Feature: Common Commitment to an Inclusive Community
Working toward greater opportunities for inclusion, SPS forms the LGBTQIA+ Alumni Advisory Council
Henry Schniewind ’56, Marc Aronson ’00, and Sophia Desrosiers ’11
This past year saw massive waves disrupt established norms of civil discourse and engagement, and included vital reckonings around racism and other systemic – and often intersectional – forms of oppression and erasure. College and prep school alumni communities, including our own, brought this reckoning home through powerful stories on social media and in offline conversations between alumni. And, with varying degrees of success, colleges and prep schools, including our own, have tried to respond.
One SPS-specific outcropping formed by these waves has been the creation, last August, of two alumni advisory councils: a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) council and the one we’re introducing to you here – the SPS LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual, and others) Alumni Advisory Council.
With members from forms representing the 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and the 2010s, and with representation on the Alumni Association Executive Committee, our group has the following purposes:
• To support and be a resource to the SPS community broadly, the alumni community in particular, and especially the queer alumni community
• To support and be a resource to the School in its efforts around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
• To broaden our understanding of St. Paul’s School history through collecting and telling the stories of queer students across the generations, thus filling in gaps in the story told about the School.
In order to better introduce ourselves, here are three patches of the quilt of the history of the School to which we wish to contribute. They are stories which led us, the authors, to join this advisory council.
Henry Schniewind ’56
Henry Schniewind ‘56 invited people to alter what they thought was gay based on what they knew of him.
Henry arrived on campus at St. Paul’s as a Second Former in the fall of 1951. In those days, “gay” did not exist – even though it did. Henry knew who his gay family members were and who his gay teachers were. That no one, however, mentioned or talked about it sent a very clear message; “gay” does not exist. At that time, SPS students were all male, all white, almost all Christian, and almost all upper-class. And all were expected to be straight. The rest of the world did not exist, and yet it did. Where was the rest of the world?
During Henry’s Sixth Form year, John Walker, the first Black member of the SPS faculty, appeared on campus. He taught at St. Paul’s from 1957 to 1966, and later served as the first Black bishop of the Episcopal Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Henry saw John Walker’s hiring as the first step toward opening up. Shortly after, a woman joined the administration and faculty. But not yet anyone openly gay. Henry entered the freshman class at Harvard in the fall of 1957. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in the spring of 1965 and left with his wife and oldest son for a medical internship at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. He returned to Boston to complete a three-year psychiatric residency at Harvard Medical School. At the time, homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness.
Henry had two genuinely loving marriages to women, and has three children and four grandchildren. He came out in his early 40s, however, when it was clear that some essential tenderness was missing in his marriage. He learned to invite people to alter what they thought was gay based on what they knew of him and not to alter their sense of him based on what they thought gay was about. It worked. Two years later, he met his husband. They got legally married in 2016 after 33 years together. Henry’s husband died from metastatic cancer in May 2020.
In the mid-1990s, Henry came to SPS a number of times as an openly gay alumnus and spoke to faculty, groups of students, and delivered a Chapel Talk that, in retrospect, was not direct enough. At that time, the School was not ready to even add sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination clause. But things were moving along, bit by bit.
Marc Aronson ’00
Marc Aronson ‘00 became the first president of the SPS Gay-Straight Alliance in 1999.
Marc fell in love with the SPS campus in sixth grade on a snowy evening as part of a junior prep school wrestling meet between Fay School and Cardigan Mountain School. When Marc enrolled as a Fourth Former in the Fall of 1997, he had just come out to his parents the previous spring, but stayed closeted at SPS for Fourth and Fifth Form. Then, in the Spring of 1999, Dustin Brauneck ’99 came out in a Chapel Talk. In the ensuing weeks, Marc joined a small, informal group of gay and allied students, assembling in the squash court common room one evening a week. By the end of spring, the School approved the formation of the Gay-Straight Alliance, of which Marc became the first president in the fall of 1999.
Originally, the GSA was assigned to the Health Center, which was offered as a place of confidentiality, but which to some, according to Marc, felt evasive on the School’s part. Marc and others agitated to have the location changed and, when 35+ students started showing up regularly to bi-weekly meetings, the School had no choice but to find a better option. The GSA started meeting in the common room of the brand new Hockey Center.
In that first year, the group recorded a number of accomplishments, including hosting a dance in the Upper dining hall, sponsoring an open house at the Rectory, and observing National Coming Out Day in Chapel. The group’s crowning achievement in that first year was getting 85 percent of the student body to sign a petition to the Board of Trustees, advocating for committed same-sex faculty couples to be allowed to cohabitate in campus housing. While it took years for that policy change to happen, the overwhelming support of the student body was an impressive first sign.
This exciting first-year environment had personal implications for Marc as well, who came out to his friends and dormmates in Coit North in the Winter Term. Their response? Acceptance and deepened friendship. This, and the ongoing work the SPS GSA has done since his graduation, is what has brought Marc to work on this council.
Sophia Desrosiers ’11
Sophia Desrosiers ‘11 found comfort in the GSA soon after her arrival at St. Paul’s.
Sophia first learned about the concept of a boarding school as a place where the “bad kids” go. Her mother would jokingly threaten to send her to one near her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. But when a recruitment administrator came to her middle school when she was in sixth grade and made it possible for her to visit St. Paul’s, she was excited about the possibility of attending. However, the transition between eighth grade and her first year at SPS was tumultuous. As excited as she was to be on her own in a new environment, Sophia felt like an outsider as a young, Black teen just starting to learn more about herself on a predominately white campus.
Within the first few weeks of school, she quickly found comfort in the GSA. While at the time there were few regular attendees, usually two faculty and at most two or three students, it was still a relief to be able to meet in a comfortable space, where members could openly discuss sexuality and ask questions without having to be queer or out oneself. As a Fourth Former, Sophia became the GSA president, working with faculty to host the Day of Silence, visit other boarding school GSAs, and attend various off-campus events, such as the Boston Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Youth (BAGLY). From her Fourth to Sixth Form years, she reveled in seeing the GSA grow into a racially and ethnically diverse group of 15 students and four faculty.
The friendships and support Sophia found through the SPS GSA inspired her to seek out and serve on executive boards of similar groups in college and medical school. Sophia’s positive experiences with the GSA and journey to becoming a family medicine physician inspired her to join this council and be a mentor for current and future LGBTQIA+ students at SPS.
Reaching Out
The stories of these SPS graduates provide a brief, thoroughly incomplete, survey of the arc of the history when it comes to LGBTQIA+ students at St. Paul’s School. One thing our alumni council can do is help to fill in that history even further through engaging with alumni and collecting narratives of the highs and lows of queer life at SPS over the decades.
All members of the Alumni Advisory Council are here to serve as resources to other LGBTQIA+ alumni, the alumni community, and our Association more broadly, and to serve the School in its efforts to become a place where each community member feels a sense of belonging and can bring their full selves to the Harkness table, the houses, athletic arenas, stages, pulpit, and all other areas of SPS life. The LGBTQIA+ Alumni Advisory Council is happy to enlist new members, and solicits your feedback, input, and requests for service.
To contact the group, please reach out to Marc Aronson ’00 (marcaronson43@yahoo.com) or Ben Loehnen ’96 (bloehnen@gmail.com). The School and SPS alumni have also come together to form a BIPOC Advisory Council. Members of that group will share their stories in an upcoming issue of Alumni Horae.