Hey Harvardians,

Gossip Guy here, your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Harvard’s queer community. I have the biggest news ever. It looks like the ultimate outsider has become a total insider. Yours truly has joined the ranks of The Voice column writers, and we are all intrigued. Don’t let my name fool you; I’m not here to bring you the newest gossip about the all-intriguing, handsome, used-to-be-chubby-but-now-has-muscles guy you see at the gym all the time, or the overly-sensitive-yet-adorable-and-sexy-dancer you see walking around with headphones. This gossip is about yours truly and the ins and outs of the Gay Life at Harvard. No reputation will be spared.

Let’s begin with what will most draw you in. We know it. Sex. Straight readers: you might be wondering if the queer community at Harvard faces the same obstacles you do. LGBTQ readers: you may be wondering if everything you think about the gay scene at Harvard applies to all of us. I’m going to break it down for all of you, or at least, my story. Let’s return to freshman year, the year that Jenny Humphrey made her grand entrance.  And what an entrance I made. How very quickly was I drawn into the hook-up scene at Harvard, right? Before you think of me as a self-proclaimed whore, let me give you background details. Prior to these mind-numbing and shameful experiences of passionless sex, I’d only had it with one other, my first boyfriend. Was it the thrill of being free to do whatever I wanted away from home, or was it the culture that caught me up way too quick?

Now, don’t take this the wrong way. I didn’t start sleeping with anyone that had a pulse. What I did was realize that there wasn’t a big dating scene at Harvard in the gay community (or in any other?). I went to QSA parties and to non-QSA parties. Every time: I saw a boy. He saw me. We danced. We kissed. We made out. We got heavy. His place? My place? Holworthy basement? The reading rooms of Weld? What happened to trading numbers and calling to show you’re interested? What happened to being genuinely interested?

I had no time for games. I was not aware of them. When an upperclassmen I had been talking to for some time asked me to come over one night, I assumed he liked me. We slept together then, and the next weekend, and the next, and several more. In high school we fall in pubescent love and seek relationships. I was not told that things change in college until he rejected the idea of a relationship. “We’re only fucking and having fun,” friends with benefits, he said. They all said…

I’m not crazy. You’ve seen it if you’ve been to QSA parties. There are couples of boys and couples of girls against walls having intense, orgasmic make-out sessions with heavy touching. One second I’m talking to my best friend, the next one he is making out with a boy I’ve never seen him with, and the next he is nowhere to be found and neither is the boy he had been making out with. The upperclassmen creep on the underclassmen, who feel special and fall into the arms of those experienced in the realms of “hooking up.”

Take Hotspot, the first QSA party of the year, replete with condoms and lubrication? It’s a nice touch, but it’s also a precautionary station. “Don’t get HIV. Don’t get herpes. Pick one up. You’ll probably end up having sex tonight.” It’s about promoting safe sex, but it is also about promoting safe sex because you’ve come to the realization that sex is going to happen. Since when did the assumption of sex become part of the meet-and-greet?

I love sex as much as the next person, but I am left to wonder: Is romance all dead? Maybe it’s a college thing, a we-pre-gamed-before-the-party-with-vodka-and-rum thing, or a Harvard thing. Whatever it is, it is a thing. Hooking up. I’ve been a part of it. You probably have. We’re victims (or lovers) of a vicious cycle and of our bodies and hormones. Even gay online dating is haywire. Straight couples have eHarmony and OKCupid, we have Grindr, ManHunt, and Adam4Adam. I’ll get into detail on these “dating” tools next time.

If you want to ask questions, ask for advice, suggest a post topic, or just have general comments, please contact hrvdgossipguy@gmail.com. All email sent to this address will be kept confidential.

Until next time, you know you love me.

xoxo,
Gossip Guy

I have never been the kind of person who “discovered” artists long before they were engulfed in the corrupting waves of popularity. The Shins showed me their magic years after they had been fond playmates of the indie underground; I first heard of Kings of Leon with their hit single on the MTV Top 40. As for my favorite artist, Jewel? I only heard of her after the release of her fourth album. Rather than exercise some cultural gift of musical intuition, I have always been content to absorb the songs I like when I may: at a party, on the radio, or on a friend’s iTunes.

