Awards of the Caucus

The Caucus recognizes members of the Harvard community who have contributed to the Harvard BGLTQ community and/or the BGLTQ community at large. Below see the illustrious list of recipients who have been honored at our Annual Commencement Dinners.

To select awardees, the Board of the HGSC first comes up with a list of nominees.  As mentioned above, we look for people who have a contribution to Harvard who have made signifcant contributions to the BGLTQ community.  This can be any sphere of life, such political, social, eduational, scientific or personal.  The Board reviews the nominees, then selects the awardee.   We welcome suggestions. They are awarded at the Annual Dinner.

List of Awardees 

2018 - Veritas Awards to Meredith Talusan and the Trans Task Force
2016 - Veritas Awards to Annise Parker, Kenneth E. Reeves,  and E. Denise Simmons
2014 - Veritas Award to Honorable Barney Frank, AB '61, KSG Fellow '71, JD '77. 
2012-  Veritas Award to Prof. Bradley S. Epps, 
2009 - Veritas Award to Prof. Laurence H. Tribe, AB '62, JD '66
2009 - Lifetime Achievement Award Robyn Ochs, EdM '89
2008 - Founding Father Award to Martin Duberman, PhD '57
2007 - Respect Award to Kevin Jennings, AB '85
2006 - Intellectual Innovator Award to Richard Schneider, Jr., PhD '81
2005 - Civil Rights Award to Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., AB '87
2005 - Ally for Justice Award to The Hon. Alice Wolf, MPA '78, IOP '94
2004 - Trailblazer Award to Hillary Goodridge & Julie Goodridge, EdM '83
2002 - Achievement Award to Frank Kameny, PhD '56
1998 - Visibility Award to Prof. Diana Eck & Dr. Dorothy Austin, DivThD '81 
 

 

HGSC 2014 Veritas Award

On May 29, 2014 we welcomed as our speaker and the recipient of the HGSC Veritas award the Honorable Barney Frank, AB '61, KSG Fellow '71, JD '77. Mr. Frank represented Massachussetts’ 4th Congressional District for sixteen terms, having a distinguished career which included managing finical crises as chairman of the House Financial Committee, championing the interests of the poor, the underprivileged and the vulnerable, working to adjust America's spending priorities to reduce the deficit, provide less funding for the military and more for important quality of life needs at home. In 1987, Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as openly gay, and in 2012 he married his longtime partner, becoming the nation's first congressman in a same-sex marriage while in office. 

HGLC 2012 Veritas Award

Brad Epps is Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He has published nearly a hundred articles and chapters on modern literature, film, art, architecture, urban theory, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Hispanophone Africa, Catalonia, the United States, and France and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo; Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (with Luis Fernández Cifuentes); Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens); All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (with Despina Kakoudaki); a special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and Modernity, and a special issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig. He has taught as a visiting professor or scholar in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid), Germany, France, Chile, Cuba, the Netherlands, Sweden, the People’s Republic of China, and Great Britain. He is fitfully preparing two books: El cine como historia, la historia como cine: Incursiones en el (debatido) ámbito del cine iberoamericano and Barcelona and Cinema. In December 2011, he was elected to the Chair in Spanish at the University of Cambridge, where he will be working permanently beginning in 2012. During his twenty-year tenure at Harvard, Epps has been a devoted and inspiring teacher of graduate students and undergraduates, a tireless voice for social justice and human dignity, and a fearless advocate for LGBT students, faculty, and staff. He was instrumental in the formation of WGS, the expansion of LGBT Studies, and the establishment of the F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship.

HGLC 2009 Veritas Award

On June 4, 2009, Prof. Laurence H. Tribe, AB '62, JD '66, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, received the HGLC Veritas Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

One of the nation's foremost constitutional law experts, Professor Tribe has been advocating for LGBT civil rights for over a quarter century, including arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).

