Queer Places:
The University of Utah, 410 Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Yale University (Ivy League), 38 Hillhouse Ave, New Haven, CT 06520
Smith College (Seven Sisters), 9 Elm St, Northampton, MA 01063

Raymond Joel Dorius (January 4, 1919 Salt Lake City - February 14, 2006 San Francisco) was an American professor of literature at Yale University, Smith College, at San Francisco State University and at the University of Hamburg .

Dorius studied after his education at West High School, English and literature at the University of Utah, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1939.

After moving to the University of Harvard, where he received his doctorate in 1949, Dorius received in 1949 initially a job at Yale University and took in 1958 a job at Smith College . Dorius became known when he was released in 1960 from Smith College, where he was a professor, after he was arrested for possession of gay pornography. For the same reason, professors Newton Arvin and Edward Spofford dismissed with him.

In Provincetown, the Boston area’s legendary gay playground, where he had gone for the weekend, Dorius had seen the Globe and was frantically trying to get on the air shuttle back to town and thence back to Northampton, only too aware of the contents of his own closets. Dorius’s close friend Roy M. Fisher was also alarmed. He too had seen the Globe story that Sunday morning, in his case on one of those leafy, quiet streets of Old Cambridge. Fisher, who was finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard (Dorius was also a Harvard graduate), was rooming that summer with Harvard professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

After his dismissal at Smith College, Dorius initially found no employment as a university teacher in the United States and finally accepted a position as a professor at the University of Hamburg. In 1964, Dorius was hired as a professor at San Francisco State University.

In 2002, Smith College admitted the unjustified termination of the three professors, and set up its own lecture series and $ 100,000 Dorius / Spofford Foundation for work on civil liberties and freedom of expression, and wrote the annual Newton Arvin Prize for American Studies amounting to $ 500.


Yale University, New Haven, CT

The story of the dismissal of the professors is described in the book The Scarlet Professor - Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal by Barry Werth . In 2004 Dorius published his own memoirs titled My Four Lives . In 2006 he died of leukemia.[1]

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