ewe
and Limitations ©

by Ed Sikov ’78

Ga

The Haverford Shoulder Check is still as essential a feature
of life at the college as it was when | was a student in the
1970s. What? You haven't heard of the Shoulder Check?
Come on! You probably did it hundreds of times — and you
didn’t think twice about it. The Shoulder Check occurs
when you see somebody come out of somebody else's room
on a Sunday morning and you rush to the Dining Center to
tell all your friends; just before blurting it out, you take a
quick glance over your shoulder to make sure the people
whose private lives youre publicizing aren’t standing right
behind you.

At a small, intimate place like Haverford, the Shoulder
Check is a vital skill to master. But while being a checker 1s
always fun, it’s usually a big drag to be the one whos
checked. In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that the Haverford
Shoulder Check has kept more gay men and lesbians in the
closet for the four years they spend in the community than
any overt acts of hate or intolerance could possibly achieve.
Since everyone pretty much knows everyone else at Haver-
ford, lesbian and gay students run the risk of being outed
the minute they leave somebody's room after what may well
be their first sexual experience. That's a lot of pres-
sure for young men and women who are just
coming to terms with themselves. For many
Fords, it may be easier just to stay celibate until graduation.

I'm a visiting prof at Haverford now, but in the fall of
1975, I was just one more geeky sophomore, as lonely and
sexually maladjusted as the next kid, except for one thing.
Like Esther in the Purim story, [ was a queen with a secret.
(As the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has so cleverly
pointed out, it was by outing herself — even her own hus-
band didn’t know she was Jewish! — that Esther saved her
people from annihilation.) And I wasn’t alone. Many of us
kept our little secret strictly to ourselves. Still, on a dreary
autumn Tuesday in 1975, I found my way to morning Col-
lection in Stokes Auditorium, where my friend and class-
mate Steven Rosen was announcing the formation of Haver-
ford’s first openly gay student group — the Gay People’s
Alliance.

It was a spectacle both inspiring and terrifying. It took a
lot of courage for Steve, an underclassman, to stand up in
front of the whole school and talk about why such a group
was forming — especially when a couple of less-than-friendly

Haverford, or the Virtues
ns £ Shoulder Checking

Ed Sikov outside his Founders office.

students began to nail him mercilessly about his own per-
sonal life. Steve and the other members of GPA neverthe-
less endured the ill will, and the Alliance thrived. In fact,
GPA quickly became widely respected for its rocking
dance parties, by far the best on campus. Leave aside the
group's politics (which were admirable); those dances made
the small gay subcommunity hundreds of friends.

Now that I’m older, | can see that the
hostility of some mean-spirited students
and faculty members simply gave me a
handy excuse to deny my own nature; it
took time for me to stop playing the mute
victim. But in the 1970s, the animosity that members of
GPA faced whenever their signs were defaced and certain
friends stopped speaking to them and certain professors
told them that they suffered from a psychiatric disorder —
that animosity was real, and it was more than enough to
convince me to keep my secret for all four years of college.
It was one of the ways in which Haverford’s very intimacy

 

FALL 1999

 

25

 

 

RUSTY KENNEDY