 

HGLC 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award

On June 4, 2009 Robyn Ochs, EdM '89, was awarded the the HGLC Lifetime achievement award, inscribed with the words "Advocate, Educate, Coordinate."  Robyn, www.robynochs.com , has been part of the Harvard community since 1983. She retired from her work in Romance Languages and Literatures in 2009. She serves on the steering committee for the LGBT Faculty & Staff Group as a retiree rep and on the Trans Task Force, and was a co-facilitator of the monthly LBTQ Women’s lunches for Harvard staff and faculty. Off campus, she is co-founder of the Bisexual Resource Center and the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network. She is editor of the 42-country anthology, Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World . She has taught in the field of gender and sexuality studies at Tufts University, MIT, and Johnson State College in Vermont, and she is a professional speaker on bisexuality, identity and labels, coalition building, marriage equality, and homophobia. An advocate for the rights of people of ALL orientations and genders to live safely, openly and with full legal equality, Robyn’s work focuses on increasing awareness and understanding of complex identities, and mobilizing people to be powerful allies to one another within and across identities and social movements.

HGLC 2008 Founding Father Award

On June 5, 2008, Martin Duberman, PhD '57, received the HGLC Founding Father Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

“Martin Duberman is largely responsible for the growth of LGBT studies programs in colleges and universities across the country”, said Tom Parry, AB ‘ 74, president of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus.  “As a pathbreaking scholar and passionate activist, he has fought to cure America’s historic prejudices by making its buried past visible.”  

Read Martin Duberman's acceptance speech.

Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.  He was the founder and first director (1986-1996) of the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the CUNY Graduate School, the country’s first such research center.  For his passionate devotion to making visible the “queer” lives that have been “hidden from history,” Duberman is considered one of the “founding fathers” of the modern LGBT studies movement.

An elegant and prolific writer, Duberman is the author and editor of more than twenty books and plays, including Haymarket:  A Novel (Seven Stories, 2003); Left Out:  The Politics of Exclusion/Essays, 1964-1999 (Basic Books, 1999); A Queer World (NYU, 1997); Midlife Queer (Wisconsin, 1996); Stonewall (Dutton, 1993); Cures:  A Gay Man’s Odyssey (Dutton, 1991); Paul Robeson (Knopf, 1989); Hidden from History:  Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New American History, 1989); Male Armor:  Selected Plays, 1968-1974 (Plume, 1976); Black Mountain:  An Exploration in Community (Dutton, 1972); The Antislavery Vanguard:  New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, 1965); In White America (Houghton Mifflin, 1964); and Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886 (Stanford, 1961).  Two of Duberman’s plays—“Mother Earth” (about anarchist Emma Goldman) and “Visions of Kerouac”—have recently been staged at New York City’s Rattlestick Theater, the New York Theater Workshop, and the Roosevelt University Theater Department in Chicago.  His most recent book, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (Knopf, 2007), was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Altogether, Duberman’s opus spans nearly two centuries—from battles over slavery in the nineteenth century to the black freedom, feminist, and gay liberation struggles of our own time.  In addition to his scholarly work, his essays have appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Partisan Review, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Liberation, The New Republic, and The Village Voice.  The New Press will publish a collection of Duberman’s political plays, Radical Acts, in 2008, along with his memoir, in 2009.

Professor Duberman has received many awards for his scholarship and social activism, including the Bancroft Prize, two Lambda Awards, the George Freedly Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2006 Pioneer Award, the American Historical Association’s 2008 Distinguished Scholarship Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his “contributions to literature."

Martin Duberman lives with his longtime partner, Eli Zal, in New York City.

HGLC 2007 Respect Award

On June 7, 2007, Kevin Jennings, AB '85, received the HGLC Respect Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

"Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students are a highly vulnerable population," said Tom Parry, AB '74, President of the Caucus. "We are honoring Kevin Jennings for his compassion and leadership, especially embodied in his founding of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, that has fostered the creation of thousands of Gay-Straight alliances at secondary schools across the country."

Read Kevin's acceptance speech
Watch the video

Kevin Jennings is recognized as a leader in both the education and civil rights communities and currently serves as the Executive Director of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, the organization he founded in 1990."

He spent a decade teaching high school history at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island (1985-87) and at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts (1987-1994), where he also served as Chair of the History Department. In 1992, he was named one of fifty "Terrific Teachers Making a Difference" by the Edward Calesa Foundation, and in 1993 was selected as a Klingenstein Fellow by Columbia University for his outstanding leadership in independent school education.

