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For example, senior Jenny Williams, a lesbian who asked that her real name not be used, says that, over the last year, she has been contacted by several students looking for advice about coming out to their friends or to their parents. She gladly meets with them and tells them her own story, then listens to their stories. "They don't need me to tell them what to do," she says. "They just need to say it out loud, and know that someone understands."
Other students consult with professors. John Clum, chair of the theater studies department, who has taught at Duke for forty-two years, says that over the course of his teaching career, he'd be asked to lunch by students, and he "knew what that meant. They wanted to come out, wanted help in coming out. It's one of the most important roles I have served as a teacher."
LGBT issues remain contentious in the U.S., both socially and politically. In the wake of visible and, at times, vitriolic controversy over the consecration of its first openly gay bishop, the Episcopal Church has been divided by the question of how to respond to LGBT parishioners and clergy. Opponents of gay marriage have passed amendments to several state constitutions explicitly banning same-sex unions.
The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay man, in 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming, inspired proponents of LGBT rights to promote the Matthew Shepard Act, which would extend federal hate-crime legislation to protect individuals against crimes committed against them because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The act passed both houses of Congress this past fall, but did not survive a conference committee. And supporters of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would protect workers from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, chose to drop language protecting against discrimination on the basis of gender identity in an effort to push the bill through Congress. Despite the compromise, the bill failed to pass.
Still, advocates for Duke's LGBT community say that times are changing. They point out that this generation of college students came of age long after entertainer Ellen DeGeneres made headlines by coming out of the closet; these students were raised in an era when Will & Grace, a sitcom that prominently features several gay characters, was in syndication on network television.
Steven Petrow '78, a journalist and former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, remembers coming to terms with his sexuality in the mid-1970s. The year that Petrow started at Duke was the first year that the American Psychological Association stopped listing homosexuality as a mental disorder. "We didn't talk about LGBT then. Most gays and lesbians were closeted, were fearful."
He says that back in those days, there wasn't a support system in place for gay and lesbian students, nor were there real role models, per se. "If you watched 60 Minutes in the late '60s, gay men were always pictured in shadow behind potted plants," he says. Now, he adds, gays and lesbians are much more visible in society at large.
"The younger generation of students is coming in with a high level of cultural literacy about lesbian and gay issues," says Micham, the task force co-chair. "It's common in the high-school world to have allies. Lots of students are coming out in high school, which wasn't so much the case ten years ago."
Center director Long likewise credits the prominence of gay-straight alliances (GSAs) in high schools with making a huge difference in the mindsets of today's incoming college students. More than 3,500 GSAs in schools across the country have registered with the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, a national education organization that focuses on maintaining safe school environments.
Duke, like other places, has also changed in more subtle ways. Early in her tenure as coordinator of gay and lesbian services at CAPS, Buhrke was assigned to counsel most LGBT students who came to CAPS, regardless of their needs or questions. It's a reflection of progress, she says, that now every counselor is trained in LGBT issues, and the students "are coming in and seeing anybody in the office."
And five years ago, a group of students spearheaded a T-shirt giveaway to promote acceptance and counter public perception that Duke was a homophobic campus. They created an initial batch of 500 T-shirts featuring the slogan "Gay? Fine By Me." Demand was so strong that they ended up producing and handing out an additional 1,500 shirts in ten days, before going on to create a nonprofit organization to organize similar giveaways at other campuses. The Love=Love T-shirt giveaway on Coming Out Day was partially inspired by the success of the earlier project.
Even before Long arrived at Duke, the university was named among the twenty "best of the best" in the 2006 edition of The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students.
But despite all of the work that has been done, LGBT leaders interviewed by Duke Magazine almost universally say that coming out of the closet—and staying out of the closet—at Duke is not an entirely comfortable proposition. While some students say they find the process relatively simple, and the campus perfectly friendly, others say they do not.
Some of the pressures to stay in the closet that LGBT students say they feel come from outside Duke. When Petrow, the journalist, visited the LGBT center last spring, he and a group of students shared their coming-out stories with each other. He was shocked to find that even among the self-selected group that came to meet him, none was out to his or her parents. Many students continue to worry that if they come out their parents may cut them off, financially and emotionally, says senior Ashley Walker, president of AQUADuke.
