Loren's mother, Rita

What makes a woman The Other? Race? Ethnicity? Sexual orientation? Skin color? Wanting a family, not a career, first? Or does a woman become The Other by just being a woman, not a man?

I’m asking those questions after interviewing five female graduate students at Yale’s School of Drama who identified themselves as The Other (watch our video here) and after thinking about my mother, a graduate student of drama at Yale almost four generations earlier. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in theater production in 1935.

Today’s students call themselves The Other for strikingly different reasons. Delilah Dominguez, 24, a native of Bastrop, Texas, identifies herself as small-town, “queer and a minority woman”—the first member of her family to attend college. A student of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, she feels uncomfortable in the privileged world of theater at Yale and bristles at the “socio-economic disparities” she observes. Having volunteered at a Branford hospice, she plans to switch careers and enter social work.

Keri Klick, a 22-year-old student of sound design who is also the first college graduate in her family, defines herself as The Other “because I have excelled quickly in a male-dominated industry—but with the sole intention of preparing myself to have a career in theater production eventually.” She talks of getting married and starting a family young. To ensure a life focused on her family, perhaps she will earn a Ph.D. and teach. “I’m going to make it work somehow,” she says.

First-year acting student Michelle McGregor, 24, of Wilmington, N.C., considers herself The Other for three reasons. She recalls her first day of classes at Yale. She felt uneasy, as a private person who viewed theater as scripts to be analyzed, “rolling around on the floor, acting like children, being goofy”—being pushed immediately to open up to people and to analyze herself. Though “school is great” now, she remains sensitive to her life within the seemingly safe, “strange bubble” that is Yale, when gunshots at night and people on the street asking for help remind her of the harder-edged reality that is much of New Haven. And, while working in New York City before arriving at Yale, she became increasingly aware of women needing to “care very much about their appearance,” while men “can get away with being disheveled.”

Prema Cruz and Carmen Zilles, acting students, are conscious of their ethnic heritage. Zilles, a 24-year-old Mexican-American, says she is the only Hispanic member of her second-year class. At the drama school, which accepts only one acting student for every 80 who apply, she wonders sometimes whether “that has to do with why I got in here.”

Carmen Zilles

As a scholarship student at Sarah Lawrence College, where “most people had a lot of money, I felt like a huge Other,” she says, turning philosophical. “I sometimes have the feeling everyone is an Other.” When she visits her family in Mexico she says she feels “very Other.” “Sometimes,” she adds, “I feel very American.”

Yale’s drama school, with its free tuition, “feels very equal,” she says. But ethnicity remains an issue. “It’s interesting that people don’t talk about it,” she says, “but it’s definitely there.” She worries that she will be limited to Hispanic acting roles after Yale.

“There’s not a whole lot of plays about the Latin American experience in this country,” she says. She has already been cast in a Yale play as a Cuban. “I’m not Cuban,” she says. “I don’t necessarily walk around feeling like a Hispanic person. I just kind of walk around feeling like a person.”

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Cruz, a 26-year-old, first-year acting student, grew up in Sacramento, Calif., with her African-American mother. Only recently has she begun spending much time with her Dominican-born, Spanish-speaking father in New York.

They visited the Dominican Republic together. Cruz, who considers herself “a black woman” and is much darker than her father, found herself faced with a wrenching moment of decision in a culture with “very blatant racism.” She needed to board a flat-bed truck that served as a bus, with dark-skinned women sitting in the back and light-skinned locals sitting inside the truck’s cab.

Her father knew to sit inside the cab, Cruz recalls, her eyes tearing. “I didn’t know what to do. Do I sit in the back or the front with my father? I’ll never forget that moment.”

Prema Cruz

Cruz, who was “never raised to think about color,” has not dated African-American or Dominican men, only white men. Whomever she marries, her children “must know who they are and where them came from”—the stories and roots of their parents and grandparents. She says, “It’s important to know what those roots dig into, what they are soaking up.”

My mother, Rita, was the daughter of Loren Haskin and Hettie Fletcher, white, Methodist, farm-family Kansans who moved west to Pomona, Calif., at the beginning of the twentieth century and never attended college. Rita graduated in 1932 from Scripps, a new women’s college in Claremont, Calif., where she was known for being, in the words of Groucho Marx, “well over four feet” and nicknamed “Birdie.”

Childhood polio had required annual surgery, recalled Marion Jones, a cousin, “to lengthen and keep her spine as even as possible. She must have suffered great pain and I thought she was very brave.” Virginia Willis, a Scripps classmate and childhood friend, said, “She had so much illness but in all the years I never heard her complain.”

Many of her classmates regarded Scripps as a finishing school preparing them for marriage and a family, not graduate school and a career. But Rita pursued her interest in theater production at Scripps and beyond (for a summer 1931 course in play production at Claremont Colleges she earned an A).

She applied to Yale. Isabel F. Smith, dean of Scripps, recommended her as “quick and humorous; diligent, conscientious and ambitious.” Smith concluded: “I have seen her take part most admirably in several plays, but she has a slightly noticeable spinal curvature and it may be that her decision to go into production has been influenced by a realization of this handicap.”

Yale accepted Rita. My grandparents scraped together Yale’s annual tuition of $350 and in 1932 my mother started the three-year production course of Yale’s department of drama where, according to department rules, “only one third may be women.”

