New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich ’71, previously a longtime theater critic and political columnist for The New York Times who was profiled in Harvard Magazine in 2007, will be the speaker at the annual dinner of the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus (HGLC), held on the evening of Commencement Day, May 24. The HGLC’s newsletter describes Rich as “one of the LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual] community’s most outspoken straight allies.”
Rich is not the first heterosexual to keynote the HGLC’s annual Commencement gathering: then Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers did the honors in 2002. The event will be held at Lowell House under the auspices of Lowell master Diana Eck, Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society, and co-master Dorothy Austin, Sedgwick associate minister in the Memorial Church. (Eck and Austin, appointed at Lowell in 1998, are the first openly gay couple to head one of the Harvard Houses; they married in 2004.)
