The following is adapted from a speech delivered by the author in acceptance of the annual leadership award given for outstanding service to the GLBT community by the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus, an organization of alumni/æ, faculty, and staff of Harvard University. The author is the founder and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, a national education organization devoted to making schools places where young people learn to value and respect everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. As part of his speech, Mr. Jennings announced that he and his partner Jeffrey Davis were funding the creation of the Eugene Cummings Prize, to be given for the best paper on LGBT issues at Harvard College each year.
I am honored to receive this award tonight, which I view as less an award for me personally and more an award for my organization, glsen. I’m very proud of the accomplishments we have made at glsen, the expansion we’ve experienced from one lonely little Gay-Straight Alliance at Concord Academy in 1988 to over 3,600 registered with glsen this year, a twenty percent increase from last year, with at least one in each of the fifty states. If you’re curious whether your old high school has one, go to GLSEN.org, click on “Students,” and you can pull down the bar to your state and figure out if it has one. If your high school doesn’t have a gay straight alliance, write them and ask why not.
Whereas we had one state that protected GLBT students when we started glsen, we now have ten, with the most recent being Iowa in March of 2007. And I am proud to say that the state house in my home state of North Carolina passed an anti-GLBT bullying protection bill this past May, and it has gone to the floor of the state senate. If we can win in North Carolina, we can win anywhere.
But there’s also a flipside to the statistics that I just cited. There are 25,000 high schools in America, which means that over 21,000 still don’t have a Gay-Straight Alliance. There are fifty states in America, of which forty still do not protect GLBT students from discrimination based on sexual orientation—including, I’m embarrassed to admit, my adopted home state of New York. This helps explain why three out of four GLBT students tell us that they are verbally, physically, and/or sexually harassed on a routine basis while they’re at school. This is unacceptable. We must be the ones who say that the next generation will not go through what we went through, that they will be respected, and that they will study homophobia in their history class and not experience it in their hallway.
For many of us over forty, the very idea that there are openly GLBT students in high school—and even in middle school, in some cases—is a mind-blowing thought, because the first place we felt comfortable being who we were was perhaps in college or later. This morning at about seven-thirty I got an e-mail from a friend who graduated from Harvard in 2000, and I wanted to read you part of it. “Like you, Kevin, I come from Appalachia. This paucity of exposure that I had in Appalachia as a kid left me in a precarious situation when I arrived at Harvard, for I was not yet then an individual, not yet my own self, and thus had to battle newly understood conflicts on this legacy battleground. This all led me literally to my wits’ end, and thus it was from a hospital bed in my junior year at Harvard that I was finally born as an individual, my own self, who would never again accept truth imposed on me by fiat, brutality, or any other coercive measure.”
For many people here tonight, Harvard was the place where we found our truth and rejected the hateful lies with which we had been raised. We think of this place as an oasis. But this was not always the case. As many of you know from William Wright’s outstanding book, Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, in that year the administration systematically sought to root out and expel gay students at the college.
One of those young men was named Eugene Cummings, who was accused of being gay and informed at an administrative board meeting in 1920 that he would be expelled from Harvard, at which point he went back to his room and killed himself. Gene Cummings, who had just turned 23 when he died, has been all but forgotten by history, but I wanted some sense of connection to him, so today I went to the Massachusetts state archives earlier today and got a copy of his death certificate, which I have with me tonight. Mr. Cummings was the son of Eugene and Bridgett Sullivan Cummings, who had immigrated from Ireland, undoubtedly hoping, like my mother, that it would be better for the next generation of their family. They lived at 361 Middle Street in Fall River, a town in southeastern Mass. Their son Eugene had been born on April 19, 1897.
Seven weeks later, fifteen miles east of where Mr. Cummings was born, my grandfather, Marlitt Jennings was born on June 7, 1897 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. And when I looked at Mr. Cummings’ death certificate in the archives today, it struck me that he could have been my grandfather. As it happens, this grandfather had a brother-in-law, my great uncle, Michael Joseph Carmel, who was the brother of my grandmother, Merlida Carmel Jennings. Uncle Mickey, as he was known, was the “special” uncle in our family, the one who never married, but who always made sure that my impoverished mill-working family had Christmas gifts for his nieces and nephews. As my father grew older and had kids of his own, Uncle Mickey made sure his great nieces and nephews had gifts too. I would never meet my great uncle Mickey because he died in Allston, five miles from here, in April 1969, of cirrhosis of the liver, brought on by a lifetime of alcoholism, of trying to live as a gay man at a time when he could not find acceptance from other people or from himself. He died two months before the Stonewall Riots took place in New York, in June 1969.
As we sit here tonight, I want us all to remember that we sit with the ghosts of Eugene Cummings and my Uncle Mickey, men who lived in a time when the freedoms we enjoy, and even a gathering like this, were unthinkable. We must never take those freedoms for granted, because they were not given to us but won by our gay forefathers who fought and sometimes died so that we could be freer than they. We must, through organizations like Mass Equality and glsen, fight to preserve that freedom. And we must believe even more strongly that it is our job to make sure that the next generation has it better than we had it, and that each of us must never quit demanding equality for the next generation, so that we can say thank you to Eugene Cummings and the Uncle Mickeys of the past, and make sure that their descendents today know that legacy, know they have a history to be proud of, and know that this injustice is part of history and not part of the America in which they live, which once and for all will be a land where there is liberty and justice for all citizens.
