On the Harvard Law Review Electing an Openly-Gay President

I fully support gay equality, and I think the people who fight tooth and nail to deny gay people the privileges of their heterosexual counterparts are honestly mentally damaged. I think the minority of people still out there who just don't accept gay people or think it's kind of hedonistic choice aren't going to have their minds or their behavior altered by a low-circulation journal's actions.

Thus, I'm less enthused than others at the news that the Harvard Law Review elected its first openly-gay President. But Harvard apparently thinks it's worth making a fuss over. Here are the first three paragraphs of Harvard's brief official online release:

The Harvard Law Review has elected Mitchell Reich ’12 as its 125th president.

“Mitch has proven himself as an outstanding editor — insightful, hardworking, and deeply committed to the Review and its community,” said outgoing President Zach Schauf ’11. “He will make a superb president, and I look forward to seeing him guide the Review in the year ahead.”

Before attending Harvard Law School, Reich graduated from Yale College with a B.A. in Classics and Political Science. He is a native of New York, and is the first openly gay editor elected to lead the Review.

Harvard placed his sexuality in the same paragraph as where he is from and where he went for undergrad. His law school accomplishments? Where he has worked? What area he plans to practice in after attending this professional school? Who his significant other and family are? These qualities deserve no mention. But his vague sexuality - what sex organs he prefers to play with - has suddenly become basic demographic information.

At my own law school, I don't know everyone's sexuality, nor do I care to. Some are transparent about it, either incessantly talking about their spouse or purposely fitting into established stereotypes. But with others, it's one of those personal details you wouldn't necessarily know without knowing the person well, or unless they were notorious in their bedroom-hopping and became the subject of gossip.

This is fairly normal and is, of course, an obvious difference between sexuality and race. With race, possible discrimination is much easier. Subconscious racism is an intellectual possibility. But if you don't subjectively know someone's gay (even if they're "openly" gay), how can one discriminate against them? In the past, I've worked with people for months without knowing their sexuality. I might have had educated guesses if pressed, but nothing I'd bet money on, and a few revelations one way or the other have genuinely surprised me.

But overall, I just don't care. I'm not more likely to vote for someone because they're gay or because they're straight. And although I know the white supremacists have to find their lawyers somewhere, I imagine there are very few law students who would hold one's sexuality against him or her. As a result, a law review electing a gay man isn't really a milestone at all, because there's really no tide that the individual is swimming against. It's not going to surprise anyone or change anyone's behavior towards the sub-group.

But of course that doesn't stop people who like to pretend milestones happen every day and have undue significance. Take, for example, Vivia Chen's take for AmLaw Daily:

Could Mitch Reich be the first openly gay president of the United States one day? Well, if history is a clue, it's possible. Harvard Law School just announced that Reich, a second-year law student, has been elected president of Harvard Law Review--the first openly gay person to lead the journal in its 125-year history.

President Obama, as you might know, was the first black person to head the school's Law Review back in 1990.

Right.

The thing about "milestones" is that the word is not just a synonym for "that which hasn't happened before." The event has to mean something. It has to change a mass of people on some individual level, like making baseball's owners collectively realize that they can employ African-Americans.

There are at least three reasons why this doesn't qualify as a milestone, or even something that would be news-worthy. The first is that I can practically guarantee you that, as a matter of statistics, someone homosexual has led the Harvard Law Review in the last 125 years. The second is that this is hardly the first openly gay law review editor in chief. Heck, there are schools in far more conservative parts of the country than Boston that have had journals devoted to gay rights for 20 years. I have a hard time believing that no gay people have run that one, meaning no "barrier" was broken by Harvard's selection.

But wait! you might say. The Harvard Law Review is a prestigious publication, the most prestigious of all prestigious law reviews!

And that brings me to my third reason this ain't no milestone: no one reads or cares about the bleeping Harvard Law Review. Here is a search trend chart comparing the Harvard Law Review's search interest to the openly-gay and completely-inane Perez Hilton's:

And here's one comparing the Harvard Law Review to openly-gay writer Andrew Sullivan's:


The Harvard Law Review's website gets about the same number of hits as Third-Tier Reality's. If Nando suddenly came out of the closet, would it be front page news? Is it news when a gay author sells 1000 copies of a book? But somehow a homosexual becoming president of a journal with a very, very low non-academic circulation is a news-worthy event.

The further response here is probably that the Harvard Law Review (a) has influenced legal policy for over a century and (b) has been the springboard for successful people, like Obama. Both of these are a poor reason to see this as a milestone of gay rights. If influence on policy is what matters, there should have been a two-decades long celebration as openly gay people became accepted in the D.C. hierarchy and in some corporate officerships and directors' spots. If this is the standard, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was a major milestone, but at the end of the day the Harvard Law Review is still an insignificant outpost in the middle of obscure land. As for the fact that famous people have served on it before, well, Abe Lincoln chopped a lot of wood and once ran a convenience store.

The truth is that the Harvard Law Review is, was, and always will be, part trade journal and part house organ. It, like all law journals, is more concerned with stocking resumes and providing an outlet for professorial bombast than actually advancing scholarship or educating the public. If it operated under normal capitalist conditions, it would fail, or at best be a struggling, obscure journal.

Of all the people hailing this as a milestone, I would venture to guess that less than 1% have actually read anything published in the Harvard Law Review. I would guess only a fraction could actually name a Harvard Law Review President other than Obama. Its significance stems solely from the public perception that the Harvard Law Review does something prestigious, noble, or worthwhile. Like many perceptions about the law, it's in error.

I mean to take nothing away from Reich. I know it's an honor, and I know how much hard work goes into getting that little tag on the resume.

But I feel mildly sorry for him that we live in a world where his sexual preferences - a very personal aspect of one's life - have become a newsworthy item and a de facto marketing point for his university because people want to believe that the Harvard Law Review is something more than it is.

But it's hard to feel sorry for him when he himself understands the non-relevance of his sexuality while agreeing it is "significant:"

Reich says that being gay is a non-issue for the Harvard Law Review community, but that he recognizes the significance of the election. He says that while he was in high school, before coming out of the closet, he found it hard to picture achieving his dreams and be gay at the same time.

“If I had seen someone who was the president of the Harvard Law Review and [also] openly gay, that would have been helpful to me,” Reich says.

Seriously? When Reich was in high school, Harvard's own state had an openly-gay Congressman and New York had an openly-gay federal court judge. I understand the importance of seeing people with your own immutable characteristic doing well in life, but unless you're a legal masochist, both Congressman and Federal Judge are superior positions to doing anything on a barely-read law review. Furthermore, I can't imagine the average gay high school youth today gaining a damned thing from this guy joining an elite academia club that maybe 0.1% of real-life high school students actually care about. Most conservatives lump the Harvard Law Review in with the academia types who are already going to hell for supporting homosexuality, so it's a complete non-event (conformity with the reality they already believe in) for the overwhelming majority of anti-gay parents.

When an active NBA player comes out of the closet, that will be a newsworthy, courage-giving, mind-changing moment. But this? Have some self-awareness, Harvard.

Because ultimately, whether or not this is a milestone should really hinge on whether or not it affects the standing of other gay people, e.g., if it gives the irrationally-conservative mom and dad the power to accept their child's sexuality or if it gives the youth the courage to be himself or herself without anxiety.

I just don't see this event doing that in any regard. I can't imagine Harvard does either, aside from seeing the positive publicity that would shine upon them if they made this individual's sexuality a matter of public concern.