In honor of Tufts' celebration of National Coming Out Day, I, too, have decided to come out — against "gay" housing at Tufts.
Occupying an inconspicuous tract of student housing is a dormant enemy. Known officially as the Rainbow House, despite being neither rainbow-colored nor a house (it is located in the 160s of the Hillsides Apartments), the establishment "provides a ‘gay-friendly' atmosphere where students can live and interact," according to the Office of Residential Life and Learning's website. This tidbit unintentionally suggests that the rest of Tufts is a non-gay-friendly" atmosphere. Apart from the offense we should all take from such an assertion is a level of ignorance incongruent with Tufts' mantra of global citizenship.
Before I explain my reasoning, I'd like to clarify what I'm calling for with this ban, given the sensitivity of this issue. My ban will be one that will not prevent gay people from living together. Nor will we end any gay social programming or prevent students from forming gay organizations. The only ban will be on any student housing officially designated as "gay-friendly."
I accept the anticipated consequences of writing this column, but if you're looking for homophobia, I'm Teflon, and your charges are clumps of unsalted butter.
Exposure such as this could warrant giving my seemingly backward perspective a second look. Gay people aren't that much different from "non-gay" people, so it's counterproductive to designate certain buildings as officially deemed "gay-friendly." Does being gay somehow render you unable to coexist with people who are not gay? Or are we to assume each class of freshmen entering Tufts consists exclusively of gay-haters and gay people? This assertion assumes that straight people are both homophobic and incapable of adapting to a new and diverse community. Regardless of how it's interpreted, shielding students from encounters with different lifestyles undermines the purpose of college.
An e-mail from University President Lawrence Bacow to the student body on Monday proclaimed that Tufts is "one community." Surely he must sense the outlandishness of ghettoizing swaths of gay students into a lone set of Hillsides suites. Unfortunately, if he did, he left it out. Ironically, enough, the e-mail did touch on the negative impacts of gay students feeling isolated.
Bacow did stress the need "to model the behavior we would hope to see in the rest of the world." Admittedly, nothing cheers me up quite like lofty, "city upon a hill"-style rhetoric being preached to a choir of post-pubescent twerps. But convincing students that wearing a certain number of rainbow pins will get the authorities in Iran to stop hanging gay teenage boys is the job of an activist, not a university president.
My detractors will say, "CJ, it's not really about whether our behavior will be copied by the rest of the world; it's about doing what we think is right." But a ban on school-sanctioned "gay-friendly" housing is the right thing to do. This movement must start today, on Tufts' observance of Coming Out Day, as a signal to outsiders that we at Tufts think gay people are no different from straight people. And if the world leaders happen to have their social-policy telescopes pointed at Walnut Hill, they'll understand what being a true progressive-minded intellectual really entails.
Tufts — and the world around it — will never be immune to anti-gay hatred. The tragic recent suicide of a Rutgers student reminds us of this continued battle for equality.
Still, I think an apt response to bigotry is not one that relies upon the assumption that straight kids at Tufts are gay-unfriendly and that gay people at Tufts need to live by themselves. Instead, let us set a new standard for civil rights by creating a place where people diverse in ways beyond sexual orientation can embrace difference as they come together to form "one community."
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CJ Saraceno is a senior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Christopher.Saraceno@tufts.edu.
