Monday, January 29, 2018
I was a student tutor for the office of minority affairs working under Van in the early 80s. I was outed as gay by a black and an Asian student, and called homophobic slurs by them. Van did nothing. Van herself was homophobic and fired me for it. She allowed her Mexican-American male assistant to tell me that I needed to see a psychiatrist for being gay. As you can imagine, that's tough on a young person. It took me 2 years to get a letter of recommendation out of her , which she deliberately typed badly so that I couldn't use it for a recommendation.It always astounded me that she herself was a minority and yet was so hateful to gays. I was glad to see she lived to see anti-discrimination laws for glbt persons in this state and civil unions.
