On a predominantly liberal campus like Harvard, an unabashed conservative like Sumner E. Anderson '92 can create a sensation.

And after a few months heading the Harvard Republican Club (HRC) two years ago, Anderson did just that. Setting an extreme right-wing agenda for the club, Anderson made moves that alienated many moderate campus Republicans and angered many gays and lesbians.

Despite the HRC's more moderate position these days, Anderson is still an active ideologue, concerned with the same controversial issues that made headlines less than two years ago.

THEN Anderson won the presidency of the Republican Club in an election that was nothing if not controversial.

Of the 20 to 25 voters present, Anderson had personally invited 15 of them.

Anderson denied wrongdoing, saying "If I hadn't brought those people in, there would not have been anyone there.

"I'm under the impression that in any election you should know even before you enter the room that you're going to win," he said at the time.

Raised in a devoutly religious family, he frames his beliefs in terms of absolute Christian morality.

One well-known example is Anderson's disgust for homosexuality, which he has called "deviant behavior" in several letters to The Crimson.

"It's repulsive," Anderson wrote once. "It's a disease...it's totally abnormal. It's not a natural activity."

Republicans who left the club soon after Anderson took office described his right-wing ideological stance as exclusionary and, in one case, "fascist."

"The [executive] board's tactics are reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of the 1930's," Jeremy Sevareid '92, then program director of the club, wrote to The Crimson in May, 1991. "Their actions have...splintered Republicans on campus."

But Anderson asserts that his conservatism reflected the National GOP platform and the American mainstream.

"During my time as head of HRC, conservatism on campus had a resurgence," he says, citing the publication of Peninsula and the formation of AALARM (the Association Against Learning in the Absence of Religion and Morality).

Campus Democrats, meanwhile said that a turn to the right for the HRC could only boost support for their party.