Some Residential Advisors and Head sponsors, fearing an attitude of permissiveness towards homophobic and racists actions, recently formed Hens Against Hate (HAH) in order to question Pomona’s attitudes towards diversity and tolerance.

Some of the cases, which involve vandalism and harassing e-mails, have been resolved in the Judiciary board, but many student complaints remain open.

The punishments for the students caught have ranged from being put on leave to being placed on social and academic probation. Still, there has been virtually no discussion about the actions within the community at large, which many see as a problem. "I think the larger community would be very upset if they knew about these things," said Svea Closser ’00, the RHS Intern who started HAH. "We don’t want these actions to continue without abatement."

The first incident occurred in Wig. RA Simon Morfit ’00 began the year with a picture of Prince on his door. The picture was a gift from his sponsees from when he was a sponsor Sophomore year. He has kept in on his door ever since, as a memento.

Morfit, who is openly gay, said that during the first week of school, the picture was torn off his door a number of times. "I got tired of putting it back up," Morfit said. "So I made copies and wrote ‘What’s up now?’ across the bottom." He then talked to the Freshmen on his hall, who he described as being "very supportive." Most of them agreed to put the pictures up on their doors.

"One night there was a party," said Morfit. "Someone tore them all down."

One of the sponsors, who had an original, then went off to make a number of copies. She, along with several other students, wrote messages like "We love Simon" on the flyers and posted them around Wig.

One Saturday morning, students returned from brunch to find the signs covered homophobic epithets. Peppered with words like "faggot," they were immediately removed by residents. They took them to RA Marie Miles ’00, who was "appalled and extremely upset." She asked them to continue finding them and taking them down, which they did. "The residents were awesome," said Miles.

"The support was amazing," said Morfit. "The cards, the letters, the hugs."

Austin Harris ’03, who has been held responsible for the vandalism, told The Student Life, "What happened in Wig is something that shouldn’t have occurred." While he is the only student who has been penalized, he maintains that he did not act alone. "I wasn’t the only person doing it, but I didn’t do anything to stop it, so I got the punishment I deserve," said Harris. "I didn’t write the worst of it."

Harris hopes that the incident can be put in the past. "It needs to be left alone," said Harris. "I’m trying to get past it."

In the wake of the incident, a number of students turned to the RAs for support. Head Sponsor Melissa Beaver ’00 said that first years were worried that this sort of behavior was "normal and okay, and they should get used to it. [They were worried that] it’s what you do when you’re drunk."

"During the beginning of school freshman year, students are just learning what’s normal at college," Miles said. "We don’t want them to think this is normal or acceptable."

Shortly after this incident, flyers were posted around Mudd Blaisdell targeting another student. The flyers, according to RA Kathy Sepponen ’00 "could not have been more malicious." Done in the form of Wanted posters, they depicted RA Akshay Shah ’00 who is of Indian descent, as a "snake charmer" who molests children and has sex with animals.

Again, the flyers were taken down by residents.

After an investigation, one individual claimed responsibility for the incident. Like Harris, he was punished. Although, like Harris, one person took all the blame for the incident, some people close to the case, who spoke on the condition on anonymity, believe that more people were involved.

In a third case, which occurred towards the end of the fall term, a number of Oldenborg students received harassing and threatening e-mails and messages on their dry erase boards.

The e-mails were sent to several people, including two sponsors and at least one first year. The e-mail addresses were faked in all cases; one message was from fuckyou@pomona.edu. Another one appeared to be from the all-students list. Recipients generally received 50 to 200 copies of the same e-mail at once.

According to an e-mail from David Peters ’01 to Mills, "Several of the e-mails had death threats and other threats of violence. Their [sic] was a strongly homophobic undertone to many of the messages."

There were also messages written on dry erase boards, which mainly appeared in hallways with openly gay students in them. According to Peters, "They were decidedly childish and immature, calling people things like gaylord and containing weird grammatical errors."

In one hall a resident erased the messages upon discovering them. They reappeared 15 minutes later, at which time they were erased again. An hour later, they were back again.

In the same hall, one student, after leaving her door unlocked was locked out of her room. A note was written on her dry erase board telling her to leave her door unlocked when she leaves so she can get locked out. The same student also heard someone going through her room while she was in the shower.

