This weekend marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus. The Crimson Editorial Board has taken this opportunity to compile a series of op-eds written by and about members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community at Harvard, past and present.The perspectives included in this series will cover a range of issues the LGBT community has faced, the progress that has been made, and the challenges that remain.

That’s the way most lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Harvard-Radcliffe alums over the age of 40 that I know feel about their class reunions. That may come as a surprise to our fellow classmates as well as to today’s LGBT students and recent graduates, but it’s the truth. Most of us stay away.

A closer analysis of why people come to reunions, however, makes it pretty clear why this would be the case for LGBT Harvard-Radcliffe graduates of a “certain age.” People basically come back to reunions because they want to reconnect with Harvard, their classmates, and their younger selves. The idea of such reconnection can be quite unappealing for an LGBT graduate.

As for Harvard, our alma mater has a checkered history when it comes to LGBT issues. As detailed in William Wright’s Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, a book inspired by a story uncovered by an intrepid reporter for The Crimson, the university once carried out active purges of its LGBT members. Those from the classes of 1970 and before, who attended Harvard pre-Stonewall—Stonewall being the 1969 New York riot which moved the modern LGBT rights movement towards a strategy based on widespread “coming out”—lived on a campus that probably had a climate more akin to that of 1920 than that of today.

While the days of institutionalized repression might have faded by the time those of us in our 40’s and 50’s came to Cambridge in the seventies and eighties, there was hardly an affirmative environment. LGBT people have only been an organized presence at Harvard for a short time (the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, an alumni group, was only founded in 1984), there were very few openly LGBT faculty and staff, and no LGBT-oriented classes. Alumni don’t come back to the Harvard of today: they come back to the Harvard of their memories and, for many LGBT folks, that Harvard wasn’t a very friendly or supportive place.

Reconnecting with classmates often offers a second challenge. Having attended Harvard-Radcliffe in a different time, many LGBT alumni were not “out” as undergraduates. Coming back can mean having to come out all over again and potentially have a set of awkward conversations and even encounter rejection – an experience few want to relive. And then add in the fact that, even for those of us (like me) who were “out” and don’t have to worry about having to come out all over again, you know you will be a small minority at the Reunion, in a sea of people who you don’t remember to have been very accepting to begin with, and the appeal of such an event is lost on LGBT alumni. I come back every five years anyway but, frankly, often wonder while in Cambridge why the hell I did this to myself.

And then there is reconnecting with one’s younger self. For many LGBT people, youth was not a happy time but instead one filled with loneliness, confusion, and self-doubt. Having fought very hard to put the shame and pain of those years behind them, LGBT adults often have no desire to revisit those days. Why voluntarily go back to a time in one’s life that is remembered as so painful?

I offer these insights to help readers understand why this fall’s first-ever Harvard LGBT Reunion is so important. Akin to similar LGBT reunions held at other Ivy League schools such as Dartmouth as well as those for other Harvard alumni subgroups such as African-Americans, Harvard’s first-ever LGBT Reunion offers the university a chance to reconnect with a group of alumni who are often alienated from the university and wary of attending its events. It offers Harvard the chance to show how it has changed for the better and that the Harvard of today is a very different place than the one many LGBT alumni remember. And it affords alumni themselves a chance to fashion a new set of memories, hopefully more positive than the ones they currently hold. It represents an opportunity for both Harvard and its LGBT alumni to reconnect and rebuild a relationship that has been so fraught in the past.

Personally, this will be the first Harvard reunion I have ever attended when I am not coming with butterflies in my stomach and a back-up plan for other things to do in Boston if I just can’t take being there. I don’t go in expecting the reunion to suck. I actually (gasp!) expect to have fun. And that’s reason enough for me to come back and give Harvard another chance.

In June, Kevin Jennings ’85 was elected to be a Director of the Harvard Alumni Association and, as such, became only the second person in the university’s history to run for and win an HAA Directorship as an openly LGBT person.