LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Student CAMP: College Queers - What Every Teen Should Know |
by Kristen Minor |
In less than a month I shall be heading up north to Dartmouth. Right now my girlfriend is in the process of trying to find the perfect school. I've read lots of guides on how to pick the perfect school, but I've never heard of one for gay teenagers to help them find the perfect school that is also gay friendly. So I've taken it upon myself to create a reference guide for the up and coming college student who plays for team Q. While you are doing the initial searching There are scores of books that contain summaries of colleges. Many of these books have listings of what kind of clubs a school has. If they carry a listing of schools that have gay clubs, make sure any school that you're looking at is on that list. If a school doesn't have a club, seriously consider crossing it offnot acknowledging a gay group either means that there isn't one or that the school does not support it. Either way, it could be a homophobic environment. An indicator of how gay tolerant a school is can be determined from a visit to a school's web page. Virtually every school's website has a listing of clubs, and most of them have web pages. Check out the GSA's web page. If there isn't one, or if the group is mentioned but doesn't have a Web site, that usually indicates that the school is not supportive or that the group is not comfortable enough at school to put up a site. This, again, can be indicative of the school's environment. If a school does have a gay group, take time to peruse the site. Many schools have more than one gay groupusually, one group is political and one is social. These groups usually have overlapping membership. Look out for large-scale fragmentation, however. If a college has separate groups for every possible division of sexual orientation, or if the groups don't have overlapping membership, it could mean that the groups are battling against each other for various reasons. A college gay group should, at its very base, help gay students acclimate to the pressures of college life. Fighting between six different groups does not accomplish that. Possibly the best way to find out a school's tolerance is by emailing students. No, don't talk to admissionsthey'll tell you anything you want to hear. Email the gay/lesbian advisor, if there is one, and any students who are in the gay group whose email addresses you can find. (If the gay group has a Web site, they usually have some club member's email addresses.) Things to ask include: How tolerant is the school? Have their been gay bashings? Has the group had problems with acceptance? How does the school administration handle homophobia? How large is the group? When are the meetings? What's the nature of the groupsocial, political, or a mix? A special note for lesbians There was a point in time when I was interested in attending an all girls school. There are benefits to doing so, but in the end I realized that I wanted a co-ed environment. One of the things I noticed, however, was that all girls' schools have reputations as havens for lesbians. For the most part they are, but in almost every mailing I got from the school I was interested in, it was mentioned that not every girl at the school was a lesbianto the point that it became homophobic. I understand the need to deal with fears, but having my tour guide mention right off the bat that the school wasn't all about lesbians ended up being one of the deciding factors in my not going there. Regardless of a school's reputation for being lesbian central, pay attention to how the school administration deals with the lesbian presence at the school. If you do attend an all girl school, beware of the phenomenon known as "gay until graduation," wherein a girl is a full-fledged Sapphic sister up until she's handed her diploma when she thereafter insists that she's straight. Experimenting is all well and good, but there comes a point. Visiting, interviewing, applying Try to meet up with a member of the gay group. This is a good time to talk about any concerns you have about the school. Remember, it's always best to go outside of tours and admissions to get a real feel about school life. Ask to see where the gay group meets, and check out their resource room if they have one. Coming out at an interview is something that should be considered only if you're positive that it will have a good effect. Schools actively look for people who diversify the student body, but you have to know what "diverse" means on that particular campus. By the same token, mentioning that you are queer on an application can catch an admissions worker's eye, but be careful. I credit my essay on being a hearing impaired lesbian as one of the reasons I got into Dartmouth, but in a different school it could have easily been seen as a negative. Scholarships It is very much in your best interest to do scholarship searches via the web. I used www.fastweb.com, but there are several other good ones. There is one scholarship for gay teens that I have foundthe League @ AT&T Foundation (www.league-att.org/foundation/index.html). I love them because they gave me money. Be sure to check them out and see if there are any other scholarships available in your region. Telling your roommate I have talked to quite a few of my friends about this, and the basic consensus is that there are three approaches to bringing it up. The first is the "break out the rainbow flags and show your pride from day one" method. It gets things out of the way quickly, but there's something to be said for the utter lack of tact in this method. There are an awful lot of things going on in the first week of school, and forcing the issue might not be good for sanity. Another option seems to be the "let them figure it out" method. This doesn't get points on the activist meter, but it does let your roommate get to know you before passing judgment. The downside is that your roommate could be clueless, and may take months to realize that you're not just really good friends with the kid down the hall. There is generally a very short time to get roommates switched, and you don't want to be stuck with a homophobe for a semester. Even getting someone who isn't a gay basher, just terrified of you, can detract from your life on campus. The third method, and the one that I think I am going to use, is to tell your roommate not on the first day, but within the first two weeks. That way you can change if you need to, but not have to worry about the chaos that is the first several days of college. If you want a single, I'm told that writing, "I'm openly gay" on housing applications is a good way to be free of a roommate. It only works for some schools, though, and I invite you to draw your own conclusions about an institution that would do such a thing. Of course, I have yet to actually attend college. I'll let you know if anything I've written helped me at all. Dartmouth just doesn't know what's in store for them. Muhuhahaha |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 11, Aug. 11, 2000. |