Other pressures are more universal in nature. In almost any situation, LGBT leaders say, coming out is an emotionally—as well as politically—fraught process. A Chronicle opinion column written in November by junior Justin Noia questioned the notion of "gay pride," arguing that the concept "demands respect on account of one's sexual lifestyle," a notion he deemed unacceptable. In a reply, also published by the newspaper, third-year law student Scott Thompson, a member of OUTlaw, explained that, rather than being some sort of boast, gay pride, "like black pride or pride in any disenfranchised group," is an attempt to counter internalized homophobia developed from years of facing discrimination.
Though Duke has not had to deal with violent attacks on LGBT students like those seen on some other campuses—Vanderbilt and Georgetown universities have both seen incidents over the past year—Long says she has received reports of what she terms "hate speech" on campus—derogatory terms directed at specific LGBT individuals and at the community in general. Early in the fall semester, for example, she says she and her staff noticed that the word "faggot" had been traced in the dust on a vent right outside the center. Not long afterward, a Chronicle story about a housing issue involving a transgender student sparked public discussions between students on campus that were not always, as she euphemistically puts it, "LGBT-friendly."
"When these things happen, even though none may seem to you to be particularly atrocious, think of the cumulative effects," she says. "Our students hear about it. If it happens, they hear about it."
They also continue to hear when terms like "gay" and "fag" are thrown into everyday speech to connote, in the words of senior Kyle Knight, "anything from 'not cool' to something quite hateful." Posts on a popular campus gossip website founded earlier this school year are rife with this type of language. Knight says he's not shy about correcting classmates when they use the words and has never faced any ill will because of it. "That doesn't mean that it stops completely," he says, "but they're at least a little uncomfortable after they say it."
More troubling to him is the tendency of his fellow students to think about homosexuality as an "issue." Classroom discussions about homosexuality often become "abstract political discussions," he says, where students on various sides of an issue will make declarations about what being gay means, not realizing that there might be a gay person, or two, sitting right next to them.
Along with the fear of politicization comes the fear of being stereotyped. In discussions about sexual orientation, many openly LGBT students at Duke are quick to say, "I'm gay, but it's not a major part of who I am." But Long suggests that what these students actually mean is, "It's not all of who I am."
"They tell me they feel almost compelled to say that, because once somebody says openly on this campus that they are LGBT, that's all they become in the eyes of other people, no matter how many other activities they are involved in.
"It's really a shame, because none of us are only one small component of who we are. We are a totality of things. To have to feel like we have to hide a certain part of ourselves so as not to have that become our sole identity is unfortunate."
But many students at Duke say they feel as if they do have to hide that part of their identity, Williams says. "At Duke there is a strong core culture that most kids buy into," she says, echoing sentiments expressed by many other students and administrators. "Most people are incredibly motivated, and they know what success looks like. They place value on affluence and power.
"Being gay doesn't fit into that view, because when you are gay, you lose some political power, some social power. Being gay doesn't fit into their idea of what their life should look like."
Walker agrees. "A lot of times, you get the sense that it wouldn't hurt you if you told people, but it wouldn't really help you—if you know what I mean."
Even in areas typically seen as welcoming of LGBT individuals, there is sometimes an evident lack of openness. "Duke's must be the only theater department in the country with no openly gay majors, which is very bizarre," Clum says.
In this respect, some suggest that Duke, despite the strong institutional push to be inclusive, has fallen behind some of its peer institutions. Other top-tier universities, notably the Ivies, "are characterized by a better climate for LGBT individuals," says Ara Wilson, a member of the LGBT task force who worked at Ohio State University and Mount Holyoke College before coming to Duke a year ago. Part of Wilson's job as the new director of the Program in the Study of Sexualities—which examines sexuality broadly, rather than focusing on homosexuality—is to revive an academic program that was once among the nation's strongest, featuring well-known scholars like Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon, and a training ground for future stars like José Muñoz.
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