Harvard asked to overturn gay expulsions of 1920

A protest is scheduled for Wednesday when Lady Gaga will visit the institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts to launch her Born This Way anti-bullying foundation.

n 1920, following the suicide of undergraduate Cyril Wilcox, Harvard’s Acting Dean Chester Greenough was alerted to a number of students holding gay parties that an anonymous tip-off said “beggared description”.

The letter received by the dean named some gay students and asked: “Isn’t it about time an end was put to this sort of thing in college?”

In the early summer of that year, Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell formed what he called a Secret Court to identify the university’s actively gay students at the university and expel them and others deemed to be too close them.

Lowell’s court only came to light in 2002 after a chance discovery in the university archives.

Eugene R. Cummings, a gay 23-year-old dentistry student, killed himself using drugs from a university sick bay before he could be expelled by the court.  Read More