Apparently, my lax attentiveness to culture puts me behind the times. Nearly every day I talk with someone who claims to have heard of Feist or Lady GaGa “before they were popular.” It seems that many people see value in being “original”: being one of the first to experiment with a new trend or to appreciate a new cultural phenomenon.

Perhaps life in the Harvard bubble has limited my perception, but this phenomenon of originality seems much more intense among Harvard students than among the good ol’ subdued Midwestern folks of my hometown. Of course (I muse this while listening to Regina Spektor, whose music I first heard two weeks ago—how unoriginal), the need to be original fits with the competitive—perhaps neurotic—mindset of many Harvard students. To be different is to be more deserving, more accomplished, and more interesting.

It seems dismissive to chalk up the desire for originality to competitiveness, however. In fact, it seems more like a desire to be seen as different than to actually be different. This strange preoccupation with image is a time-tested variable—how we are perceived by our peers is not a newly discovered adolescent concern. Yet at a university known for educating industry icons and world leaders, why wouldn’t people strive to be leaders, even if their spheres of leadership were just passing trends?

As one of my blockmates suggested, these fledgling Columbuses may simply strive to be thought of having good taste. Talent scouts, after all, make a living by this—or at least by identifying what has the potential to be popular. Harvard is less known for producing talent scouts than for producing best-selling authors, brilliant mathematicians, and future presidents. That said, it would seem—to my Harvard-trained logic—more effective to stick with one traditional style. Someday, I’m sure, hipster attire will no longer be fashionable, and then the people who wear decently colored and fitted clothes will once again be on top of the style heap. The added benefit: people who adhere to traditional styles do not often fall out of style.

Though, given how I lounge and write this in my blackish skinny jeans and gray-and-black striped sweater (I caught onto hipster fashion long after it became fashionable), I can think of no better theory. Do we value originality because it shows others that we have good taste? Do we value originality because it allows us to confirm our taste to ourselves?

Regardless of motive, this desire to be original is, on the whole, harmless. At worst, it is a petty criticism of someone else’s unoriginality. Still, I cannot criticize the phenomenon with integrity. As I think about it, I wonder if my indifference to being the “first” person I know to do something—to wear this style or to listen to that music—is in itself different, challenging, even original. The thought is pleasing—but again, why? Why does that matter?

Maybe instead of obsessing over new trends, instead of trying to live on the “cutting edge” with our not-yet-realized claims on the future, we should content ourselves with our current interests. The obsession with originality is temporal, and temporal obsessions can be dangerously cyclical; in one week, a month, two years, the same trend that one person discovered will become popular, and that person will strive to find something else “original.” Indeed, the cyclic aspect of the quest for originality is what makes the quest futile.

In the end, we like what we like, and many of our likes change. When we discover that we like something is—and should be—irrelevant.

 “You’re an original, baby / Like we’ve never seen before / You’re an original, baby / Turn around and you’re looping at 100 more” – Sheryl Crow

I started dating Ryan knowing that I would eventually leave him. For whom, or what, I knew not. It was my third year as a Vietnamese international student in Singapore, and already, I could feel myself clamoring for farther, greener pastures. I slapped an expiration date on the budding relationship out of both habit and necessity. Admittedly, I was being selfish, but at the tender age of seventeen, I was still in that vulnerable stage where I craved the assurance that someone could like me for who I was, and the thought of being alone in this foreign land scared me to tears. So I relied on this boy to give me the closeness that I wanted, even though I could never really reciprocate his feelings.

