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To accommodate students who are looking for advice but prefer not to come to the LGBT center, presumably for fear of being publicly identified as LGBT, Long says she has established regular office hours on East Campus and also makes herself available in more informal settings. These venues have been popular. "I jokingly tell people I've had more coffee in the past year than I ever thought I could consume," she says.
She says that she has spoken with several students who were out to their friends and family in high school, before coming to Duke, but have since gone back into the closet. Likewise, she says she knows of faculty members who are unwilling to come out to colleagues.
And, despite its positive ranking in the Advocate College Guide in 2006, Duke was ranked as among the most homophobic campuses in the U.S. by the Princeton Review just seven years earlier. (Long cautions against putting too much weight on the rankings, whatever they indicate. Though she's proud of the center's recent work, she says that the results of surveys can vary drastically depending on "who's asking the questions, who's answering, and what the questions are.")
Students and faculty members alike say that it's easier to be out in some departments than in others, often depending on whether the department has any openly gay faculty members. "A noticeable gay presence in the arts and humanities" faculties, for example, makes those departments seem more welcoming to LGBT students and faculty recruits, Clum says.
No concrete figures exist on the number of openly LGBT faculty members at Duke, but many faculty and staff members report that it is less common to find openly gay faculty members in the social sciences than in the arts and humanities, less common still in the hard sciences and the medical school.
A university-wide faculty survey on work climate conducted by the Provost's Standing Committee on Faculty Diversity in 2005 asked questions about sexual orientation, but administrators reported there were not enough respondents to those questions to draw any conclusions or make recommendations. The committee is now working with the LGBT task force to develop focus groups that will capture a more accurate picture, according to chair Nancy Allen, vice provost for faculty diversity and development.
Besides the programming sponsored by the LGBT center, students say, there isn't much of an LGBT social scene on campus. Williams says that since coming to Duke, she has had one serious relationship that lasted a year and a half, but it's over. She knows of only three other lesbians in her class. "One has a girlfriend from home, and I'm not interested in dating either of the other two. It's almost silly how limited that is."
She says she believes that the problem is, to some extent, a Catch-22: If there were more of an LGBT social scene on campus, then closeted students would have more of an incentive to come out. If they did, they would improve the scene.
Others share this sentiment. Knight says he is especially frustrated by the "sideline relationships"—often secretive one-night stands—between members of the out gay community and closeted gays at Duke. The gay community does not want to forcibly out any of these people, he says, but at the same time, their occasional forays only serve to remind members of the community what life could be like if more people were out in the open.
Williams says she knows that there are more-established gay and lesbian scenes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in Raleigh, and perhaps she could find women she is interested in if she explored more outside Duke, but adds, "I'm really well established in a social group, and my social group doesn't [go to those places]. So that would require doing research and jumping into a situation where I don't have any common interests with people except that we are all gay." Instead, she continues to go out to straight bars with straight friends, and, over the course of the night, watch them pair off with men and head home.
According to an ongoing study by a team of Duke researchers, she is not alone in her struggles. Much has been made in the press of the so-called "hook-up culture" prevalent on college campuses, an atmosphere characterized by casual, no-strings-attached sex. As part of a larger study on the development of romantic and family relationships of young adults, the Social Science Research Institute Faculty Fellows Working Group on Family Change and Variation, which consists of nine Duke faculty members, is studying the phenomenon of "hook-ups" on campuses like Duke's.
The study has not yet been completed, but preliminary interviews suggest that "the heterosexual hook-up culture is part of what makes the gay experience more difficult on college campuses," says sociologist Suzanne Shanahan, associate director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and a member of the team. "When that's the normative culture, how do you create an alternative narrative for yourself where you can be comfortable?"
Some students have been able to identify alternate opportunities to socialize. Senior Parker King, for example, says that since
He came out last year, he and several gay friends have spent many weekend evenings hanging out at gay bars in Raleigh. But others have not. According to LGBT Center director Long, the difficulty many LGBT students have in finding alternatives to the typical heterosexual social scene may be owing, in part, to Duke's housing system. Duke requires students to live on campus for three years. She says that this makes it harder for some to get out and mix with the outside Triangle community, a community that she points out "is actually pretty LGBT-friendly."
A crowd descended on East Campus in September for the annual North Carolina Pride Parade and Festival, which has been hosted by Duke every year since 2001. Just inside the campus gates, row upon row of booths were brimming with brochures and wares from custom jewelers, adult-toy stores, LGBT-friendly real-estate agents, advocacy organizations, and nearby museums. Along Main Street, colorful floats were lined up, and groups of riders milled about, waiting for the action to begin.
The celebration was not the in-your-face orgy that many opponents of gay rights think these things are. Sure, among the bagpipers and convertibles were a few marchers in drag, but, overall, the mood of the large crowd suggested a family-oriented affair. Even a row of protesters from a local church who line part of the parade route with signs warning, "Abortion is murder. Homosexuality is a sin. Islam is a lie," have brought children along.
Among the parade's participants were some sixty Duke students, a number that's all the more impressive, Long says, when compared with last year's six. Long attributes the improved turnout to better leadership and networking in the ranks of the student groups.
Long says she believes that bringing events like the Pride Parade to Duke may allow students to feel more comfortable on campus and reach out more into the community. This past November, she helped arrange for Duke Law School to host the inaugural conference of Equality North Carolina, a statewide organization that advocates for equal rights for the LGBT community. Several Duke students attended the conference, which featured lectures, panel discussions, and workshops organized around the theme of LGBT rights and advocacy.
In addition to educating students about their options, she says, it is crucial for the center, as well as the task force, to continue to reach out to diverse groups on campus, engaging various campus divisions in discussions on, for example, how to make the university more welcoming for LGBT employees and students, or what the transgender-inclusive nondiscrimination policy means for them.
As simple as the new policy might seem, she says, it raises many questions that will have to be answered in the coming years. In fact, the university was challenged on the policy early in the fall semester, when a transgender student awaiting surgery from male to female was granted access to a female bathroom while living in a male wing of a dorm. After the other students living in the hall were informed of the situation, a parent called the university—and the local media—to complain.
"I was outraged about it," Lee Chauncey, the parent, told The Chronicle. "I have absolutely no problem and fully support the young lady getting the procedure done, but the living arrangement was inappropriate until the surgery was done. It was not only inappropriate, it was against state laws." The student was moved to a room with a private bathroom.
Long says the question about bathroom access will not likely be the last question the university faces regarding the policy. "Just like any other policy you put in place, you're going to have to learn what it means all across this campus," in terms of not just housing policies but also things like employee health benefits and workplace dress codes.
"It's about the bathrooms, it's about showers, but it's also about what is acceptable within the work environment," Long says. "Is it acceptable for people to dress in nontraditional ways, and is that only acceptable if in fact they're going to have surgery or have had surgery? Or is it acceptable if that's the way they feel most comfortable and choose to be?"
Despite the university's best efforts to establish policies and institutional mechanisms to deal with these kinds of issues, unforeseen questions and challenges will always arise. Finding answers to these questions and challenges, she says, will take time, effort, and many long conversations.
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