In response to Luke Dumas’s column (“Having a Gay Old Time,” 4/28/09), I am struck by several things:1) I doubt highly that the people who planned Pride Week would have opposed Dumas’s suggestions if he had submitted them at the relevant time and had showed that students would have enjoyed/attended them. 2) Why is Gay Pride Week “inherently flamboyant”? It only seems to be inherently gay, unless we posit that homosexuality implies flamboyance. (False.) 3) Dumas claims to read the minds of Pride Week planners; to wit, Gay Pride Week was “a thinly veiled attempt to maintain the University’s intellectual integrity.” I doubt that the event planners had the University’s intellectual integrity as a central focus. Overall, I feel that Dumas’s op-ed overgeneralizes the homosexual community at the U of C as one that essentially desires programming featuring “feather boas, ass-less chaps, and celebrity gossip.” Overgeneralization is a common theme of Dumas’s writings; as in “Uniquely Terrible” (2/10/09), wherein Dumas comments thusly about contemporary classical musicians: “After all, it’s not every day that one gets to see a performer do all he can to suck at playing his instrument;” also, “Running Late” (3/2/09), wherein Dumas addresses a “campus-wide epidemic” of students’ oversleeping.How his work passes for acceptable or interesting writing, I know not. Andrew ThorntonClass of 2011