I finally summoned the courage to leave Ryan ten months into the relationship and three weeks shy of our high school graduation. “It’s not you, it’s me. You deserve someone who appreciates you better than I ever could,” I said, my voice muffled by guilt. It was a tired and mostly deceptive cliché people use to mask the disillusionments of a break-up. In this case though, it was true. My emotional unavailability was poisonous, and I couldn’t bear seeing it eat away at him. I had planned several versions of my future in my head, none of which included Ryan. You know that joyful moment in a relationship when he brought your roommate food because she was sick, and you realized that this might be the real deal? For me, it was less joyful and more frightful. This was starting to become real, and it was time to find the exit. Permanence was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had no idea where I would be a month from then, but I knew that I was about to leave the Lion City. He was but a fragment of a past I was ready to leave behind.

He couldn’t have been all that surprised. I had envisioned the breakup at the very onset of our relationship, musing then and again of a future in a foreign land, embracing the exotic and chasing wild geese. When I tried to break up with him, he just stared at me blankly. He probably thought that his kindness and devotion would make me change my mind, and that my flighty disposition was just a phase. “Where are you going?” he asked. “I don’t know, but I’m leaving this country.”

Perhaps in the deepest recesses of my mind, I did love Ryan. But I was always reluctant to fall into the embrace of all-consuming love. I was terrified by my attraction to him, and the fear only increased as he became more of a real person with each passing day, someone I actually liked. At some point, the fear of being emotionally invested and then having to deal with the inevitable breakup consumed the promise and possibility of being in love, and there was nowhere else to go but out.

I wanted to call my mother as soon as I left Ryan. The emotional burden was proving harder to withstand by myself than I had thought. But I would have had to explain to her the concept of casual dating, my peculiar propensity for “expiration dating,” and my aversion to attachment because I didn’t know how to commit to a place, much less a person. I decided to leave the soul-baring soliloquy to Taylor Swift instead.

Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that I ended up at Harvard, a place where people are so overcommitted that no one really commits. We are so busy scrambling to the top of our classes and pre-professional extracurricular activities that we neglect to realize how utterly alone we are most of the time. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we hide our deeply deflective, but destined for greatness selves behind a veil of accomplishments because it’s so much easier to write a seven-page analysis of a book we don’t actually know, than sustain a seven-minute conversation with a person we really hope to know. We are stumped by someone’s nervous flirtations because the protocol for reaction is not listed in our overpriced textbooks. The options are endless, but the directions are lacking. So we resign ourselves to programming a plethora of websites that attempt to make love happen and cross our fingers.

At Harvard, I quickly developed a habit of giving false information to members of the opposite sex. On Thursday night, I am a Wellesley freshman with a major in contemporary arts. Friday night, I hail from New York and my mother is half-German. None of this is true. I am 100% Vietnamese, and the closest encounter I’ve had with art involved scribbling my giant initials in pink ink across a wall in my room, which my mother swiftly repainted. I dally in the realm of easy hookups and contrived flirtations, where things like backgrounds, hopes and dreams don’t matter at all. I’d like to think that this is less because I value the anonymity of a hookup, and more because if I’m just a concoction of a self and not a reality, then I can’t hurt the other person and he can’t hurt me.

It sometimes strikes me in a flash of blind panic that I might be eternally gripped by the curse of loneliness and commitment phobia. “It’s okay,” someone who attended Harvard eons ago once told me. “Just focus on the academics, everything else will work itself out.” Maybe that’s true. For the time being, though, the concept of “life companion” brings to my mind an image of a Cavalier spaniel scrunching its nose and wagging its furry tail, and that makes me smile.

By Liyun Jin ‘12

“I have to tell you something,” he said, putting his tray down and looking me in the eyes.

“I’m already dating someone.” He took a deep breath. “I mean, I have a girlfriend.”

Silence. Incredulity. A dull pain, as I felt my jaw hit the floor.

Such a confession isn’t something one usually hears on a first date. But this wasn’t any random date, it was a date made possible by Datamatch.

The Harvard Computer Society’s annual dating service prides itself on a “proprietary artificial intelligence system so complex that no one understands it.”

Claiming to be “better at matchmaking than you or any of your friends could ever hope to be,” Datamatch drew 1,998 respondents this year—students looking for fun, for Facebook stalking targets, and for what the survey guarantees will be the names of your “Harvard soulmates.”

