Will I have any friends?

Most people have at least one LGBTQ identified friend at Yale. There are very few who would actually choose not to be friends with someone solely based on their sexual orientation. In addition, the queer community itself is full of interesting, talented people who are always open to making new friends. Contact the LGBT Co-op to start making these connections.

Equal Opportunity at Yale

President Levin announced on Tuesday, October 17, 2006, in a message to all Deans and Directors, the Yale Corporation vote on September 28, 2006 to amend the University’s Equal Opportunity Statement, effective immediately. The Equal Opportunity Statement now reads as follows:

“The University is committed to basing judgments concerning the admission, education, and employment of individuals upon their qualifications and abilities and affirmatively seeks to attract to its faculty, staff, and student body qualified persons of diverse backgrounds. In accordance with this policy and as delineated by federal and Connecticut law, Yale does not discriminate in admissions, educational programs, or employment against any individual on account of that individual's sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a special disabled veteran, veteran of the Vietnam era or other covered veteran, or national or ethnic origin; nor does Yale discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
[New language in pink.]

Military Recruiting at Yale Law School: A Chronology of the Litigation

In 1995, Congress enacted the Solomon Amendment specifying that any university barring access to military recruiters would lose all its federal funding. At that time, almost all law schools in the United States excluded from their recruitment programs any employer who discriminated on grounds of sexual orientation. Yale Law School adopted this policy in 1978 – among the earliest law schools to do so. The U.S. military’s exclusion of openly gay and lesbian lawyers from employment violated the law school anti-discrimination policies, and law schools were the principal targets of the Solomon Amendment.

Enforcement of the Solomon Amendment was relatively relaxed during the Clinton Administration, but when George W. Bush took office in 2001, federal enforcement efforts immediately escalated. The imminent threat of losing all federal funding led virtually all law schools, including Yale, to exempt military recruiters from their non-discrimination policy. The Yale Law School faculty, however, specified that its exemption was only temporary and instructed the Dean to explore all avenues of legal relief against the Solomon Amendment. Unlike the policies of many law schools, the Yale policy did not bar military (or any discriminatory) employer from access to the school but instead withheld any active law school assistance, especially access to its Career Development Office website for scheduling interviews and exchanging information with potentially interested law students. The Department of Defense insisted, however, that withholding any advantage from military recruiters violated the Solomon Amendment. After extended, fruitless negotiations with the Department, in October 2003 forty-five members of the Yale Law School faculty (some two-thirds of the faculty) filed suit in the Federal District Court in Connecticut, claiming that the Solomon Amendment violated their constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association and academic freedom. Two weeks later, the Yale Law School student LGBT organization, Outlaws, filed its own suit alleging that their independent constitutional rights as students were violated.

In mid-September 2003, a separate lawsuit had been filed in a New Jersey federal district court challenging the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment; this lawsuit was a class action, composed of several law schools, individual law professors and students. Unlike the Yale suit, the plaintiffs in this case (known as Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR) v. Rumsfeld) asked for an emergency hearing. The district judge ruled against them while the Yale suit remained pending, and the FAIR plaintiffs immediately appealed to the Third Circuit federal court of appeals (which has jurisdiction over New Jersey federal district courts).

The Yale faculty and student cases proceeded to a full factual hearing in 2004 and in February 2005, U.S. district judge Janet Hall ruled in favor of the Yale faculty, holding that the Solomon Amendment violated their rights to free speech and association. (She dismissed the student suit as moot, on the grounds that in the faculty case, she had given all of the relief that the students independently had sought.) The Government immediately appealed Judge Hall’s ruling to the Second Circuit federal of appeals (which has jurisdiction over Connecticut district courts).

Meantime, in November 2004, the Third Circuit reversed the New Jersey district court and held for the FAIR plaintiffs that the Solomon Amendment violated their speech and associational rights. The Government requested Supreme Court review of this ruling and in May 2005, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. In March 2006, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Third Circuit, holding that law school recruitment policies were not constitutionally protected speech and the presence of military recruiters on law school campuses was not forced association between them and law schools or their faculty.

This Supreme Court ruling effectively reversed the grounds on which Judge Hall had held in favor of the Yale Law School plaintiffs. The Supreme Court did not, however, directly address the academic freedom claim that the Yale suit had advanced, and the Yale faculty plaintiffs continued to press this claim in the Second Circuit, notwithstanding the unfavorable ruling of the Supreme Court in the FAIR case. In September 2007, the Second Circuit ruled that the Solomon Amendment did not violate any of the Yale faculty’s constitutional rights, including the right to academic freedom.

This final exhaustion of the possibility of legal protection for the Yale faculty meant that the Department of Defense was now free to terminate all of Yale University’s federal funding – some $350 million. Although most of the University’s federal funding goes to the Medical School and Yale Law School receives virtually no federal funds, the Law School faculty decided that it would not jeopardize the activities of the rest of the University by enforcing its non-discrimination policy against the military recruiters. The Law School thus must pursue other means to dissociate itself from the U.S. military’s discriminatory policy.

In the over three hundred years since its founding, Yale has educated and been home to some of the most prominent queer scholars, activists, and artists in the nation's history. In the past half-century, we have become a nationally known center for LGBT activism and scholarship. Below is a smattering of events in Yale's queer history:

1913

Cole Porter graduates from Yale College and becomes one of the most celebrated popular composers in American history

1946

Modernist lesbian genius Gertrude Stein bequeaths her papers to Yale

1952

Martin Duberman graduates from Yale College. Later, he becomes a pre-eminent and prolific gay historian and the author of Stonewall

1955

Richard Raskind graduates from Yale College. Later, as Renee Richards, she becomes a champion tennis player, winning at Wimbledon in 1982

1957

Larry Kramer, future co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT-UP, graduates from Yale College

1969

LGBT students found the first gay organization at Yale, now called the LGBT Co-op

1975

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, M.A. '74, receives Ph.D. in English from Yale. Later she writes Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet, foundational texts in queer studies

1982

GALA, Yale's Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association, was founded. David Leavitt, an undergraduate at Yale, publishes his first short story in The New Yorker. It is the magazine's first openly gay piece of fiction

1983

Jennie Livingstone graduates from Yale College. Seven years later, she produces and directs Paris is Burning, an acclaimed documentary film about drag balls in New York City

1984

Judith Butler, B.A. '78, M.A. '82, receives Ph.D. in Philosophy. Within a few years, she becomes a founder of American queer theory, writing the groundbreaking Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power

1987

Groundbreaking gay historian John Boswell helps found the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center/Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale

1988

First Gay and Lesbian Studies conference at Yale

1989

George Chauncey, B.A. '77, M.A. '81, receives Ph.D. in History from Yale. Chauncey becomes one of the US's premiere gay historians, writing the classic Gay New York, and is now on faculty at Yale.

1990

Boswell appointed History Department Chair

1995

PRISM founded by queer students of color

1998

Women's Studies becomes Women's & Gender Studies and adds a track in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies

2001-2002

Yale hosts NUJLS Jewish LGBT Conference, Transcending Boundaries Bi/Trans Conference, and Beyond Visibility: Queer People of Color Shattering Single-Issue Politics

2002

Founding of Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale.

Queer Life at Yale: A Guide for Students