Gay to a degree.

When Larry Kramer offered Yale University $5 million to endow a gay-studies program earlier this year, he was, as usual, daring to think the unthinkable. While most universities offer an occasional class on gay and lesbian issues, only a handful, such as the University of California, Riverside, and San Francisco State University, grant minors in the discipline. Yale eventually snubbed the gift, but the prospect that serious money might be at hand has the academic world buzzing about the future of gay studies on college campuses.

Surprisingly, even gay and lesbian academics disagree over the desirability of gay-studies departments. Rutgers University English professor Michael Warner, for one, believes that the first aim of scholars should be getting gay perspectives woven into the general curriculum. "It may be selling gay studies short to confine it to a degree program--a minor or major--because like most interdisciplinary subjects, it takes place in a lot of different departments," says Warner, author of the seminal gay-studies text Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. "Gay studies is about challenging the assumptions of heterosexual culture in all fields. The impact of gay studies is best felt not at the level of gay-studies programs but at the level of your ordinary American history survey or sociology course . This is where we are fighting the real battles."

Warner cites the impact gay scholars have already made as a sign that even more can be accomplished. "People across the English field have had to rethink a lot of major subjects and authors and how they teach familiar texts because of the work of queer scholars," he says. "The obvious one would be [poet Walt] Whitman, whose use of homoerotic themes used to be swept under the rug or apologized for, but now they are up front and center. But it is also true for writers whom we think of as straight--like Jack London. His novels are full of attraction and anxiety between male characters--that is now seen as one of the major themes of his work. We now are talking about ideas of masculinity as one of the major currents of American literature."

Not good enough, says Kramer, who points to African-American and Latin American studies departments already in existence. "We deserve to have our culture taught the same as everyone else who pays taxes and is a people. I'm getting sick of our sidestepping this." What's more, Kramer argues, many of the courses currently offered are grounded in "navel contemplation"--gray issues that don't teach gay history, culture, or literature. "I think that these courses have all been whipped into existence by gay academics who are afraid to go out there and claim that we have a history," Kramer says.

Many gay scholars argue that for psychological and tactical reasons, academics must press for bona fide programs that would offer interdisciplinary classes in conjunction with departments like English and history. "The psychosocial impact of seeing gay and lesbian studies listed in a course catalog both for students and for faculty is enormous," says Jonathan D. Katz, chairman of the Department of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Studies at the City College of San Francisco (CCSF). "I share completely my colleagues' desire that gay studies should be naturalized in every department and throughout the institution. But wishing is not going to make it so. If you're a department, you are a player. If you are a player, then you can negotiate with other departments and strike deals and do all the academic politics that make institutions run. Most important, it allows for a program in which resources are not controlled by people who may not have our best interests at heart."

Many academics point out that gay-studies specialists have no way of protecting their turf without their own departments. Universities give tenure to faculty in specific professorial "lines," which dictate a professor's specialty. Without gay-studies programs, there are no lines to ensure that work in the field will continue. "While there are pitfalls to institutionalization, it is important for a field this young and fragile to have some kind of apparatus to protect its knowledge base," says Jill Dolan, executive director of the City University of New York's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). "Junior faculty often feel that they can't do gay and lesbian studies until they are tenured because their positions in the academy are tenuous--especially when they are not at one of the big Northeastern universities. There is a kind of survival instinct that kicks into effect. It seems to me that the knowledge can't proliferate unless there are faculty that are hired to teach it, and there can't be faculty unless there are programs with faculty lines to support them."

While most universities are still reluctant to create gay-studies programs, the subject matter is enjoying a moment of academic vogue. "Gay and lesbian theory has become the cutting edge," says Framji Minwalla, chair of the board of directors at CLAGS, who will teach a gay and lesbian theater class at Dartmouth this winter.

Furthermore, grants for research work from national organizations like the revered Modem Language Association have increasingly gone to scholars working in gay studies. "So even in a place that has no administrative commitment to gay studies, it's possible to do the work and get support at the national level," says Warner.

In fact, Kramer, who says he has received inquiries from 54 colleges interested in his financial support, would like to take the money that Yale turned down and use it to establish a foundation for gay education.

Though there seems to be no shortage of scholars to teach gay-studies programs, finding undergraduates to enroll in the classes may prove difficult. At Dartmouth and Rutgers, gay-studies classes that are offered only every other year have been chronically undersubscribed. One cause may be that many students don't begin to identify as gay until after their undergraduate careers are over. Those who do come out in college still face risks in signing up for gay-studies classes. "There's a lot riding for an undergraduate deciding to take a gay-studies course, much less to major in gay studies or minor in it," explains Warner. "Not many undergraduates are out. Their families will see the transcripts. Who's going to hire someone who has a degree in gay studies? Larry Kramer wanted Yale to teach classes in gay male literature. I can tell you from experience that very few people are going to sign up for such courses. They are only going to be people who are securely and strongly out."

Unlike women's studies and African-American studies, which students lobbied for in the 1960s, interest in gay studies seems to be coming from academics. "I don't know of anywhere where the undergraduates are really banging on the gates and faculty are refusing to offer the course," says Warner. "It is usually that faculty are interested in teaching the courses and there are some kids who really want them and other students who may secretly want them but who are apprehensive about taking them."

Dolan, who reports that classes she taught in lesbian studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison were fully booked, argues that gay academics need to focus on teaching undergraduates. "That is where it's at for this movement to keep revitalizing itself," says Dolan. "My sense is that there is a whole student population that is hungry for this material."

If Kramer had his way, however, what would a gay-studies department actually look like? The department at CCSF, which is, in the words of Katz, the only full-fledged "department in the country that we know of," may offer some clues. CCSF began offering its first classes in gay studies in 1970, and the program gained department status in 1991. Two thousand students a year enroll in 18 classes, including Issues in Lesbian Relationships and The Lesbian and Gay Avant-Garde of the Fifties. But CCSF has an advantage in attracting Students: At $39 per class, the courses are priced to sell. More than half its students already have degrees and take the courses for enrichment. Says Katz: "It's not unusual to have 18-year-old students for whom English is a second language in a class with Ph.D. students."

With the price of a bachelor's degree often running at $100,000 or more, social pressure is just one of many factors working against the institutionalization of gay studies. Top-to-bottom programs like the one at CCSF seem like a fantasy to gay scholars at most universities. Still, academics are professional big thinkers, and Kramer's provocative offer has given them the stuff of dreams.