The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture »

Douglass Shand-Tucci’s previous books include The Art of Scandal, the bestselling biography of Isabella Steward Gardner; Boston Bohemia, and, most recently, Harvard University, with photographs by Richard Cheek and a foreword by Neil Rudenstine. The origin of The Crimson Letter is a speech Shand-Tucci, a 1972 graduate of Harvard College, gave to the Gay and Lesbian Caucus in 1997. He lives in Boston’s Back Bay.

After setting the tone by describing a 1960 scandal and his own experience before graduating in 1972, Shand-Tucci traces the history of homosexuality in the prestigious university since the days of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The study grew out of a 1997 speech he gave to the Gay and Lesbian Caucus. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The New York Times

Shand-Tucci presents homosexuality as Harvard's hidden history, and he moves from the personal and precise -- almost confessional -- tone of his introduction to an account of the institution itself. But this institution is not only the university in Cambridge, for ''Harvard, whatever lens you look at it through, is above all an American story.'' Gay Harvard, for Shand-Tucci, is the story of modern America. — Daniel Swift