When People Assumed Harvard's Claudine Gay Was a Lesbian, Did It Hurt Her Case?

Kendra Lee
·4 min read
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Cambridge, MA - December 15: Claudine Gay embraces her husband, Chris Adendulis. Harvard University on Thursday named Gay as its next president in a historic move that will give the nations oldest college its first Black leader.
Cambridge, MA - December 15: Claudine Gay embraces her husband, Chris Adendulis. Harvard University on Thursday named Gay as its next president in a historic move that will give the nations oldest college its first Black leader.
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Cambridge, MA - December 15: Claudine Gay embraces her husband, Chris Adendulis. Harvard University on Thursday named Gay as its next president in a historic move that will give the nations oldest college its first Black leader.

The trouble with stereotypes is they are often as wrong as two left shoes, and they give bad actors fuel for their ridiculous fires.

Case in point: Claudine Gay, the recently resigned Harvard University president, has short hair and champions DEI initiatives, so segments of the population have concluded that she’s gay. Initially, a lot of folks of all races made assumptions about a connection between how someone looks and their sexual identity.

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Diverse Issues in Higher Education also reported on this issue, including this quote from Anthony Abraham Jack, an associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University, in its coverage: “You cannot read this without understanding the layers of sexism, racism, and misogyny from the get-go,” Jack said. “And Claudine was at the center of all of that by being a brilliant Black woman who was at Harvard.”

But perhaps most illustrative of the lengths right-wing nut jobs will go to topple a queen is found in a comment from D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky who knew Gay when they were both graduate students at Harvard (and whose work Gay is accused of allegedly stealing).

He told Emma Green during a New Yorker interview for the article “Why Some Academics Are Reluctant to Call Claudine Gay a Plagiarist” that the comments he’s seeing on social media have gone beyond the pale:

Green: … What role do you think race has played in the scrutiny of Gay and in her resignation?

Voss: Having been dragged through Christopher Rufo’s fan base—seeing the language people used, even some of their account names and symbols—I have no doubt that part of the hostility toward Claudine results from racism. That being said, I was even more struck by the amount of misogyny. … Claudine has short hair. The number of people who assumed she was lesbian, even though she is married to a guy I went to graduate school with, was also striking.”

As if to prove Voss correct and, most likely to hasten Gay’s exit when antisemitism and plagiarism accusations weren’t working fast enough, enter prolific X user Jake Shields, who said in a January 2 post that received more than 645K views: “They booted a gay black women from president of Harvard and replaced her with a Jewish man. Gay black women are the most valued class in America …”

There was also this from X user RBPundit: “Wait. Is Claudine Gay also a lesbian? Because that’s the final stone in the Intersectionality Gauntlet that makes her critique-proof forever.”

And this from X user JoeyMannarinoUS: “How is Claudine Gay not a lesbian?”

And finally Mikael Covey’s error-filled X post: “Claudine Gay is President of Harvard because she’s black female lesbian but she wouldn’t have a PhD w/o plagarism” (grammatical errors are Covey’s).

Speculation about Gay’s sexual orientation has grown exponentially as scrutiny over her handling of these two crises at Harvard has increased, according to the Celeb Critics. This is despite her marriage to researcher and lecturer Christopher Afendulis, with whom she has an 18-year-old son—facts it took all of a 13-second Google search to unearth.

Her resignation from the presidency isn’t even enough, however, so the “Gay is gay” messages continue; racists want to see her out of work completely, and for those on the fence about the trumped up antisemitic and plagiarism, saying she’s a lesbian is a tried and true tactic to turn the tide against her.

It might work, too. Everybody knows all Black lesbians have short hair and are somehow connected to antisemitism and plagiarism and thus underserving of a career they’ve spent decades building. That previous sentence is dripping with righteous sarcasm, in case anybody’s confused. Wouldn’t want Black women who write for a living to come under fire for being homophobic. It is the season for bizarre and unrestrained attacks on us, you know.

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