By Rachel Zarrell

When Joseph DeRoche applied to be an instructor at Northeastern in 1965, the vice president interviewing him noticed he wasn’t married.

“He said, ‘I see you haven’t found the right woman,’ and I said ‘yes,'” DeRoche remembers. “But if I turned around and said, ‘No, I haven’t found the right man,’ I doubt very much if I would’ve been hired.”

Now on the verge of retiring after being an instructor for nearly half a century, DeRoche has not only seen the university change its outlook, but has contributed to its evolution. Forty years ago, he proposed the course he has taught nearly his whole career, Gay and Lesbian Literature. At the start of his career at Northeastern, where he also received his undergraduate degree, DeRoche said the school was a much different place than it is now. Nearly the entire school was located in today’s Krentzman Quad, he said, and income from co-op was enough to pay for tuition. The school also widely opposed open homosexuality, which forced DeRoche to keep his sexual preference a secret among his colleagues.

“It was the beginning of the gay and lesbian movement, and people started coming out of the closet,” DeRoche said. “And you never knew when you came out of the closet what the reaction was going to be. [Some people] came out of the closet in certain cases [and lost] their job. It was a very tenuous time.”

It wasn’t until a few years after DeRoche began teaching at Northeastern that the university took steps to end intolerance on campus, via a non-discriminatory clause. Despite the current sentiment, DeRoche went to the English department and proposed a literature class focusing on gays and lesbians in literature.

DeRoche recalls that, at the time, the curriculum was very traditional. The English department, he said, was supportive of the course, and they placed it on the curriculum. The Faculty Senate, however, was less than pleased.

“[The Senate] felt in a traditional way that being gay or being lesbian [made] you a second-rate citizen and somehow you were a danger to the students, if not to yourself,” DeRoche said. “This was a new world and they didn’t want to get into it.” Since the university was still fairly traditional, the department needed to be careful in picking the course name for DeRoche’s class; “Gay and Lesbian Literature,” would have been too controversial. Ultimately, the department decided on “Homosexuality in Literature.” “We had to find some title that wouldn’t scare everybody to death,” DeRoche said. But students reacted nonetheless. A letter of protest published in The News said the course would corrupt students, and DeRoche recalls the letter as citing the course as a “recruiting device.”

DeRoche wrote a reply to the letter, but he said it didn’t pacify everyone. As a result, classes were small and gender disproportionate, with men being afraid to take the class in fear that people would assume they were gay, especially if they actually were.

“I had one student who came up to me who said he couldn’t take the class because his lover wouldn’t let him,” DeRoche said. “They were in the closet and … his lover was so afraid that they would be identified as gay because they took the course.” Rumors of a committee to end discrimination on campus began to circulate. DeRoche said Northeastern was one of the first universities in the country to deal with issues of homosexuality.

“I taught the class before [the non-discriminatory clause] came about,” DeRoche said. “Maybe it helped open up a door. And at that point, things began to happen.”

Deroche recalls that in the late 1960s or early ’70s, then-university President Kenneth Ryder formed a committee overruling the Faculty Senate to find out “what could be done for or about gays and lesbians, both as students and as faculty and staff.” DeRoche sat on the board for the committee, along with “a real mix of people who wanted change.” What resulted was the non-discriminatory clause still in effect today.

Now in his last semester at the university, DeRoche still teaches the gay and lesbian literature class, which currently has upward of 50 people enrolled. He has also lived to see progress for homosexuals he never expected to happen in his lifetime, like gay marriage, an idea which he said “never even crossed [his] mind.”

“It’s a long, slow, historical process, and it’s always going to be controversial,” DeRoche said.

DeRoche is retiring this year to travel around the world, leaving behind his legacy of fostering tolerance, along with a pair of large shoes to fill.

“I hear people talk about how they want to take [the class] next semester and I wonder if it will be different,” said Ben Rosenbaum, a freshman theatre major who is in the class this semester. “No one [else] would have as much knowledge through experience to teach this class.”