Queer Acceptance at College

My child faces a world more welcoming than my own

I was headed back to college. Not with plans to stay for eleven years and three degrees, like the first time around. Nor to make lifelong friends and gain knowledge of myself and the world. I was returning to my alma mater to take one of my children to school. As they began their journey towards independent living, I wanted to step back and revisit how college life for queer youth had changed over the last three plus decades.

I had spent far too many college years as a confused and closeted gay youth. In contrast, my child seemed comfortably out with their non-binary identity. Our gay family and friends in liberal San Francisco had embraced my child, but would the world beyond really be so accepting? Had my own experiences growing up in a homophobic age made me too pessimistic about the present?

The past

In the flush of the Stonewall protests of the late ’60’s, a gay student group flourished at my university. But by the time I arrived on campus in 1979, the group had either disbanded or gone completely underground. Only in my last two years of graduate school did the college publicize the existence of any gay support group. By the time I attended, in my late twenties, the youngsters who were taking their own first tentative steps outside the closet considered me an ancient dinosaur. I only went twice.

My first year on campus, I lived in an all male, mostly freshmen dorm, with bigger rooms at the ends of the hall for upperclassmen. My neighbor, Tom, a wise, worldly, and ruggedly handsome junior, was happy to dole out advice about dating, romance, and relationships. Towards the end of freshman year, after multiple rejections from women, I dared, for my first time ever, to utter out loud my concerns about my sexuality.

“Well, maybe I’m gay?”

“That’s silly, John. Gay doesn’t really exist.”

Tom genuinely believed that. Homosexuality was completely foreign to his own experience. He never had to struggle with feelings of attraction that weren’t simply, cleanly, and perfectly aligned with everything he saw in public life. He reckoned that gay people were just confused. And, maybe, subconsciously, he was protecting himself from my crush on him — an attraction which I hadn’t yet consciously acknowledged to myself, either.

During my second year of college, one brave soul, Greg, dared pen a letter to the student newspaper, decrying the campus’ and society’s homophobia. He poignantly wrote about how he didn’t feel free to walk across campus holding hands with a boyfriend. Deeply confused about my own sexuality at the time, I was both thrilled and awed at his courage. Adding to my confusion, I heard numerous friends, who were otherwise good and openhearted people, voice disgust at Greg’s boldness, and condemn any behavior that deviated from heteronormative sexuality.

Tom had been trying to help. He hadn’t intended to warp my sense of self and reality, but it was four more years before I even dared to say the word gay to anyone else. This time I confided in a medical school classmate, another ruggedly handsome blonde with a wealth of heterosexual experience.

“Maybe I’m gay?”

“You just haven’t met the right woman, John.”

Again, this friend wasn’t trying to gaslight me. He was offering words that he thought were true, and would genuinely help me to live in the world that he recognized.

I grew certain about my sexual orientation only over the next two years, after dating two different women, each an intelligent, nice person, with a love for the outdoors, and an appreciation for bad puns. It wasn’t the women, it was me. Either of these women would have been a good match for me, had they only been men. They’re both good friends to this day. I really was gay. Yet, I needed another few years, and a detour off the continent, before I actually kissed a man.

I’m aware that a constellation of personal traits and family dynamics inhibited my behavior and made my coming out journey more baroque than that of many of my peers. But the society I was embedded in certainly played a role. Greg was the only openly gay student during my undergraduate years. Rumors existed about others. Stories swirled about one of my friends, David, largely because he was active in theater. But I knew then that David was straight, and his thirty years of happy marriage have confirmed this. Back then, very few public figures acknowledged being gay. Implausibly, even Liberace pretended to be straight.

America’s oppressive homophobia drove many queer youth to drugs, despair, suicide, and a host of less immediately lethal behaviors. This homophobia impeded our ability to address the AIDS epidemic until years after it began. It contributed to many queer individuals creating tortuous, untruthful, and self abnegating relationships with themselves and others.

The now

I’m glad that our society has grown more understanding and welcoming of diversity regarding gender expression and sexual orientation. Youth are leading the way through doorways cracked open by preceding generations. Colleges and universities help incubate this tolerance.

My child’s freshmen orientation week lessened any apprehension they had about being accepted for who they are, and also dispelled most of my own worries about whether sexual minorities were truly being welcomed. The housing office acknowledged the presence of non-binary individuals on the dorm request forms. At the orientation check-in, the school provided stickers for individuals to indicate their preferred pronouns. During convocation ceremonies, the provost and the president instructed students to use their time at college to “learn who you really are”, “embrace diversity”, and become “your authentic selves”, and specifically included gender and sexuality as dimensions of self to be affirmed.