Kevin is best known for his work creating safe schools for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students. After "coming out" in a chapel talk to the school community at Concord Academy in 1988, he helped establish the nation's first Gay-Straight Alliance for students at Concord and became a well-known spokesperson and writer on LGBT issues in schools. In 1990, he founded GLSEN, bringing together teachers, parents and community members to end anti-LGBT bias in K-12 schools. As the head of the then all-volunteer group in Boston, he led GLSEN in its successful effort to make Massachusetts the first state in the nation to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against public school students and in 1993 to establish a state-wide program called "Safe Schools for Gay and Lesbian Students." Kevin became GLSEN's first Executive Director in 1995, relocated its national headquarters to New York, and has led its rapid growth from an all-volunteer group to its status today as a national education and civil rights organization with nearly seventy chapters around the country and a national staff of approximately thirty.

Kevin has made several television appearances as an advocate and spokesperson for LGBT youth. He is also the author of several books including Mama's Boy, Preachers Son; Becoming Visible: A Reader in Gay & Lesbian History for High School and College Students; One Teacher in Ten: Gay and Lesbian Educators Tell Their Stories; Telling Tales Out of School: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People Remember Their School Years; and Always My Child: A Parent's Guide to Understanding Your Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Questioning Son or Daughter. He also wrote and produced the historical documentary Out of the Past, which won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary.

Kevin graduated from Harvard in 1985 and served as Co-Chair of Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus from 1997 to 1998.

He and his partner Jeff Davis make their home in New York City.

HGLC 2006 Intellectual Innovator Award

On June 8, 2006, Richard Schneider, Jr., PhD '81, received the HGLC Intellectual Innovator Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner. It was presented by noted author and Gay & Lesbian Review contributor Andrew Holleran.

Read the speech

"Ideas are the weapons of choice in the battle for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights," said Tom Parry, AB '74, President of the Caucus. "We honor Richard Schneider for his creativity, entrepreneurial acumen, and leadership, especially embodied in his founding of the Gay & Lesbian Review."

Richard Schneider, Jr., a child of the 50's who grew up in suburban New Jersey, went to Williams College and received his BA in history in 1973. There he became politically active, came out as openly gay, and founded a lefty political journal called Counterpoint. He then went to Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, where he worked in comparative and cultural studies until finally settling on the study of complex organizations as his area of specialization. His doctoral thesis was a comparative analysis of eight large management consulting firms and was later published under the title Market Design: Client Relations and Organizational Power in the Management Consulting Firm (1988). He completed his PhD at Harvard in 1981.

Richard's first teaching job was as an "itinerant scholar" for the University of Maryland's European Division, where he taught courses in sociology and anthropology for the next five years, living for various stretches in Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, and Greece. After a two-year stint at Alfred University in upstate New York, he returned to Boston to serve as the Director of Research for a Boston-based consulting firm, The Center for Strategy Research, where he remained through most of the 90's. There he spearheaded the development of a method of computer-aided content analysis for the understanding of qualitative consumer research.

It was in 1994 that Richard founded The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, which was first published by the HGLC and was initially distributed mostly to its members. By the second or third issue, however, the quarterly journal was developing a broader readership and was soon recognized as an important national journal of GLBT ideas and opinion. In 2000 the journal's name was changed to The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide, and in the following year it began publishing bimonthly. The G&LR is now in its thirteenth year of publication with a circulation of about 12,000, two-thirds of which are regular subscribers. Nearly ten percent of the G&LR's subscribers are Harvard affiliates. For over a decade, the G&LR has been widely regarded as the leading GLBT cultural and intellectual journal in the U.S. Schneider remains its editor and president and foresees continuing growth.

In 1999, he met his partner, Stephen Hemrick, with whom he lives in Boston and Provincetown.

HGLC 2005 Civil Rights Award

On June 9, 2005, philanthropist Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., AB '87, received the HGLC Civil Rights Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

" Civil rights is elemental for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community," said Tom Parry, AB '74, President of the Caucus. "We honor Buddy Fletcher for his astute and dedicated philanthropy, especially embodied in his recent $50-million initiative, announced on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, in support of individuals and institutions working to further the broad goals of that decision. He pays tribute to us all while furthering the cause of equality and civil rights."

Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., known as Buddy, is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fletcher Asset Management, Inc., which he founded in March of 1991. He implements investment strategies aimed at capitalizing on market inefficiencies to yield attractive, risk-adjusted returns from public companies managed with a goal toward environmental and social sustainability. Prior to founding Fletcher Asset Management, Buddy served as Senior Vice President for Kidder, Peabody & Co., where he managed a team that invested the firm's own capital. Previous to that, he was a Vice President in a similar group at Bear, Stearns & Co., Inc.

Known for his long-standing interest in community service and philanthropy, especially in the area of education, Buddy has made donations that include the endowment of the Alphonse Fletcher University Professorship at Harvard in 1996. Also, in May 2004, he announced his most substantial philanthropic endeavor: a $50 million pledge in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision to individuals and institutions working to improve race relations. The gift is one of the largest individual gifts ever made by an African-American. Buddy, who credits his success to his aspiring parents and his Harvard education, has said he hopes his gift will help continue the progress toward racial equality that the Brown decision started.

While at Harvard Buddy studied applied mathematics and served as the First Class Marshal. In addition, he was also cross-enrolled in Aerospace Studies at MIT. After graduation he helped his parents put his two younger brothers through Harvard while working as a trader on Wall Street. He also holds a Master's degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In May 2005, Buddy was awarded an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College.

Buddy was raised in Waterford, Connecticut. His mother began as a teacher and held the positions of Principal and Administrator during her career in the Southern Connecticut School System. Buddy's late father was employed by Electric Boat of Groton. His stepfather, Dr. James P. Comer, is the Founder of the Comer School Development Program and Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center. "My parents always said we should always strive to be better than the best." Buddy lives with his partner of more than 10 years, Hobart V. Folkes, Jr., on New York's Upper West Side.

HGLC 2005 Ally for Justice Award

On June 9, 2005, Massachusetts Representative Alice K. Wolf, MPA '78, IOP '94, received the HGLC Ally for Justice Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

"Alice Wolf has been an ardent advocate and ally of our community from her earliest days on the Cambridge City Council to her fight for marriage equality as a state representative. We could ask for no better friend," said Tom Parry, AB '74, President of the Caucus.

Alice K. Wolf is the State Representative from the 25th Middlesex District in Cambridge. She was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1996 after serving the people of Cambridge as Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Councilor and School Committee member.

Within months of being elected to the Cambridge City Council in the mid-1980s, Alice spearheaded the passage of a human rights ordinance that included discrimination protections based on sexual orientation. In 1991, as the mayor of Cambridge, she hosted the first pre-Pride brunch in City Hall for the city's gay community. In 1992, she worked with local activists, Mary Bonauto of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and the Cambridge City Council to pass the state's first domestic partners ordinance, providing health insurance benefits to the same-sex partners of city employees.

Alice's then-unprecedented leadership on gay rights earned her the title of "Honorary Lesbian" from the Cambridge Lavender Alliance. Her career as a state legislator, which began in 1997, has been equally distinguished. For the first time she obtained money in the state budget for a "safe schools" program and a suicide prevention program for gay teens. In addition to sponsoring domestic partner bills and opposing attempts to ban same-sex marriage, in late 2002 Alice again took the lead on gay rights, sponsoring both civil unions and gay marriage bills in the House. She has been an unequivocal supporter of the Supreme Judicial Court's Goodridge decision; her speech linking her support for gay civil rights with her own family's flight from their Austrian homeland to escape the Nazis was a moving moment at last year's constitutional convention.

Alice's legislative initiatives include closing the achievement gap for the children of the Commonwealth, reforming the health care system and maintaining an adequate supply of affordable housing. She is also focused on working towards a cleaner environment, instituting a fairer electoral system, and preserving the rights of immigrants. Alice is also a strong advocate for women's rights, fighting to protect victims of assault and domestic abuse and to protect a woman's right to access reproductive health services.

