In his speech "Race, Queerness & Sexuality" delivered Tuesday night to an audience of about 35, Keith Boykin '87 said that he chose to attend Dartmouth because of its reputation as a conservative school.
Boykin joked that controversy follows him wherever he goes, but he admitted to having attended the College because he "wanted to shake things up."
While a student at the College, Boykin witnessed a number of explosive situations including a storming of Parkhurst, the construction and destruction of a shanty town on the Green and the tape-recording and subsequently published transcript of a Gay Straight Alliance meeting by a writer for the Dartmouth Review.
Boykin said his experiences with controversy at Dartmouth prepared him for the hurdles and difficulties he has faced since graduating.
"I learned to go beyond my boundaries, beyond my life circumstances -- to try to walk a mile in someone else's shoes," he said. "We [at Dartmouth] learned to respect tradition, but also to respect diversity."
Boykin was a featured guest at PRIDE 2007, Dartmouth's first week dedicated to celebrating the College's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender history and culture. The author of three books and a commentator on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now," Boykin was the highest ranking openly gay person in the Clinton White House.
His speech covered a variety of topics, from coming out to his mother to intellectual arguments about orientation as compared to behavior and identity. His stories were at various points silly, serious, and poignant, and he tied them all together with Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," which Boykin said has been a source of inspiration to him throughout his life.
"His road less taken is a road that many of us are often disinclined to take because we are encouraged, steered, directed to go the common path," Boykin said. "My primary objective was to try to live my life for myself."
Motivational poems aside, Boykin has not always enjoyed the bumps along the less-traveled road. He addressed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which came into effect when he worked with the Clinton White House, describing it as a "disaster."
During the Clinton administration, then Gen. Colin Powell argued against lifting the ban on gays in the military, and especially against comparing that discrimination to discrimination of blacks in the military.
"General Powell wrote a letter that said skin color is a benign non-behavioral trait, while sexual orientation is a behavioral trait," Boykin said. "The truth is we make associations between skin color and behavior all the time. And additionally, Powell was confusing orientation with behavior. He's assuming that orientation means behavior."
Boykin explained that there are three levels to one's sexuality. Orientation is who a person is attracted to; behavior is who the person engages in sexual activities with; and identity is how the person presents himself to the world. The three are not always consistent.
Boykin said he believes that Dartmouth is at least moving in the right direction.
"Dartmouth has changed a lot since I graduated 20 years ago," he said. "I cannot have imagined a time where a GSA could possibly have existed and put together a PRIDE event on campus that lasted a week."