Loren Ghiglione

You’ve probably noticed that this video is six minutes long. So far, I’ve been making an effort to keep the videos I upload brief, sometimes (read: most times) under a minute. That’s, of course, a response to the ever-diminishing attention spans of the American public. But I had a lot of trouble keeping this one short. The stories of Delilah Dominguez, Carmen Zilles and Prema Cruz are incredibly moving and worth every second. Find out for yourself as these three women from the Yale School of Drama reflect on what makes them feel different.

Video by Dan

Twain wrote to Dean Wayland: “I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.”

McGuinn not only was elected president of the Law Club and won the law school’s oratory prize at the Yale commencement in 1887 but he also had a distinguished law career in Baltimore. He served two terms on the City Council, represented the Afro-American, supported women’s suffrage, argued cases against local segregation ordinances and mentored Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court and the likelihood that it would declare a university’s race-based affirmative action unconstitutional Dan Tham video interviewed Robert C. Post, the current dean of Yale Law School and a constitutional law scholar, about the law school’s efforts to encourage a diverse student body.

Loren

Video by Dan

Quinnipiac University journalism professor Ed Alwood

The Saturday morning we went to see journalism professor Ed Alwood at Quinnipiac University, it happened to be parents’ weekend and the campus was abuzz with activity—music playing, lots of hand-drawn cardboard signs, mothers and fathers walking around with their kids.

We pulled up to the gate and rolled the window down to speak to the security guard. Loren managed a few words before the security guard held up a piece of white paper with, bizarrely, Loren’s headshot on it. She compared the image to the real thing, and then waved us through. A hundred feet later, another security guard stopped us. She held up the same photo, grinned, and pointed to the face on the piece of paper. We were VIPs.

Ed Alwood, like every good journalist, had done his homework on us.

Before entering academia, Alwood had a long career in journalism and public relations, including working as a CNN correspondent in Washington, D.C. He published Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media—the first book to describe the experiences of gays and lesbians in mainstream media—which is why we went to see him.

Alwood, who is gay, has had a prime view of the gay rights movement, from the pre-1974 era when homosexuality was classified as a mental disease, to the first gay march in Washington D.C., to the current movement, which he questions.

Alwood finished college in 1972, when “gays were still mental cases.” he said. “I wasn’t out at work, whatever out is,” Alwood said. “How are you out at work? Bring in a banner? Oh, I didn’t have any boyfriends’ pictures at my desk.”

Being gay sometimes left Alwood feeling vulnerable on the job, but it also helped him find and air stories he otherwise wouldn’t.

It was sometime in the early ‘80s in Washington D.C. “I’d never been to the gay porno movie theater, but I knew where it was,” Alwood said. “In that day, the gay movie theater would advertise the movie it was showing in the Washington Post.” Alwood was riding in the van with his crew when he heard chatter on the police scanner about a three-alarm fire.

“I heard the address and I looked at the Washington Post, and I thought, ‘That’s the gay movie theater!’” he said. “Then I thought, ‘Well how do I handle this?’” Alwood laughed at the memory.

“So I made up this convenient story, and I got on the walkie talkie, two-way radio, and I said, ‘Listen we were riding along here and I heard this police thing and I just happened to be reading the Washington Post and just happened to notice that the address of the fire is this gay movie theater.’ And they went, ‘Oh really?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I think we need to go there.’”

Several people died in the fire, and it turned out to be a big story.

At that time Alwood’s social network, and that of his gay peers, revolved around bars. “The bar became the gay people’s church,” he said. At bars, they “could meet with a fair amount of anonymity,” he said. “Except if you were on television every night.”

Alwood, who easily reminisced about being a gay man in the less tolerant ‘70s, visibly bristled when asked about coming out to his family. He grew up in Albany, Georgia. “I’ve got a fair amount of family who are fundamentalists,” he said. It wasn’t discussed.

“I don’t sit with them and talk about their sexuality,” he said. “I don’t see any reason to sit with them and talk about my sexuality.”

Alwood doesn’t describe himself as a “political person” but he did participate in the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979, the first of its kind. But the movement he identified with then is not the same anymore, he said. His statement reminded us of Larry Mass, whom we interviewed in New York. Mass said similar things; gays and lesbians don’t have to fight for equality as much as they once did, and it changes their culture.

Alwood wasn’t shy about his disapproval.

“The whole tenor of that type of political movement has changed so that it’s almost embarrassing,” he said.

For one, Alwood said the movement has gone corporate. At a recent convention, people at booths were hawking services and products “like the state fair,” he said.

“We come across as clowns,” Alwood said. “We come across as weird, very weird people.”

He hasn’t embraced the word “queer” either.

“We have people who seem to revel in these stereotypes rather than knock them down…In all of the celebration of gay pride, I just feel like there has been a decline in the pride part,” he said.

Alwood hasn’t forgotten a piece of advice given to him and his peers: If the movement wanted to be taken seriously, its participants had to present themselves seriously. That meant men wore ties and women wore dresses. Nothing over-the-top.

Alwood acknowledged that the needs of the movement have changed. He has stopped going to National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association meetings. These days they’re more about finding jobs than improving coverage of gays and lesbians in the news, although he said he’s still supportive of the organization.

“Sometimes movements outlive their necessity,” he said.

Alyssa