Reverend Dorothy A. Austin, former associate minister for Memorial Church at Harvard University, and a pioneering LGBTQ+ leader, died at 82 in her Cambridge, Massachusetts home. She was also part of the first same-sex couple to serve as house masters for one of the university’s undergraduate residences
Reports the Boston Globe:
One of her own responsibilities turned out to be taking a groundbreaking role in 1998, when Harvard named Rev. Austin and her then-partner and future wife, Diana Eck, as house masters of Lowell House. The official title has since been changed to faculty dean.
“It was a landmark to be sure,” Eck told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, in 2023. “But it was a landmark whose time had come by that time.”
Still, Harvard appointed them more than five years before a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in the state in November 2003.
The couple married the following year on the Fourth of July, a nod to the country’s religious diversity and their own backgrounds in academia.
“These two women are deeply — and also widely — religious. And neither is willing to cede faith to the religious right,” the Globe’s Ellen Goodman wrote in a column published on their wedding day in 2004.
For that column, Rev. Austin told Goodman: “We shouldn’t relinquish the religious tools to the right. This is a moment of prophecy — of mercy, justice, love, comfort. We need religious traditions and people in them.”
By then, Rev. Austin had already created a career in the pulpit and at the classroom lectern.
She was a professor of religion and psychology at Drew University, commuting to and from Cambridge and the school’s Madison, N.J., campus, when she was appointed Sedgwick associate minister of Memorial Church.
Her professional initiatives in Cambridge, meanwhile, have included creating and directing the Erik H. and Joan M. Erikson Center in Cambridge Hospital’s department of psychiatry. For a time, the Eriksons shared a home with Rev. Austin and Eck.
Soon after becoming house masters of Lowell House, Eck and Rev. Austin expanded their own immediate family to include four teenage refugees from Kosovo: Amella, Aida, Kreshnik, and Sokol Zejnullahu. Kreshnik now lives in San Francisco, while the other three remain in Cambridge.
Along with her ministerial duties, Rev. Austin was a therapist.
“Dorothy had a great gift for listening,” Eck wrote in a tribute. “She was a world-class listener; it was as if she listened with all her senses, the way people write poetry or choreograph. Listening was a creative act for her.”
Read the complete Globe article here.
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