30 Hold Sit-In to Demand UCI Housing for Gays

About 30 students held a peaceful sit-in Monday at the office of UC Irvine Chancellor Jack W. Peltason, demanding that the university alter its housing policies so gay and lesbian couples can qualify for student family housing.

The sit-in at the chancellor’s office, which came after about 100 protesters staged a noontime demonstration in the administration building, was the first on campus since the Vietnam War era, university police officials said. There were no arrests.

Peltason held two separate meetings with the demonstrators, who at various times chanted slogans, wielded placards and ate several pepperoni-and-cheese pizzas rushed in about two hours after the group moved into the building.

While the chancellor acknowledged under questioning from the students that he does not consider homosexuality immoral and would not retaliate against students or faculty involved in the protests, he offered little else to assuage their frustration and anger.

Instead, Peltason said that the protesters should pursue the issue “through the civil process” to change California’s legal definition of marriage, which does not apply to homosexual couples.

“We recognize that this demonstration is more than a political demonstration,” Peltason said in a written statement Monday. “It is a genuine and courageous expression of a need to be recognized--a need for acknowledgement that gay and lesbian partnerships are as meaningful to them as marriages are to those persons who have the option of getting married.”

He also said the university has never had a policy exception that allowed homosexual or other unmarried couples to room at the university’s family housing quarters, even though at least three lesbian couples are now living at the 860-unit Verano Place apartments. None of the couples is being asked to leave.

Other university officials said sympathetic campus housing authorities had allowed several homosexual couples to rent low-cost family units, citing a policy exception that permits “non-traditional families.” Under that exception, students can claim that their ability to attend the university might be jeopardized if they are not allowed to live with adults not related to them by marriage.

Most of the demonstrators, whose numbers included both homosexual and heterosexual students, came away from the day ready for a drawn-out fight.

The rally and sit-in were the start of a week of protests to spotlight the university’s reluctance to make family housing available to homosexual and other “non-traditional” couples.

Students are planning to set up a “shanty town” outside the administration building Wednesday and hold a noon rally on Thursday. Organizers also said they have been in contact with peers at UC campuses throughout the state in hopes of sparking similar protests.

“If (Peltason) gets enough pressure on him, he’ll buckle,” Nicolas Martinez, a co-chairman of the Gay and Lesbian Student Union, said during the noon rally, which drew dozens of students armed with placards carrying slogans such as “Destroy Homophobia, Not Homes.”

While unmarried heterosexual couples can become eligible for resources such as student family housing simply by being married, Martinez noted that homosexual couples “don’t have that option.”

The sit-in occurred after a 90-minute demonstration in the administration building’s lofty inner atrium broke up. As the crowd dispersed, more than two dozen students, many of them undergraduates, huffed up several flights of stairs to Peltason’s fifth-floor office, chanting the entire way.

Peltason said the issue surfaced in December when he read a news account of a demonstration in Berkeley that quoted protesters who suggested that UC Irvine was already allowing “non-traditional couples” to room together in family housing quarters.

Surprised by the story, he asked administrators to clarify the matter. Only then, campus officials said, was it discovered that homosexual couples were inappropriately being allowed into family housing under the hardship exception, which was designed for situations involving handicapped students or other extreme cases.

Student leaders, however, have contended that Peltason buckled under pressure from administrators of other UC campuses. Peltason denies that charge.

When gay and lesbian student leaders learned of the shift, they began mustering their forces and held several protests in late January. The demonstrations are happening just three months after Irvine voters narrowly approved a ballot measure that stripped gay rights protections from city anti-discrimination laws.