Gay W&M Alums Respond to Discrimination Flap

By Amber Lester Saturday, March 13, 2010

The College of William and Mary’s gay and lesbian alumni are commending the college’s affirmation this week that it will not discriminate based on sexual orientation.

William and Mary GALA is a 24-year-old gay and lesbian alumni group with more than 600 members. President Wayne Curtis, a Realtor in Baltimore, Md., says the group was impressed by the college’s response to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s request that the state’s colleges remove “sexual orientation” from nondiscrimination policies.

Cuccinelli told colleges and universities on Sunday that by adding sexual orientation or gender identity to their nondiscrimination policies, they were acting outside the authority allowed by the General Assembly. Earlier this year, Gov. Bob McDonnell opted not to include sexual orientation in an executive order on workplace discrimination as his two predecessors had.William and Mary students decried Cuccinelli’s actions on Facebook and in newspaper editorials, calling on the college to take a stand. Curtis says GALA members were already discussing plans of action to prevent sexual orientation from being removed from the college’s nondiscrimination policy. Action became unnecessary by mid-week, however.

On Tuesday, William and Mary President Taylor Reveley issued a statement saying the college needed to carefully review Cuccinelli’s views as a matter of law and policy. He went on to say, “For now, let’s be clear that William & Mary neither discriminates against people nor tolerates discrimination on our campus.” He ended his statement (available here) by saying the campus community does not discriminate.

“This is the way we live our lives together at William & Mary, because we believe this is the way we should live our lives together,” he said.

“This is not going to change.”

The next day, Gov. Bob McDonnell issued an executive directive stating discrimination based on “one’s sexual orientation or parental status violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution” and is therefore prohibited. Anyone not following the order would be subject to appropriate disciplinary action, ranging from reprimand to termination, McDonnell said.

“Our membership has been very much impressed by the courage and the backbone the college administration has showed in this,” Curtis says. “In the correspondence I received, there was never a question that the college administration was wavering. That is an enormous difference than would have been the case 20 years ago when we had a president who wanted to know what he could do about us.”

Curtis, who was born and raised in Fredericksburg, says he was surprised to see how quickly the Republicans in office were “going back to their old ways.” “I thought, and I hoped, they were making a miscalculation,” he says. “This was a return to the right-wing politics we’ve been used to since George Allen. But this is not your father’s Virginia.”

Curtis, a 1982 alumnus of WM, says it was unfathomable to be “out” to high school classmates in the old Virginia. He was not involved in the existing gay student activist group when he attended college because it seemed “a little too dicey, a little too lefty.”

When he graduated, he entered a work environment that was unfriendly to homosexuals. “One of the first things I experienced was gay workplace discrimination,” he says. “My work life after graduation very quickly pointed out to me that this was something we needed to do.”

GALA was formed in 1986 and one of its first goals was to have “sexual orientation” added to the nondiscrimination policy at the college, something the group achieved in the ’90s. “It was one of the first issues we put our hands on and said, ‘This needs to happen,’” Curtis says. The Faculty Senate lobbied for the addition, as well; the senate is currently trying to get “gender identity” added to the policy.

He believes there has been a “sea change” in the way society views gays and lesbians, and sees more support for equality than ever before. “I’m really encouraged that even in conservative, reddish Virginia, that kind of reaction could cause a conservative politician to backtrack as quickly and really as completely as he did,” he says.

Many Virginians supported Cuccinelli’s view because the House of Delegates recently defeated legislation to protect state employees from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Curtis says Cuccinelli’s supporters should walk a mile in his shoes.

“I have lost a job because of anti-gay discrimination. I have been verbally threatened on the street because someone perceived a group of men as being gay,” he says. “When you are actually in my shoes, the world looks different.”