Single, curious, and hopeful, I put Datamatch to the test. The survey makes plenty of lofty promises, but could it actually deliver?

Experimental Methods

The procedure was simple: After receiving the names of my six matches on the morning of Valentine’s Day, I emailed all of them with an awkward but direct invitation: “Hey, you were on my Datamatch list! Want to grab dinner sometime?” The ones who were foolish enough to say “Yes” sat down to meals with me, and based on how these dates went, I evaluated the efficacy of the dating service.

Surprisingly, three guys accepted my invitation. Even a complete stranger gave an enthusiastic “Sure, let me know what works for you,” suggesting various times and accommodating my midterm schedule.

Their responses made me wonder: if guys are so eager to go on dates, then why don’t they just ask? Despite all the complaints made about Harvard’s non-existent dating scene, it turns out that guys are actually enthusiastic to go on dates. It just seems that they don’t want to make the first move.

The Dates

My date with Mr. I Already Have A Girlfriend (IAHAG) clearly didn’t go so smoothly. After only knowing him for about three minutes, the occasion had already devolved into not only my worst date ever, but possibly the most awkward social experience I have ever had. Thanks, Harvard Computer Society.

In addition to telling me that he already had a girlfriend, IAHAG also claimed that his girlfriend was “perfectly okay” with the fact that he was going on a date with someone else. I, however, was mortified on her behalf.

The first fifteen minutes of our meal consisted of complete silence punctuated with my incredulous laughter and his bumbling explanation that he accepted my invitation because he likes making new friends. Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I don’t use dating services to find friends.

After we decided just to make the best of the botched date, we actually had a pretty good conversation. After it ended, he asked me to accompany him to a Harvard Natural History Museum exhibition. I politely declined.

He got one point for being so transparent. Minus one billion points, though, for borderline cheating, being misleading, and ruining my appetite.

The other dates were more successful and less awkward, though by comparison, just about everything would be better than my experience with IAHAG.

Though my dates were all interesting people, I would never make the stretch and deem them soulmates.

Conclusion

Datamatch claims to “match you with the people on campus with whom you are most compatible. Guaranteed.” Clearly, the Harvard Computer Society left out the “will not” in this description.

For me, not only did Datamatch lead to the most awkward date I have ever been on, but also helped me garner a reputation among six Harvard men as that desperate girl who asked out her Datamatches. On the plus side, I got over my asking-guys-out-phobia and now know about a cool exhibit at the Natural History Museum.

I will admit that my results aren’t conclusive, since this experiment had an extremely small sample size. Who knows, perhaps Datamatch will work for everyone else, and I’m just so hopeless that I defy the matchmaking abilities of “computers so powerful” that they had to be locked “in a cage buried below campus.”

By John Paul Jones

Call me a hopeless romantic, but I am a fan of the bromance. Shakespeare’s Veronese Valentine and Proteus, in their loving pursuits of Silvia and Julia, are one of my favorite examples of a bromance. They’re both heterosexual. They’re both deeply in love—not with each other—and they pass countless hours talking about their beloveds and making life plans. But they’re really just friends, so what’s the big deal?

This kind of close, nonsexual friendship between two men has existed, I’m sure, throughout human history. Only recently, however, has it been christened with a hint of homoeroticism. The obvious combination of “brother” and “romance” sometimes provokes a quick denial of homosexuality: “Yeah, we’re bros—no homo.” It’s fine for bros to be really close (or even to have pet names), but don’t expect them to hang out with self-proclaimed “Gay Pimp” Jonny McGovern.

In a broader context, the bromance also elicits more than $100 million worldwide at the theater. The stoner flick Pineapple Express, in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play Mary Jane’s bromancing lovers, is one of the recent signs that bromances have become acceptable in mainstream media—and therefore, in the youth culture that both creates and emulates those media.