The student government president began his speech by addressing “gentleladies, gentlemen, and gentlethem” in a tone of voice that sounded genuinely hospitable and joyous. I’m aware that some activists find such phrases to be gratuitous or snarky, but all of these open acknowledgments of gender and sexual diversity departed dramatically from my own experiences, on that very same quad, decades earlier.

This summer, as I walked past the classically colonnaded buildings, missing the stately elms that no longer adorned the library, having succumbed to Dutch Elm disease, I marveled at how the majestic oaks were presiding over a completely different population than four decades earlier. An incredible assortment of human shapes, shades, clothing styles, hairdos, and adornments clogged the sidewalks and caught frisbees on the quads. Most looked comfortable simply being themselves. Nobody appeared to have any particular cares or concerns regarding how others presented themselves.

I did notice one burly, bleached-blonde, six-footer sweating profusely in the line to pick up freshman dorm keys. Was it the excessive heat? Was it the heavy makeup covering the beard stubble? Wouldn’t the butterfly patterned blouse and short skirt help keep them cool? They looked uncertain, wary, nervous. I imagined them wondering, “Will I fit in? Will I make friends? Will I fall in love?” But were their fears any more intense than those of their fellow classmates venturing into a new environment? Were their fears of rejection more grounded in reality? Maybe they were really just worried about finding their classroom on the first day, or whether their financial aid had come through.

What’s changed and obstacles to change

We have yet to create a perfect world. Only after a few years of wearing flannel shirts and overalls, and cutting their hair in a mullet, did my own child speak of their desire to change pronouns. And they waited until their very flight to college, to share with us their new chosen name. One that they had been using online for months with their prospective freshmen friends. But they are still many steps ahead of where I was forty year ago, even though I was dealing with the relatively simpler issue of sexual orientation.

Today, those opposing gay and transgender rights represent a shrinking, but no less strident, fragment of the population. Republican legislatures in dozens of states have passed laws infringing on non-binary individuals’ access to sports, bathrooms, and even appropriate medical care. Americans still willingly commit violence against queer people, from verbal slurs to outright murder.

We visited five of my good friends who still live in the city where I went to school. All of them wholeheartedly supported my non-binary child. I don’t think that they all would have been ready to do so forty years ago. Why have they changed and adapted, while others remain behind?

The unfinished fight for queer rights builds on transformations introduced by the sexual revolution of the sixties. Both movements represent embodiments of an even larger, truth revolution. For centuries, traditions, often established by religious texts, determined “correct” behavior. The right still embraces this view, and counts on authority figures to deliver these “truths” to the population. They use the word truth to mean whatever they believe their ancient texts say is right. The left, on the other hand, believes that the scientific method and individual lived experience establish truth. Furthermore, the left contends that what is not true cannot be right.

The very existence of trans kids, or of gay fathers, challenges foundational “truths” of the right. This is why the right so vehemently vilifies and tries to erase queer identities. But denial of the truth doesn’t make the truth go away, whether the truths pertain to election victories, global warming, or the spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations.

The right’s reliance on bibles, constitutions, and authority figures provides consistency, simplicity, and absolutism. Worshipping old traditions reassures adherents and stabilizes society. The truth revolution produces tradeoffs. It forces us to surrender tranquility and accept uncertainty; we must forego purity and embrace nuance. While our children are privileged with a greater sense of self awareness, many are also less resilient because they have faced few confrontations with a world that will challenge who they are or what they think and feel. But ultimately truth results in a stronger, more flexible, more nurturing world, because people’s lives will more closely align with verifiable truths, rather than warp to what the world expects of, and imposes on them.

The truth revolution changes more than just our understanding of sex, or of gender. It permeates all of our behaviors, even how we eat. I was raised to clean my plate, and to this day, I tend to eat whatever I am served, whether by a parent, dining hall worker, or waiter. I was programmed to defer to these “authorities” regarding what should nourish me. In contrast, my twins will consume what their body tells them to, without regard for how much of it someone dolloped onto their plate. They leave morsels uneaten, and put away food for another meal. My children have better awareness and regulation of themselves than I did at their age, but this is a result of cultural change as much as it is due to my parenting.

For centuries, colleges largely upheld the canon, and supported limiting our behavior according to our ancestor’s rules. More often now, universities try to pursue truth and encourage students to ponder and evaluate the benefits of these old patterns. Individuals and cultures thrive when they understand where they came from, and when they reject false limitations regarding where they are headed.

I’m glad that my return to campus helped me appreciate how much both I, and the world, have grown in the past four decades. It gives me hope that we will see as much improvement in the next forty years.

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