The "gay Ivy"

How did Yale get the reputation as being the most pro-gay Ivy League college? Certainly not through the efforts of administrators, who did everything they could to fend off that rap. In 1987, when the journalist Julie Iovine, Yale '77, wrote a feature article for the Wall Street Journal asserting that her alma mater was "suddenly … a gay school," then-president Benno Schmidt wrote 2,000 of Yale's most influential alumni to rebut the piece.

Now, in the Yale Alumni Magazine, George Chauncey, a Yale history professor and author of the landmark "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940," tells the story of how gay activists changed Yale from within. They transformed it from a place from which the future AIDS activist Larry Kramer felt so alienated, in the 1950s, that he attempted suicide his freshman year--a psychologist he subsequently saw warned him to steer clear of the few gay friends he'd made on campus--to one in which a gay freshman could write, last fall: "Whereas the majority of students at my high school regarded gays and lesbians as outsiders, people fundamentally unlike themselves, Yale undergraduates seem to regard gays and lesbians as perfectly normal."

"I still marvel at how different his freshman year was from mine," writes Chauncey, who graduated from Yale in 1977 and got a Ph.D., again in New Haven, in 1989.