Depicting the bromance is a rather daring move, especially given the homophobic attitudes that pervade much of our culture. It’s even more daring to live it. Forget actors whose allegedly gay orientations constantly serve as gossip rag fodder: millions of college-age men are involved in bromances. At Harvard, the phenomenon is similar. One pair might play hockey together; maybe another met in Justice section. Regardless of how they came together, they’re close friends, they’re emotionally supportive—or sometimes needy—and they’re not planning to break up anytime soon.

Perhaps what keeps these pairs together is a long, twisted precedent of defined male sexuality. Especially in American society, many men strive to live up to gender roles, no matter how contrived they are—a phenomenon paralleled in fiction. In Hollywood, male leads almost invariably play heterosexual characters with clearly defined sexual values. James Bond, for example, the classic embodiment of masculinity, never fails to save the world and land the prettiest woman around; Superman, a more demure character, poetically and silently falls in love with Lois Lane. So far, no bros on the side.

Enter Brokeback Mountain, a tale of two closeted lovers who both embrace gender norms out of necessity and violate them out of love. The blockbuster success of this film helped bring homosexual relationships into public attention, and the film certainly did not follow the precedent set by queer cinema. Brokeback Mountain earned a mainstream audience—not a uniformly queer one.

What does that have to do with the bromance? In our society, the idea of two men being close enough friends to seem like lovers is, well, a bit progressive. Our hockey players and Justice enrollees are not looking to be identified as gay; frankly, most probably aren’t gay. Nor are Dale Denton (Rogen) and Saul Silver (Franco). By carrying on their bromance, however, real bromancers open themselves up to the possibility that outsiders will misunderstand their relationship. Implicit in the modern bromance, then, is an acknowledgment of homosexuality. This acknowledgement is the reason for phrases like “no homo.”

Maybe I’m giving undue credit, but I see a certain value in this acknowledgement of homosexuality. At its core, the bromance has some homoerotic elements. Does this combination of acknowledgement and homoeroticism constitute acceptance? No, but especially for people who strive to be politically correct, it is socially expedient to show tolerance of queer orientations.

Translation: “We’re not gay, but we’re not going to change our behavior for fear of being called gay.”

I’m not saying that Dale Denton and Saul Silver are on the front lines of queer rights activism. (On the other hand, out and proud actor Neil Patrick Harris is notorious for his bromancing characters.) But this cute cultural phenomenon that validates sincere affection between two men is one example of how queerness is starting to gain visibility. Two unrelated men can now publicly express affection, and plenty of people won’t think twice about it. This tendency toward acceptance of male-male affection is a sign that, to some extent, gay relationships are becoming normalized. Of course, that says little for America’s often stagnant disregard for transgender rights, same-sex adoption, and a host of other queer rights issues. It also doesn’t remedy the fact that the queer “community” still fights a troubling misconception that its members are all rich, white, gay men. Still, the definition of an abnormal relationship might be narrowing just a little bit thanks to the bromance.

So thank you, bromancers, for your pseudo-homosexual expressions. I’d love to see you more actively involved in advocacy for queer rights, but I realize that it can be difficult for an accidental pioneer.

In any case, I love you, men—no homo.

Along with a liberated and riotous freshman year, the abrupt wake-up call to the academic demands of college, and learning how to deal with being sexiled by a roommate, studying abroad is often considered to be a key element of the college experience. In accordance with modern western cultural values of global awareness, many college graduates who study overseas during their undergraduate years deem their time abroad as necessary to achieve a fulfilling post-secondary education.

At Harvard, however, a different culture exists. Only a small handful of students decide to leave the gated community in Cambridge each year, most preferring to spend time abroad during the summer, oftentimes not in language immersion programs. Some have been eager to point the finger at the university’s administration, citing the authoritative discouragement the student body feels. The Office of International Programs only lists five exchange programs that Harvard itself runs with partner schools, which include the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (better known as Sciences Po) in Paris and Uppsala University in Sweden. Contrarily, the university seems to push students toward Harvard Summer School programs, many of which include research-oriented weeks abroad interspersed with cultural excursions rather than language immersion courses.

