I am writing to the Crimson in response to two recent articles pertaining to Mather House and the alleged problem with homophobia. These articles stemmed from a BGLSA reaction to an incident in Mather House on Sunday night, February 19, 1989. The BGLSA and the Crimson have shed sufficient, if not colossal, light upon the BGLSA's version of that Sunday night incident and the issue of homophobia.

I wish here to provide my fellow residents in Mather House and my fellow students in the Harvard community with another account of what happened on that night of February 19. I want to present the issue this account raises, sexual harrassment of a heterosexual male by a homosexual male.

That Sunday night there was a public party in Mather House, to which I had invited a few friends from home. One of my friends, in fact, had been hired to dee-jay the party. As a result, for much of the evening, he and most of my other friends were clustered in a section of the room physically detached from the dance floor. My friends, with one exception, are in their early 20s. The exception was the kid brother of two of my friends, a boy still in high school.

During the party, a Mather House senior walked up to the platform on which my friends were clustered and asked the 17-year-old boy to dance. That boy said "no" and thought that the matter was closed. The Mather individual in question returned to the platform some time later. Again, he asked my friend to dance; he told my friend that the two of them could "get away from all these girls," as his hand roamed over my friend's lower back and behind.

To say the least, my friend was surprised. My friend grabbed a young woman who had accompanied the group to Harvard that evening, told the Mather senior that the woman was his girlfriend, and rejected for a second time the invitation to dance.

The boy's older brother, the dee-jay, was then approached by the same Mather senior. The Mather student informed the older brother that he was a homosexual, and the older brother told the Mather senior to stay away from him and his brothers.

Two more times that evening, the Mather individual approached my group of friends. My friends were by that time exasperated and, unfamiliar with this train of events, did not know what to do. What they did was engage the Mather individual in exchanges that were--on both sides--bigoted, deeply offensive and abusive. At one point, one of my friends pushed the Mather senior.

I become aware of events too late to prevent the exchanges, but did interfere at the later times in the evening to separate the individuals and to help calm matters. I did expect, after the first heated exchange had ended, that the Mather student would not go out of his way to approach my friends again. Of course, this expectation proved false.

At the end of the evening, after a House tutor and I had broken up the last bout of shouting, my friends and I sat down with the tutor. My friends, at the tutor's request, then spent over an hour recounting the evening's events. They described the hatred that came out of their mouths as honestly as they described the offensive language hurled at them. What that tutor and I heard was the truth.

Five days later, a group of gay men and lesbian women interrupted dinner in the Mather dining hall. They announced that they had come to protest homophobia and explained that their action was a result of Sunday night's incident. They staged a "Kiss-in," saying that they were pushed to action by the abuse which the said Mather senior had faced the previous Sunday.

Needless to say, while no one at Mather defends homophobia, we were shocked by the misuse of fact that underlaid the action in the dining hall. The individual the group came to defend had sexually harassed my friend, and other instances are known when he has exhibited similarly unacceptable behavior. Unfortunately, the group's attack on homophobia could only be understood by many of us as an endorsement of that individual.

The Crimson articles and the House meeting on Saturday focused on homophobia--not because it was the intrinsically more important issue, but because concern for the privacy of this Mather senior led me and many others in the House to avoid direct reference to the case in public forums. This silence should not be construed in any way as acquiescence to the peculiar deception which has been perpetrated on the Harvard community. And I can no longer maintain that silence.

I denounce homophobia in any of its expressions and the assault of my friends on the member of my house. My friends were wrong, even if they were provoked. I also denounce with equal vigor sexual harassment, in all of its expressions, and the harassment of the said individual on my friend.

When my friend was sexually harassed, I did not conduct a public forum on sexual harassment. I went to the proper judicial channels of Harvard University. The BGLSA, prompted by the student who had harassed my friend, chose to do otherwise and held the Kiss-in. I was told by Harvard administrators before the Kiss-in not to discuss the Sunday case. The other group, however, felt free to do so.

They made homophobia the issue. I now make sexual harassment the issue; it was the issue which created the confrontation, and it is an issue which should not have been suppressed. Homophobia has been highlighted while truth was forced to squirm in the sidelight. The perpetrator of the sexual harassment has become a hero of the cause unjustly, and undeservingly so.