When Art Leonard ’74 and Mark Schwartz ’74 set out to start an organization for gay and lesbian alumni in 1979, they faced a hurdle: since many Cornellians hadn’t been out during their time on the Hill, finding potential members to invite was difficult. A letter published in the Alumni News—seeking “gay alumni all over the country who would be interested in getting to know other gay Cornellians”—received just a handful of responses. A few months later, in late June 1980, some of those new members gathered to walk down Fifth Avenue in New York’s annual Pride march. Carrying a red cloth banner with “Cornell Alumni” in white letters, they were met with boisterous cheers from onlookers. “Alumni started joining us; they just stepped in from the sidelines when they saw our sign,” Leonard recalls. “It wasn’t very many, but every additional person knew someone else who was interested in our group and could spread the word. After that, our social gatherings got bigger.”
Over the past four decades, that small cadre has grown into the Cornell University Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association (CUGALA), a thriving network of some 4,000 Big Red grads—as well as faculty, staff, parents, and friends—around the world. Their mission is to make the University a more inclusive place for LGBTQ Cornellians through community service, mentorship programs, advocating for resources on campus, and more. “This group is about supporting each other as people and as Cornellians,” says current CUGALA president Olivia Tai ’08, BA ’10. “For me, it’s about maintaining a community and contributing to the world. For many of our alumni, it’s about supporting LGBTQ students in ways that they themselves didn’t feel supported while they were at Cornell.”
