Gay Freedom
Item
-
Title
-
Gay Freedom
-
Description
-
Letter to the Editor about the Dean of Students at the Eastman School of Music, Flora Burton's, mistreatment of homosexual students.
-
Creator
-
Campus Times
-
Date
-
1971-05-14
-
Format
-
Newspaper
-
Language
-
eng
-
Publisher
-
University of Rochester
-
Rights
-
This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
-
Source
-
Campus Times (May 14, 1971), Campus times (University of Rochester), LD4747.C197, Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester
-
Text
-
To the Editor:
You, if you are a truly freedom-loving person, you will be out raged and saddened that the Dean of Students at the Eastman School of Music has flagrantly and repeatedly harassed, tormented, and threatened with blackmail (i.e., exposure to parents, dismissal from school, etc.) students she learns have engaged in homosexual behavior and have refused to go for "psychiatric treatment.'
Perhaps Dean Burton thinks that her actions are virtuous, that she is helping the poor sick souls. Perhaps Plato was right and every man pursues the good as he sees it. Or, maybe she is just a venomous, spiteful and wicked old bitch. I don't know. But what I DO know is that her actions — and any such actions — are wrong and evil and that they must stop. These kinds of incidents have continued this long unarrested because gay people have been oppressed and unable to fight back — oppressed out of ignorance, superstition and fear.
But people must have the free dom of their own bodies — to use them as they will; they must be free to love each other with them. In fact, freedom to speak, gather together, write, make love, smoke dope — they are all of a piece; freedom to choose how to live one's own life when it interferes with no one else's. The federal government, or the state, or the city, or the university — or Dean Burton — must not dare to interfere.
Gay Freedom