“Everyone jokes that Harvard is very very gay,” says Philip de Sa e Silva ’13. “And definitely, compared to my high school, it is.”

De Sa e Silva says that in high school, he did not feel as though coming out was beneficial to him, so he waited until his first year at Harvard to come out.

“[At Harvard] there are a lot of people who are out and older. And that helps,” he says.

Jessica, who is from Massachusetts—a place in which she says it is easy to be gay—was surprised that her peers at Harvard accepted her as quickly as they did, since they came from a variety of communities and represented families with a range of religious and political convictions.

“I had my own prejudices,” she says.

Jessica says she was surprised that students who said they were devout did not discriminate against her for being lesbian.

“I have a friend who is Catholic and he came up to me and said, ‘You know Catholic people, we’re cool with the gays,’” she recalls.

HARVARD DOES QUEER

Head Teaching Fellow for English 154: “Literature and Sexuality” and a non-resident tutor in Lowell House, Robert Joseph “R.J.” Jenkins says that while Harvard offers a positive environment for queer students, homophobia still exists on campus.

“I think the danger we’re in is the danger of thinking that because we’re at Harvard, because we’re in a liberal environment, because we’re in the northeast, everyone is accepting,” says Jenkins, who is openly gay.

De Sa e Silva recalls a night when he was returning to his dorm room in DeWolfe from a party in the Quad. As he rode the shuttle, he says he remembers hearing a boy behind him yell homophobic slurs at one of his friends—something de Sa e Silva had not heard since high school.

“He was calling someone a fag or something like that,” he says. “I just felt so tense.”

Some people, like Katherine M. Baus ’15, say Harvard is still a heteronormative environment.

Baus, who identifies as bisexual, says she does not think events during freshman orientation address the needs of queer students.

“The comedy shows—the stand up—are exclusively, exclusively heterosexual and it would be nice to see some sort of representation there,” she says.