Volume CXXXIII, Number 17 February 22, 2002 f

Being gay at Bowdoin
KARA OPPENHEIM

Bowdoin College is a diverse and multi-faceted environment, and lately I've been thinking that I've really addressed only one of the many groups represented here.

I try to write from experience, but as a heterosexual female, my experience is, in some ways, very limited (although perhaps not so limited in that realm, as my parents have come to realize through my column). However, we have sizeable gay and lesbian communities at the College, and there is no reason for them to be overlooked in a column about sex and romance here. So I would like to devote a couple of installments to BEING GAY AT BOWDOIN.

It's very common for young men and women to come out when they get to college. They may have felt trapped into roles (or closets) by their friends and families at home, and the changes of college often allow feelings to surface that may have been suppressed, whether consciously or unconsiously.

Ellen came out her freshman year. She was worried that there wouldn't be a gay community, "and if there was, I imagined it to be kinda underground and secretive."

Regardless, Ellen knew that this was what she had to do; it had been building in many ways for a while. She had always felt some sort of draw to women that she knew was "weird" (her word) for heterosexual women, but it hadn't actually occurred to her that she might be gay.

At some point, though, "things just started to make sense, and the more I thought about them, I was like, 'Wow, I think I'm gay.'" She found that many of her new straight friends were shocked-when they met her, they had assumed she was just like them. Not to say that she wasn't in many ways, but there was no way around the fact that while she liked men and women both as friends as they did, she was also attracted to women.

Stanford came out his sophomore year. He'd had a long-term girlfriend in high school and had always sort of assumed that he was straight, but things slowly started to come into focus with the changes college life brought.

The summer between his freshman and sophomore years, he admitted-only to his very closest friends-that he might be bisexual, and by the beginning of that school year, was pretty much openly gay. "I just told my good friends and figured that sooner or later everyone else would know, which they do by now."

"The thing is," Stanford confides, "it's not like I'm part of some 'gay' group. I like my friends and I don't think that should change based on who I am attracted to sexually." And on the whole, his friends have been enormously supportive, accepting his coming out without question.

What Stanford did not find was a closely-knit gay male community. "I have a pretty good idea of who all the out gay guys are at Bowdoin, but I mean, for the most part, I have my friends and they have theirs. And, you know, when the groups overlap, they do, and when they don't, they don't."

Ellen had a quite different experience. It seems that beneath the pines the lesbian community is much larger and more unified than the gay male community. "There is a pretty substantial community of girls at Bowdoin who identify as 'gay,'" she says.

Girls who come out at Bowdoin are warmly embraced and find an outpouring of support. For whatever reason, the gay male community at Bowdoin lacks this cohesive 'warm fuzziness.'

Ellen and Stanford have both been lucky in that they haven't faced much prejudice in the Bowdoin bubble. Ellen has not been subjected to derogatory name-calling and apart from Stanford's friends teasing him that one of his sweaters is "really gay," he has not dealt with any discriminatory confrontations.

But, as Ellen realizes, "thinly veiled, completely asinine" ignorance does exist. Not that Polar Bears aren't considerate or would ever want to call someone a name or degrade a personal choice, but "gay" is still a term used for "stupid" and we all scream cheers at the Bowdoin-Colby hockey game that would make a homosexual person feel uncomfortable, even if we mean to offend only the Mules.

Stanford recalls an incident once when an acquaintance, Josh, asked a mutual friend, right in front of Stanford, "Is he, like, out?" The friend replied, "Yes." There was a long pause.

"So does he have, like, a, uh, ahem, partner?"

"Yeah, he's kind of seeing someone. Why don't you ask him yourself?"

"Oh, ahh, well…." Josh sort of coughed, looked at Stanford, then walked away.

It's occurances like this, where Josh was trying to be tolerant and polite, that can be inordinately awkward for someone who is gay. Stanford could tell that Josh was uncomfortable with his homosexuality; at the same time, he could also tell that Josh would never actually say so, whether out of amity towards Stanford or just out of fear of being labeled a bigot.

Coming out is an enormous step in the life of a gay individual. Some men and women live their whole lives in the proverbial closet because they don't have the courage to admit to their friends, families, and themselves that they are homosexual.

So I will conclude this week that no matter how supportive Bowdoin claims to be and, in its defense, tries to be, it is still hard to be gay here. Homosexuality is really only one characteristic of a person, much like religion or socioeconomic background. It can have as large or as small an effect on a person as factors like this, and it's sad when some people don't realize this or are consumed by intolerance. I am very impressed with the ease and comfort Stanford and Ellen seem to have found in their friends, but only wish that everyone could be so cool about it.