1962
The following letter was received from EdHermance and is offered here without comment. In the past, although I have welcomed expression of opinion, I have edited such letters. At Ed's specific request his message is printed in full. As always a sign of Dartmouth uniqueness has been its ability to assimilate and acknowledge divergent ideas and attitudes.
12 May 1975
"Dear Classmates,
"During this lull in the flow of wedding, birth, and promotion announcements, perhaps this is a good time for me to announce my non-marriage and rambling occupational motion, both of which stem from the fact that I'm gay. What follows is offered in the hope that reflecting on our common past and on my subsequent experience will be useful in changing the present, both at the College and in the many places we all are now.
"College brings back very mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, those years were spent in a beautiful place, with lots of time, friends, and books. But the experience strikes me now as grotesque too: nobody knew I was gay.
"Dartmouth, like the rest of the world, was a repressive, negative atmosphere for anybody who did not fit the heterosexual - Dartmouth - image. Exposure meant no friends in college and slight chance of a job afterwards. The only people whom I thought might be gay were in the arts, theater, where gayness could find some off-stage expression without dire consequences.
"Living in the closet at Dartmouth was not much different from living in a closet elsewhere, only you lived in the closet with roommates. I wasn't sexually attracted to any of my roommates, a condition required for the most elementary mental stability in such an environment; and I couldn't establish any strong relationship with the people I was attracted to, because the social world made such a relationship untenable. One of my roommates once remarked queasily that a high school friend of his discovered that his (the friend's) college roommate was homosexual. I let the moment pass and continued to pass, as well as I could, as a future husband and father, sometimes thinking myself that such would be my destiny.
"As my social self was so disoriented, I applied myself all the more to academics. I took lots of philosophy and literature, read Socratic dialogues, Shakespeare's sonnets, Proust, Gertrude Stein, etc., but never could bring myself to write about anything suggesting gayness, and nothing in the teachers positively encouraged me to do so. That was the hell of it: the warmth and brilliance of the richest jewels before my reading eyes and a glacial atmosphere around me and in me.
"After graduate school and seven years of teaching, I finally got to the point where the privileges of an academic life just didn't seem worth the total denial of my sexual/affectional self. So I dropped out and wandered around in the Colorado and San Francisco counter culture before breaking away to Germany to think for a couple of years. Since my return three and one half years ago to Philadelphia, I've managed a natural foods co-op, worked in a food co-op federation and restaurant. Since September I've been working at a union job in the Univ. of Pa. library and keeping the books for a gay liberation magazine, The Gay Alternative, and Philadelphia's nascent gay community center.
"I hear through the gay grapevine - not from this here Alumni Magazine - that there's a Gays at Dartmouth now. That's fantastic, but I know, from experience with a very successful Gays at Penn group, that such groups are only the tiny beginning of what's needed to change the attitudes of society at large. Gay liberation can be of great help to individual gay people ready to ask for support from their fellows, but we the visible are pathetically few and have little influence on the great masses of people, educated and uneducated alike, who despise, ridicule, and/or ignore us and those like us. (Everybody knows the Nazis killed six million Jews; who knows how many homosexuals they gassed? We wore pink armbands.) Still there are practically no occupations open to the openly gay - only hairdressers, entertainers, and maybe librarians can be gay with impunity. Still gays are subject to vicious public attack and the attackers can use the law as their club: witness Phila.'s City Council President Geo. X. Schwartz, who, during hearings on our civil rights bill - with a copy of the "deviate" intercourse statute in his hands - asked a gay leader, "What do you do - do you do it in the mouth or anus?" The gay leader sent him a cactus for Christmas with a signed note, "Either way."
Here are some actions which could be taken:
1. No recruiters on campus who will not knowingly hire gays (cf. the Univ. of Minnesota)
2. Dartmouth Medical School should graduate at least 5% gay doctors (cf. the AMA's adamant position against gay doctors)
3. Gays at Dartmouth should get lots of money for lecturers, movies, exhibits, dances, etc. (cf. Gays at Penn's $1,600)
4. Talk about gayness, homosexuality, etc. It doesn't matter much what you say and think now, the talking itself is what's needed. The silence is deadly.
Sincerely, Ed Hermance
Secretary, Box 1907, 60 Hausen St. Rochester, N.H. 03867
Head Agent, O Brion, Russell & Co. One Boston Place Boston, Mass. 02106
