Less than a week after Sarah Pettit’s death, a serious movement is afoot to establish a chair at Yale University in her name. Pettit — a founder of Out magazine and a senior arts and entertainment editor at Newsweek when she died last week at the age of 36 (see " An Unordinary Life, " on this site) — attended Yale as an undergraduate, graduating in 1988. During her time at Yale, she was a major player in the gay-and-lesbian political scene, and is credited with influencing the school’s decision to add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy. The Sarah Pettit Chair would fund a scholar in gay-and-lesbian studies to teach and do research at Yale.

The chair would be managed under the auspices of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies. This program, named for AIDS activist, novelist, and playwright Larry Kramer, was initiated by his brother, Arthur Kramer, in April of 2001 to fund the teaching and research of gay-and-lesbian studies. Both Kramer brothers graduated from Yale in the 1960s. While Kramer himself will be donating the seed money for the Sarah Pettit Chair — and is behind the move to establish a permanent chair in her name — larger fundraising efforts will be needed to raise an additional $150,000 to $200,000. Kramer says it should be easy to raise the money. In an e-mail, he writes: " People are already contacting me about giving money and it is happening so fast we don’t have the apparatus up and running yet on how to do this, via Internet or checks to Yale, or what. But there appears to be a LOT of energy about supporting the notion, which is great, and touching. "

The celebration of Pettit’s work that the chair would represent is yet another stage in her sometimes stormy relationship with Kramer. While they were both highly visible figures in the national queer literary scene and were at times close friends, they had, in 1997, a major falling-out when Kramer led a fiery attack on Pettit’s editorship of Out. Angered that Out printed a piece by Village Voice editor Richard Goldstein that praised the radical political group Sex Panic! — which publicly criticized Kramer and others who it thought advanced sexually repressive ideas — Kramer and other community members wrote a series of e-mails (which became public via the Internet) that challenged Pettit’s editorial policies. One e-mail — written to Pettit by Kramer — said, in part: " I find it beyond acceptable, for instance, that Out is entirely edited by lesbians now. That you can be so passively hostile (well, not even so passively) on this current issue is such a slap in my face ... that it becomes doubly painful that we have no recourse to anyone on your staff who knows what the fuck we are talking about.... "

Although written in anger and in the midst of an epidemic, Kramer’s e-mail, many people felt, was a factor in Pettit’s being fired from her job at Out. Certainly the creation of a Sarah Pettit Chair at Yale would have pleased her, and it no doubt shows that even the worst, most personal fights in queer politics, can, in the end, be resolved with generosity and grace.