This week, I spent my time in the Archives looking through the Amherst GALA Questionnaire. This questionnaire, put together by Will Dix ’77, served as “the basis of a gay history of Amherst College” entitled Hiding in Plain Sight: A History of Homosexuality at Amherst College. The survey answers provided a great deal of insight into the experiences of a number of Amherst alums.
The front side of the survey looked like this: 
The back side of the survey asked the following questions: 
The questionnaires offered some pretty thought-provoking answers.
Some alums from the late ‘50s-early ‘60s stated that there was no homosexual activity on campus (see written response in above picture). Other alums, from earlier in the decade, reported having between 5-15 homosexual encounters with other students while at Amherst. One alum wrote “During the late ‘40s recognized homosexuals were shunned and scorned, not just at Amherst, but by society in general. ‘Coming out’ hadn’t even been dreamed of. In order to have a social life, one dated and posed as straight insofar as possible. Fear of discovery was very real. Interestingly, one simply accepted this situation, never thinking that things could be different.” Yet another alum gave the following response: 
As the above responses show, there was an incredible diversity of experiences of ‘gay life’ at Amherst throughout the years. What I found most interesting, though, was the consistent ‘no’ response to question #6: Did race, ethnicity, or religion significantly affect your life as a lesbian or gay man at Amherst? This begs the question of who was taking this survey and whether their experiences (diverse as they were) were representative of those whose race did affect their life as a queer person at Amherst.