Pickets Protest UCI’s Shift on Gays in Family Housing

A small group of gay student activists picketed Saturday at a conference focused on accommodating cultural diversity on campus, deriding the UC Irvine-sponsored seminar as “hypocrisy.”

The conference at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel took place just days after a UCI administrator announced that the university would no longer admit gay couples into campus housing set aside for families. The ruling will not affect several lesbian couples who already live in family housing, admitted under a trial policy begun in fall, 1988.

Unmarried heterosexual couples will also be barred from the family housing.

“The difference is heterosexual couples can avail themselves of a marriage license,” said Randy Kerr, a graduate student and member of the chancellor’s advisory committee on the status of gays. “We cannot do so. We’re being told that our relationships are not valid.

“In the age of AIDS, where for young gay men a stable monogamous relationship promises survival, this administration is forcing students to choose between these relationships and affordable housing.”

Under the trial policy, unmarried couples were admitted to family housing, where apartments rent for $450 to $650, if they could prove through financial or other records that they had been in a committed relationship for at least six months.

Horace Mitchell, UCI’s vice chancellor of student affairs, said the relaxed standard had never been intended for unmarried couples, homosexual or heterosexual, but that it had been “inappropriately” extended to some gay students.

Mitchell said the policy had been meant to help hardship cases, such as a single parent who lived with a relative who helped with child care.

Mitchell also noted that gay couples have an advantage over heterosexuals under current campus housing policies: They may share an apartment in regular student housing, while members of the opposite sex are prohibited from living together on campus.

“What we’re being asked to do,” he said, “is recognize gay couples as being married couples, and I’m saying we can’t--that we don’t have the authority to do it . . . because it’s contrary to state law.”

College teachers and administrators who attended Saturday’s conference, which was co-sponsored by UCI and the University of South Carolina, seemed to take the pickets in stride, occasionally stopping students to ask them about the protest.

For their part, the students were cordial, notwithstanding the signs they wore accusing the UCI of discrimination and hypocrisy. Students quietly walked through a hotel ballroom where conferees had gathered for a luncheon.

Linda Merlo, 23, a junior studying linguistics, stopped at a table of college administrators to explain her concerns about the recent change in housing policy.

She said many student activists fear a trend, pointing out that Irvine passed city Measure N in November, which eliminated an ordinance barring discrimination against gays.