Letter to the Editor

Dear Mr. Mees,

As an alumnus of a venerated university similar to Duke nearing my five-year reunion, I share the nostalgia you must have felt upon returning to campus. I hope one day to bring my son back to college to show him the classrooms where I first came to understand compassion, what I think Whitman meant when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

It is with that understanding that I wish to respond to your letter in the Duke Chronicle from January 14. In your letter, after seeing that a new LGBT center on Duke’s campus has replaced a former hall where a plaque commemorating your father once hung, you expressed frustration with our generation’s “overacceptance of sexual and gender issues,” and argued that this acceptance came about as a “reflexive change” in our thinking. The only reflex here, I submit, is your writing of the letter in response to seeing the community center. The first community organization promoting research on sexual health, sexuality and gender, by the way, was founded in Berlin in 1897. That organization advocated for the social acceptance of gay and transgender people, taking as its cause célèbre the repeal of a discriminatory sodomy law in the German penal code. Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy were a few of the signatories on the petition advocating for the statute’s repeal.

You continued further by wondering if our acceptance of “homosexual activity” in general was a kind of “Pavlovian support.” Though I'd like to think we all have a greater capacity for independent thought than a dog hearing a bell—whether or not we have been conditioned to support our LGBT brothers and sisters still doesn’t explain what you found so offensive about the social and educational space, except that its creation perhaps caused the removal of your father’s plaque. I hope that you or the university will honor his memory by hanging the plaque in a straighter hall.

If you intended the study you have cited from 1997 about mortality rates among people infected with HIV who were also gay as your argument against the center, I wonder if it is you, not we, who might better serve as a subject of a Pavlovian study, since you so uncontrollably conflated homosexuality and HIV/AIDS infection. I also hurt for those who have suffered and died from this tragic disease, but I’m offended that you would condescend to and deny their humanity by suggesting that they held death in their own hands. The fact of gay life is not death but love.

Since the center already exists, presumably the university administration and the LGBT people who made it possible have already come to an informed decision about its value, which, I should point out, primary among many other things, is to celebrate love. It wouldn't make any sense at all for them to discontinue support for the center on account of an alumnus who would benefit from that which it celebrates most.

Jake Conway is a 2011 graduate of Yale University.