When Professor of Philosophy Warren D. Goldfarb '69 was the head tutor of his department in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he used to leave matchboxes from a local bar catering to a mostly gay clientele on a table in his office.

The matchboxes sat on the table for years, rarely used by smokers, but that was not their purpose. They were meant as a signal in a university where homosexuality was not universally acceptable--that Goldfarb's office was a haven for gay, bisexual and lesbian students.

It worked, Students like the gay undergraduate who, the victim of abuse from a homophobic roommate, was forced by College officials to move out of his suite, came to him with their stories. Or graduate students who, when interviewed for Harvard fellowships, were asked about their sexual orientation, felt comfortable approaching him.

Such stories pushed Goldfarb, an abstract mathematical logical theorist who has never held a permanent job outside Harvard University, to come out of the closet in the early 1980s, making him the first openly gay member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The stories made an activist out of a man who had stayed out of the conflicts that tore the College apart when he was a student. As a professor, he spearheaded a crusade for a University-wide rule forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Goldfarb is a slight, bearded man, often casually dressed in jeans and black Reeboks. Hardcovered philosophy books line the shelves of his large office, and a depiction of a cow amidst grass with the legend "Outstanding in the Field" adorns a mug sitting in the middle of his somewhat cluttered desk.

A student gave the mug to him, he explains. The two small figurines on another corner of the desk are part of a Wittgenstein joke reference comprehensible only to those in the know, but the humor of a nearby Citizen Goldfarb book, the self-published autobiography of an obscure industrialist, is self-explanatory.

It is unquestionably the office of a professor, with its academic in-jokes, student tributes, cluttered files and all, and its occupant is both the expected scholar and something else: the matchbox-collecting activist.

The activism, and the scholarship, provide a curious if not surprising mix given Goldfarb's background. He comes from a middle-class New York Jewish family. His parents were children of immigrants who valued education above all else and were willing to make financial sacrifices to send a son to Harvard.

His father, an accountant, and his mother, an elementary school teacher, prided themselves on his success at the College and were part of a world that prized a Harvard professor above any other avocation.

At his 20th reunion for the Bronx High School of Science, he recalls, "I was considered to be the greatest success story there."

But the same parents who valued his scholarly success were not always comfortable with other aspects of their son. Goldfarb says his late father never wanted to meet the partner the professor has now lived with for more than 15 years.

The college his parents prized so highly, despite fears that their son would encounter anti-Semitism, was a happy place for Goldfarb. He was involved in the Gilbert and Sullivan Players, the Lowell House Opera and Hillel, and he says he met no serious anti-Semitism.

It was an introductory class on logic and a General Education introduction to philosophy his first year that sparked the intellectual passion that has shaped his academic life ever since. Goldfarb was a mathematics major, but the philosophical questions were impossible for him to ignore.

"I was finding that these problems of philosophy did grip me," he says. The classes were challenging, but that only motivated him to move farther in the field and come to a real understanding.