By Dr. Timothy Patrick McCarthy
Dr. Timothy Patrick McCarthy
Faculty Keynote | Harvard Lavender Celebration
First Parish Church | Cambridge, MA | May 26, 2025
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Thank you, [Professor] Evelynn [Hammonds] – my dear sister and longtime co-conspirator.
Thank you, First Parish – our local sanctuary and steadfast ally.
Thank you, Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus and Open Gate – our beloved benefactors and community catalysts for four decades.
Thank you, Councilwoman [Andrea] Jenkins – our trailblazing leader.
And thank you, student organizers from the graduating Class of 2025 – Alexis, Brian, Byron, Han, Jama, Niara, Sabrina, Zac – our brilliant future.
We are living queer history today!
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My name is Tim McCarthy and I’m here to celebrate you.
When I look out at this congregation – poised as we are on the precipice of Harvard’s 374th Commencement – I see a rainbow revolution bursting with lavender brilliance.
Look around. Soak it in. Mark this moment.
In times like these, it can be too easy to lose track of who we are, how we got here, and where we are going. So let me start with some unvarnished veritas: we are queer, we are here, and we always will be.
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This celebration – and others like it this week – was not meant to happen.
Over the last decade, Harvard has proudly supported the growing number of student-centered “affinity graduations” intentionally designed to create space to celebrate communities that have not always been welcome – or felt like we fully belong – here. Just one year ago, thousands of people participated in more than a dozen of these joyous, technicolor, university-wide gatherings that represent the very best values of diversity and equity and inclusion in our unapologetically global 21st century university.
But in February – as it turns out, on Valentine’s Day – the U.S. Department of Education threatening punitive action if colleges and universities did not, among other things, end “race-based decision-making” in “all…aspects of student, academic, and campus life,” including “graduation ceremonies.” Earlier this month, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon , specifically, based on the big lie that we have somehow “engaged in a systemic pattern of violating the federal law.” In the face of this unprecedented political bullying and extortion, Harvard decided it would . We were left in the lurch, seething and scrambling.
Now I know this was not an easy decision – and I do not blame our friends and colleagues across this institution who are caught in the crosshairs of this most recent culture war. But understanding the complex constraints of our current crisis does not soften the blow of betrayal or make it any easier to be collateral damage.
“One Harvard” will never be true or indivisible so long as any of us are still dispensable.
But this is far bigger than just us. This attack on Harvard – and on higher education – is one battleground of a larger war against multicultural democracy and human freedom. This is a war on all the people of this wounded world – what – who live on the downside of prejudice and the outside of power.
For those precious few of us who have managed to get through these gates of privilege – call us “inside outsiders” – we feel the compounded weight of this wretched war. We fully belong neither here nor there – or any kind of where.
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That is why it is so essential to claim space, create space, and keep space of our own. It is this fabulous spirit of forging our community that first led to the creation of Lavender Graduation many years ago. And it is this fierce spirit of fortifying our community that inspires us to gather today for this Lavender Celebration in the face of everything that currently threatens lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people of every intersection.
There is a deep history of this fabulous, fierce queer spirit – here at Harvard and throughout history. Some of us have studied this together in my “Queer Nation” course.
We see this fabulous, fierce queer spirit in ancient and indigenous societies.
We see it among the “female husbands” and “Boston marriages” of the 19th century.
We see it in the trailblazing discoveries of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin before the rise of Nazi Germany.
We see it in Harlem’s drag balls amidst the crucible of Jim Crow segregation.
We even see it in the parties in Perkins 28 before the purges of Harvard’s “Secret Court” in 1920.
We see it in the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis.
We see it in the 1958 Cooper Do-nuts Riot in Los Angeles.
And in the 1961 Black Nite Brawl in Milwaukee.
And in the 1965 Dewey’s Restaurant Sit-In in Philadelphia.
And in the 1966 Julius Tavern Sip-In in New York City.
And in the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Franscisco.
And in the 1966-67 Black Cat Tavern Protests in Los Angeles.
And in the 1968 Patch Bar “Flower Power” Protests in Los Angeles.
And of course, we see it in the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City.
We see it in the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Liberation Front, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Third World Gay Liberation, Radicalesbians, Combahee River Collective, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, ACT UP, Black AIDS Institute, SisterLove, Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation—and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our queer history, before any mainstream institution seriously recognized or respected us.
Today, we see it in the more than 2000 activists from 170 countries who come together virtually every month through our Global LGBTQI+ Changemakers Network at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights.
And we see it in this church—right here, right now.
Indeed, we see it any time one or more of us gather together to live and love, fight and debate, organize and agitate, kiss and touch, dance and do drag, resist and refuse to relinquish what we have, what we need, and what we deserve.
We know this because we have had to fight – for us – forever.
My dear friend , the late great Indian-born American lesbian activist, reminded us of this: “Outside is where queer began – not as a meme, but of the deep experience and memory of being different because of gender identity or sexual orientation. LGBTQ people remain outsiders to racist patriarchy and its economic and gender values. This outsider frame is a potent resource in an era of autocracy, reaction, conformity, and social control. A queer future rests on remembering our difference, in the critical perspective it provides and in the possibility of radical solidarity it affords with other outsiders. As Audre Lorde wrote: ‘There is no separate survival.’”
Together, we will survive this time. And we will also live – all of us – to thrive again.
Congratulations on your graduation, Class of 2025.
Now go forth with your lavender brilliance and do the things they really hate:
Be fierce! Be fabulous! Be free!
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Timothy Patrick McCarthy is Lecturer on Education and Faculty Chair of the Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Program at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. The first openly gay faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School, he teaches “Queer Nation,” the school’s first and still only course on LGBTQ+ matters. Professor McCarthy is the recipient of the 2023 Evelynn M. Hammonds Award for Exceptional Service to LGBTQ+ Inclusion at Harvard University. This is the faculty keynote address he delivered at the 2025 Lavender Celebration.