Alice earned a B.S. from Simmons College and an M.P.A. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2001, she received an honorary Doctor of Education degree from Wheelock College. Alice and her husband Robert Wolf have two sons, Eric and Adam, who were her inspiration to get involved in Cambridge schools and government. She has four grandchildren.

HGLC 2004 Trailblazer Award

On June 10, 2004, Hillary Goodridge and Julie Goodridge, EdM '83, received the HGLC Trailblazer Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

"The Supreme Judicial Court's landmark ruling revolutionized the lives of Bay State same-sex couples who can now claim their equal rights under the law," said Tom Parry, AB '74, President of the Caucus. "We are honor the Goodridges for their courage in challenging the status quo, and their willingness to put a human face on the first major civil rights battle of the 21st century."

In 2001 Julie, EdM '83, and Hillary, the lead plaintiffs amongst seven same-sex couples, sued the Massachusetts Department of Health for the right to marry. On November 18, 2003, in an historic decision, the State Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Bay State lesbian and gay couples would be the first in the country to have that right.

Julie and Hillary met in 1985 at a seminar at Harvard on disinvestment in South Africa. Their mutual friend, Amy Domini, who was speaking at the seminar, introduced them. Julie pursued Hillary and several years later, they became a couple. Then in 1996, in anticipation of the birth of their daughter, they chose 'Goodridge' as their family name. The name was Hillary's grandmother's maiden name, which they took to recognize their growing family and responsibilities.

Today, Annie is eight years old, "completely adorable," as her moms readily proclaim, with lots of friends at school and in their neighborhood. Annie takes ballet (and has danced in the Urban Nutcracker for two years) and piano, is on the "wee gators" swim team at the Y, plays soccer, is in the Freedom Choir, and is a member of The Freelance Players, a theater group for kids 8-12. She also relishes the attention of her grandparents and uncle from Hillary's side of the Goodridge clan. Holidays, birthdays and other special events often bring them together.

Julie is the president and founder of NorthStar Asset Management, Inc., an investment advisory firm specializing in socially responsible investing. Founded in 1990, the firm has $50 million under management. Hillary has had her share of 'firsts' - a member of the first class of girls at the St. Paul's School in Concord, NH, as well as the third class of women at Dartmouth College. She is currently the Program Director of the Unitarian Universalist Funding Program which gives away just under $1 million each year to denominational and social service and justice programs across the country.

The Goodridges have long been active in a variety of community activities and non-profit organizations and are members of the Caucus. They now join a select group of distinguished Americans who have challenged the status quo, demanded equal rights, and in doing so, changed the way we all live.

When Hillary and Julie got married on May 17, 2004, their friend, Amy Domini, speaking at the wedding, said, "You introduce a couple of people, you maybe encourage them a bit, and what happens? A national crisis. The fault line for the presidential election. The coming of Armageddon."

HGLC 2002 Achievement Award

Considered one of the fathers of the gay rights movement, Frank Kameny, PhD '56, received the HGLC Achievement Award at the Caucus's Annual Commencement Dinner on June 6, 2002. His friend and admirer, Andy Tobias, '68 MBA '72, made the presentation.

Born in 1925, the son of middle-class Jewish New Yorkers, Frank entered college to study physics at the precocious age of 15. His education was interrupted by service during World War II, but in 1956, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in astronomy.

After teaching a year at Georgetown University, Frank moved to a civil service job with the U.S. Army Map Service in July 1957. But his gay identity soon clashed with his professional life. Late one night in Lafayette Park, a popular gay cruising area across from the White House, Frank was arrested "for investigation" of a morals charge but quickly released.

Nothing came of the incident immediately, but the arrest was eventually reported to an investigator with the Civil Service Commission. That fall, after only a few months on the job, he was fired from the Map Service, and in January 1958, he learned that he was barred from all future employment with the federal government.

But Frank's experience spurred him to militant activism. "My dismissal amounted to a declaration of war against me by the government. And I tend not to lose my wars."

Frank went through a lengthy process of suing the government to get his job back, but all of his efforts and appeals failed, including an attempt to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 1961, however, the high court rejected his petition. "That ended the formal case," he explained, "but not the battle. The time had come to fight collectively."

