Hi History Makers, Eric here. A few months ago we launched Making Gay History's Patreon

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And thank you so much.

By the time I finished my first year of college, I couldn't exactly fool myself into thinking

I wasn't gay, even though it wasn't what I wanted for my life. I'd been through enough

men by that point to set aside any doubts that this was who I was and that a wife and

kids were not in my future. But I had no clear image of what my future would hold. What

life might look like for this gay man. If there were role models out there for the kind

of life I might want to lead, I hadn't seen them.

In April 1977, toward the end of that first year, I turned a sociology paper into a personal

fact-finding mission. Under the cover of research, I spent hours in the Vassar library pouring

over books about gay people. I wasn't ready to be out in class, so I masked my subject matter

interest by adding a decoy subject. I named the paper Marginal Man, the alcoholic and

the homosexual.

My name is Eileen Leonard, and I was a professor of sociology at Vassar, and I worked there

for 44 years. I started in 1975.

So you arrived one year before I did? Yes.

...