 15, 1920
I felt then and I feel now that you men could have done much good had had perhaps a little less sense of justice and a little more of the spirit of Jesus in your hearts when dealing with this case.
Grace Smerage, letter to Harvard
Translation the first: "You guys kind of missed the big picture. You still have a lot of homosexual menace to clear out."
Translation the second: "There is this thing called sin, and there is this thing called forgiveness, and considering you were founded to teach ministers how to do their thing, y'might remember that."
Irony the first: By forming their court in the manner of an inquisition -- telling students upfront via stagecraft that they were in some serious shit and they had better tell all -- they missed the boat. They could have gotten piles more information if they had worked with the students. (They could then have expelled far more.)
Irony the second: Wonder how many really bright closeted gay students opted against going to Harvard because of this concern? One of the things that happens when you go after students for irrelevant stuff like sex with consenting human adults is you lose students who could have become really strong assets to your school. (Lest anyone think that I am making this up, here is a similar argument.)
These reports of events long ago are extremely disturbing. They are part of a past that we have rightly left behind.
I want to express our deep regret for the way this situation was handled, as well as the anguish the students and their families must have experienced eight decades ago.
Whatever attitudes may have been prevalent then, persecuting individuals on the basis of sexual orientation is abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university. We are a better and more just community today because those attitudes have changed as much as they have.
Then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers
About as unequivocal of an apology as you get. Admit mistakes. Apologize. Explain what you have done to rectify the situation or how you are better now. Emphasize that you are better for having open minds and diversity.
Do something.