Harvard’s surprisingly small number of offerings could very well stem from lack of student interest. But it’s not completely unreasonable that people would choose not to take advantage of their international opportunities given that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences departments are notoriously stingy when it comes to accepting credit from foreign universities (or any university that’s not Harvard, for that matter). Greg Gilroy, a junior economics concentrator who chose to study in Florence, Italy through a program at the University of Minnesota, did not take a single economics class during his year in Europe. “I was not able to get any of my classes approved by the economics department.” Instead, Gilroy completed courses in Italian language, culture, and European history.

Others, however, have succeeded in petitioning for concentration credit. History and Literature concentrator Odelia Younge ’11 found her department extremely open to accepting her Spanish literature, film, and history courses from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid as part of her interdisciplinary academic track. “I am getting credit toward my concentration—despite being History and Literature in the American field,” Younge noted. Hansae Catlett ‘11, a junior studying biomedical engineering, also received a credit toward his concentration with a course in engineering design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Catlett added that he “also got one core knocked off.”

So why do so few students study abroad? Jessica Erickson ‘10, a Psychology concentrator who spent a year at Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile last year, sympathized with the common sentiment that most of her peers feel when considering a year away from the university: “I think most people feel that they are going to get behind some way or miss out on something, which is too bad since that’s not the case at all.” Anna Raginskaya ‘11, a History of Art and Architecture concentrator, also noticed this widespread trend. “I think this is because spending a semester away from Harvard at an academic institution that is not very strong may indeed be perceived as a loss,” commented Raginskaya, who is currently studying art history and finance at Universita Bocconi in Milan, Italy.

But many who forgo a semester or two to escape the cruel New England winter found themselves missing what they had initially wanted to get away from. While studying abroad, many students realize the plentiful resources Harvard offers, and the constant and notoriously Harvard-style complaining that obscures the reality of the university’s generosity in terms of funding, establishment, and general conveniences. “My perspective [of Harvard] hasn’t changed much,” Catlett said. “I still view it as an amazing place of learning and opportunity. Now, I’m just taking more advantage of those opportunities.”

Undoubtedly, students who experience life at another university abroad draw their own conclusions after comparing the advantages with those of Harvard. “I took for granted the availability of textbooks, the Coop, the amazing libraries, and computer labs,” Erickson recollected about her time at Pontificia Universidad Católica. “In Chile, I would have to wait about an hour in line to photocopy all of my reading materials every week. I missed the organization and dependability that Harvard offers.”

As far as social life goes, it’s a mixed bag. Gilroy, a member of the lacrosse team, mentioned that he missed “hanging out with teammates and Final Clubs.” Catlett had a different take, however: “I didn’t miss the redundant social scene or the long nights working on problem sets or essays.”

Younge also cited the omnipresent stress of Harvard as something she was happy to remove herself from. “Studying abroad is a lot more relaxing, that’s for sure. The environment is more laid back. I do not miss the stress that sometimes goes along with being on campus and starting classes.” Kristin Ohanian ’11, who decided to go abroad in an untraditional route by applying to an external program, Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), was quick to mention a less frenetic pace of work and life as a favorable impression of her time at the University of Amsterdam. “The libraries here closed at eight, so no Lamont all-nighters, that’s for sure!”

Perhaps the gaping hole in communication can explain why more students are not taking advantage of studying abroad. Harvard’s financial aid office offers assistance to those going abroad, sometimes more so than if they were staying on campus. According to Raginskaya’s experience with cooperating with the financial aid office,
“[they will] write you a check for any extra money you will need as dictated by your budget.” Additionally, the faculty seems to welcome the idea of pursuing academics elsewhere, allowing those who explore outside of the brick-lined confines of the Yard to come back with perhaps greater worldly wisdom. “If a student states clearly that they want to go abroad, I feel like most departments would bend over backwards to make that happen,” said Younge.

Harvard kids just have one problem to resolve. “It’s important to not fall into a trap of thinking you are the best and brightest,” said Raginskaya. “Going abroad and meeting so many new people will easily show you how many things you do not know.”