Queer Student Resources at Williams
Among these pages you will find resources to help understand, accept and educate others about what it means to be or be a friend to LGBT students. Williams College has a host of LGBT organizations including the Queer Student Union, BiGLATA (queer alumni) and the Eph Rainbow Alliance. In addition the MCC keeps magazines and other literature on queer/transgender issues in Jenness house. Links to various other online resources and organizations can also be found here. The struggle for a tolerant campus is on-going and has a fairly long history which can be read about with original documents going back to the 1970's in the history section.
In 1976 the Williams Gay Support Organization was formed. While the organization changed its name over the years to suit naming conventions and political climate, its goal has essentially stayed the same: to promote awareness and foster understanding of alternative lifestyles and sexuality.
While homophobia has decreased considerably since then, the need for queer resources has never been questioned and can be seen in some poignant examples from the time of the WGSO's formation.
Intolerant Attitudes
To the editor:
I was in Mission Park dining hall Friday night when J. Doe stood up on a chair and read aloud the letter entitled: "Gay Support". The letter cited "repressive attitudes", "hostility", "suffering from prejudices", and "individual insecurity" as reasons necessitating WGSO's existence. It was a sincere expression of personal fears and a call for straights to attempt a new understanding of gays.
The reading of the letter (in a mocking and sardonic tone) epitomized the problems of closed-mindedness and conformity which repress "minority" positions relating not only to sexual preference but to politics, socializing, economics, religion race and other areas as well. Although I don't expect these tunnel vision attitudes to disappear, I look forward to a time when such cruel and insensitive behavior as occurred Friday night is met not by silence or forced laughter, but by a collective voice asking J. Doe to please sit down.
-K. Doe
Williams Record, p.2 April 13, 1976
[J. Doe] speaks back
To the editor:
I am writing in response to Mark Leach's letter in the April 13 edition of The Record...
K. Doe's "tunnel vision" analogy can indeed be applied to his limited perspective as well. He and the WGSO must arrive at the mature recognition that they cannot realistically expect a universal tolerance for Gay Support ideologies and programs to exist at Williams, or anywhere else for that matter.
No matter how far the WGSO is able to move toward attaining their goals of "tolerance" and "open-mindedness", it cannot avoid the inescapable fact that in such personal matters as structuring life styles there will always be widespread oppositional viewpoints.
In conclusion, I would like to stress that it was the vulnerable and irresponsible manner in which the WGSO letter was written that prompted my chair-reading reaction. Coupling the letter's slang references to deviant sexual types with its closing quips about "welcome to our closets" made its content clearly, and necessarily susceptible to comic revision.
-J. Doe
Williams Record, p.2 April 16, 1976