Frank and a friend established the Washington, D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society, a homophile group that had started 10 years earlier in Los Angeles. The first meeting of the D.C. chapter, held on November 15, 1961, drew about 12 men and women, who elected Frank as the new group's president.

Unlike many other gay leaders of the time, Frank embraced direct action along the lines of the black civil rights movement. "The [gay] movement of those days was very unassertive, apologetic, and defensive," Frank noted. But he believed that gay people should fight a "down-to-earth, grass-roots, sometimes tooth-and-nail" battle.

Under Frank's leadership, the group charged to the forefront of the nascent gay rights movement. The D.C. chapter focused on trying to reform the government's exclusionary policies toward homosexuals in federal employment and successfully lobbied the ACLU to take up the cause. They also organized the first gay demonstration of the White House in April 1965, in which a handful of gay men in suits and lesbians in dresses carried placards reading "First Class Treatment for Homosexuals" and "Civil Service Commission is Un-American."

A few months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the first time decided that the rejection of an application for federal employment on the grounds of "homosexual conduct" was "too vague." The Civil Service Commission, the court ruled, failed to state "why that conduct related to occupational competence or fitness." Dogged by a long line of similar court cases, the Civil Service Commission formally amended its anti-gay policy in 1975. After 18 years, Frank Kameny was vindicated.

Following the Stonewall riots, the D.C. Mattachine was eclipsed by newer gay groups. Although his leadership waned, Frank's activism continued. In 1971, he ran as an out gay man to be D.C.'s non-voting delegate to Congress. He garnered only 1.6 percent of the vote, but the campaign showed that gay people would turn out to vote as a bloc.

Frank held protests at the Pentagon and sent newsletters to J. Edgar Hoover. Although Hoover monitored Frank's activities closely, he none-the-less asked to be removed from the mailing list, which Frank refused.

Frank examined the medical & psychological data on homosexuality. He looked at it with the trained eye of a scientist and found it to be nothing but bias and prejudice. So Frank was instrumental in getting the American Psychological Association to declare that homosexuality is not a mental illness.

He started a campaign that repealed the DC Sodomy law in 1993-a law similar to others in all 50 states that declared 95% of all adult Americans felons, but applied almost exclusively against gays.

Frank co-founded the NGLTF, the National Gay Rights Lobby (a precursor to the Human Rights Campaign), Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, and a host of other organizations.

In 1975 he served as Commissioner on the DC Commission on Human Rights as the first openly gay municipal appointee to any position in DC.

In 1998 in one of his most recent protests, during a gay radio program on an Alexandria radio station, Frank solicited the entire adult population of the state of Virginia to engage in sodomy with him, with particular emphasis upon all prosecutors, police chiefs and police officers, and judges in the state. In classic Frank Kameny style he was highlighting the hypocrisy of our elected officials.

(Excerpted, in part, from "Who is Frank Kameny?" by David Bianco — PlanetOut & "75th Birthday Tribute to Franklin E. Kameny" by Bob Summersgill — GLAA)

HGLC 1998 Visibility Award

On June 4, 1998, Prof. Diana Eck and Dr. Dorothy Austin, DivThD '81, received the HGLC Visibility Award at the Caucus' Annual Commencement Dinner.

In March 1998, Diana and Dorothy were named Co-Masters of Lowell House at Harvard, the first same-sex couple so honored in the university's history.

Diana is a native of Montana and is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies. She studies the religious traditions of India and the challenges of religious pluralism in multi-religious societies, including both India and the U.S. She also directs the Pluralism Project, a research project that studies America's religious diversity in light of the most recent decades of immigration.

Dorothy is originally from Fall River, Massachusetts. A psychologist with a doctorate in Psychology and Religion from Harvard, she's the Sedgwick Associate Minister in The Memorial Church, the University Chaplain, and a Lecturer in Psychology & Religion at the Divinity School. An advocate of town-gown community projects, she's run a building apprenticeship program for high school students at Cambridge Rindge & Latin and a home-care service for elders, staffed by students. She serves on the public service committee of Phillips Brooks House and the Committee on House Life.

Diana and Dorothy met at Harvard as graduate students and have made their home in Cambridge for more than twenty-five years. They were married on July 4, 2004.