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“Like Lambda Health Alliance - that’s the medical school.” Also OutLaws (Columbia Law School), Queer TC (Teachers College), Cluster Q (Columbia Business School), and Q (Barnard College). “Each school has its own group,” said Chris Woods, assistant director of multicultural affairs and LGBTQ outreach. Any university without one is now the deviation Columbia currently maintains more than a dozen. If Bob Martin was a martyr, consider the following a national act of veneration: in 2016, thousands of LGBTQ student organizations endure on US college campuses. In the weirdest way, he was almost Christlike.”
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“Bob willingly gave of himself to see the movement grow. “That was the thread of his life,” said the Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Churches, and Martin’s friend from the sixties. “Just an extraordinary figure,” said Peter Awn, the venerable Columbia professor of religion who spoke at the Donaldson Lounge dedication. He was always fixing things for the people ahead of him, to make sure it never happened to them.” And as Martin’s activism accelerated, and the fallout landed, the pummeling he took, whether physical or psychological, never stopped him. “But then he would try to fix the problem. “Terrible things happened to him,” said Ellen Spertus, a colleague during the mid-nineties, and now a computer-science professor at Mills College in Oakland, California. Something else about Martin, and this too is completely contrary to his supposed self-aggrandizement: he’d always take the hit, and usually without a shield.
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“He always claimed to be bisexual,” said Dynes. Not by the rigorous definition of the word, at least. Donaldson, actually Robert Martin, was interchangeably called Bob, Stephen, or Donny by friends, acquaintances, and lovers, all of whom repeatedly corroborated one thing about him - Martin, the gay activist, wasn’t gay. But the pseudonym reflected a sensible precaution in 1966, one rarely revealed his real name in a gay bar, and absolutely never as the de facto president of a clandestine queer club at Columbia University.
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Undercover, unofficial, and unfunded - the Columbia administration dithered a while before coming around - but still, the first of its kind in the “whole wide world,” as Donaldson liked to say.įor a man adoring of attention, a glaring absurdity exists. “And very solicitous of his role in history.” A role indisputably singular: a half century ago, in Columbia’s 1966 fall semester, twenty-year-old Stephen Donaldson, a sophomore, founded the first queer student organization ever on a college campus. “He was very self-promoting,” said Wayne Dynes, a friend and former Columbia professor. When the room was posthumously dedicated to Donaldson in November of 1996, its namesake had largely been forgotten. The queer lounge, in a delicious historical paradox, actually functioned as a closet for quite some years, a place for the building’s janitors to stash supplies. And he “looks jaunty in his portrait,” which he does - half-Italian, young, grinning and buoyant, his dark curly hair topped by a sailor hat. “He started the precursor of our group,” said one, which is true. Little happens here until Sunday afternoons, when the students of the Columbia Queer Alliance meet. Sunshine-yellow walls and Caribbean-blue support beams brighten the room, known for twenty years as the Stephen Donaldson Lounge. Unlike Dorian Gray, whose portrait festered in an attic, the photograph of Stephen Donaldson languishes underground, framed yet unhung, placed unceremoniously on a tile floor and shoved uncelebrated next to a bookcase in a basement room of Furnald Hall, a century-old dorm on the Columbia campus.