This semester, one door to several queer students’ room was vandalized. Everything was torn down except for several queer rights stickers, and cigarettes were burned into the carpet.

Joe Jordan ’02, who shares the room with Sky Shields ’02, and is openly bisexual, felt that the vandalism was homophobically motivated. "At first I was baffled, " said Jordan. "Someone must have been pretty stupid to do this." While Jordan feels that everyone has been sympathetic, he doesn’t feel that Pomona College has had a response to what he sees as a series of homophobic vandalisms. "It’s unacceptable," said Jordan.

His roommate, who is openly gay, does not agree that it was a hate crime. He feels the stickers were left up not as a message, but because they are hard to remove. Still, Shields characterized the instance as "weird."

"It was a bit too out of the ordinary for a reaction," said Shields.

Shields sentiments were echoed by some of the people who received the most recent set of harassing e-mails (see "E-mails Harass Students" in The Student Life). This set of e-mails, which were generally racist and threatening in nature, and targeted females, apparently came from the same person responsible for the Oldenborg e-mails.

Like the Oldenborg e-mails, they included very personal details of people’s lives that indicated that the author had been watching them. Some students changed their daily routines as a result, and were advised by the Office of Campus Life not to walk around alone at night.

The administration has found the person who they believe to be responsible for the e-mails. When questioned, according to Dean of Campus Life Matt Taylor, the male suspect admitted to sending the most recent round, and at least some of the Oldenborg e-mails.

The suspected perpetrator has been put on leave, and, if he does return to Pomona College, will face Judiciary Board proceedings. "The charge sheet has already been drawn up, and it’s sitting in his file," said Taylor.

When asked if the police had been notified, Dean of Students Ann Quinley said, "We haven’t reported it to the police, but we should, and I will. What he did is technically a crime."

It is unclear, however, whether the e-mailer will ever face charges, as no students have asked to press legal charges, according to Taylor. "We don’t plan to fly him back to face [Judiciary Board] charges," said Quinley.

These incidents, combined with the general defacement of Queer Rights signs, have led Closser and a number of other RHS employees to start HAH. The goal of group, according to Closser, is to "make a statement that as RHS we will do everything in our power to make these activities stop."

"We hear about all of these things," said Miles. "That’s why we came up with the group, but we welcome anyone to help us with it." HAH plans to coordinate with resource centers over the coming weeks to provide programming aimed at bringing these incidents to light and preventing them from happening in the future.

"I think the larger community would be very upset if they knew about these things," said Closser. "But I don’t think most people are aware of them. There was no publicity."

Another key goal is help people to understand what HAH perceive as a pattern. "When you’re in our position, you stop seeing these isolated incidents as being so isolated," said Miles. They feel that the pattern is reflective of a broader attitude in which these actions "while not acceptable, are seen as being normal," according to Head Sponsor Laura Ephraim ’00.

Queer Resource Center Co-Director Josh Creter ’00 has also expressed alarm at the frequency with which queer rights signs are torn down. "Does this say something about homophobia in Claremont? Yes," said Creter.

Quinley acknowledged that "homophobic incidents are the ones that have seen the smallest decrease during my time here." She felt that this was probably due to the fact that many students may be coming from environments where homosexuality was ridiculed, and they may not yet realize that some people really are, and will be, life-long homosexuals.

RA Jesse Zaritt ’00 echoed this sentiment. He see the first year at college as being a very formative time, in which students are now possibly being normed towards seeing homophobia as acceptable. "We want to norm people in the opposite direction," said Zaritt.

This norming would take the form of "empowering people to do something about it," said Closser. This would prevent what Ephraim dubs "the snowball effect," whereby smaller actions, when unchecked, breed larger and more destructive actions, like the ones that have occurred over the past year.

Homophobia "hasn’t been the norm," said Beaver. "We want to end it now so that it doesn’t become the norm." Morfit added that the incident involving him was his first real negative homophobic encounter at Pomona College since coming out in his Sophomore year.

"It’s been a few [unrelated] individuals," said Sepponen. Her sentiment was echoed by Miles, who said, "98 percent of students would be appalled by these things."