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A typological history of non-heterosexual male college students in the United States, 1945 to the present

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A typological history of non-heterosexual male college students in the United States, 1945 to the present

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A TYPOLOGICAL HISTORY
OF NON-HETEROSEXUAL MALE COLLEGE STUDENTS
IN THE UNITED STATES,
1945 TO THE PRESENT
by
Patrick Dilley
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment o f the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION)
August 2000
Copyright 2000 Patrick Dilley
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, vmtten by
Patrick Dilley
under the direction of h.ia Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
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Patrick D illey W illiam G. Tiem ey
A Typological History
of Non-Heterosexual Male College Students
in the United States,
1945 to the Present
Identity developm ent for non-heterosexual collegiate males is more
com plex than currently reflected in either student identity developm ent theory or
gay identity developm ent theory. Both existing theories present identity
developm ent fo r this population as linear and progressive, but neither take into
account the specific differences o f being a non-heterosexual male in college.
This dissertation proposes that developm ent fo r non-heterosexual male students
is contextually based, not necessarily linear, and indeed recursive. A meta
theory o f identity is postulated, consisting o f senses (what one perceives),
experiences (what one does) and sensibilities (the meanings one makes o f one's
senses and experiences).
U tilizing queer theory to examine historical research and intensive
qualitative interviews with 57 form er collegians (who were students from 1945 to
1999, representing 54 institutions in 22 states), the researcher presents a
typology o f seven types o f non-heterosexual identity evident in U.S. collegiate
males during the latter half o f the tw entieth century (homosexual, closeted, gay.
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queer, parallel, "norm al" and denial). Narrative data o f 22 o f the respondents
highlight the distinctions o f each type; the types are also analyzed from a
historical context.
Seven conclusions are outlined, four concerning theory and three dealing
with educational and adm inistrative practices. The four theory conclusions are;
Sexual activity is more im portant to this population than either gay or student
identity developm ent models reflect; many students who later identified as non
heterosexual e arlier wanted to be considered “norm al;" media Influenced non
heterosexual collegians' concepts o f non-heterosexuality; and em otional
attractions to other males was viewed as a greater indicator o f non
heterosexuality than sexual activity. The three practical conclusions are:
campus environm ents impacted non-heterosexual student identity, both
positively and negatively; the existence o f a gay student organization on campus
was not in itse lf enough to provide social and/or developm ental opportunities
needed fo r positive identity developm ent; fraternity life presented non
heterosexuals with environm ents to explore their sam e-gender interpersonal
relationships.
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Acknowfedgments
Over the past five years, a number of Individuals aided me in completing this
dissertation project. The idea for it grew from my master’s thesis at the University of
Kansas, where I benefitted from the advice and guidance of Marilyn Amey and
Susan Twombly, as well as the comradery and assistance o f Cindy Sanders Oerritt
and David Hardy. Mike Stanton, my first doctoral advisor at St. Louis University,
encouraged me when I originally approached him about pursuing doctoral studies in
higher education to explore the history of gay students on U.S. college campuses,
and how those students identified.
At the University of Southern California, I learned from and was supported by
a number of associates in the Rossier School of Education, including Martha Soto,
Delores Akins, Shereen Fogei, Lisa Patriquin, Maya Alvarez and Julie Wong.
Alexander Jun, Craig Saito, Terry Lynberg, and Dan Throgmorton joined me in a
dissertation study group one semester that helped kick-start the research portion of
the project, after a year or so of reading and thinking.
A number of friends and colleagues across the continent also aided my
conceptualization, research and analysis of theories of identity development, race,
gender, and things queer. Michael Schiavi, Sherri Bayouth and Eric Moore listened
to my rantings and ravings about the process and the product of graduate
education. Michelle Knight, James Koschoreck, Kristen Renn, Marilyn Doggett and
Yvonna Lincoln all earned my deepest respect and gratitude for their insights and
assistance. I thank James Ratcliff and Hans Schutlze, who approved a grant to
travel to the University of British Columbia in the symmer of 1998; at UBC, I was
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iii
able to speak with Kenn Shedd Honeychurch about queer theory, and I finally had
time and place to come as close as I possibly could to nailing down that concept,
which is the basis of the critique of existing identity development theories and the
analysis of the narrative data.
Of course, without the fifty-seven men who volunteered their time and their
stories, their data, I would have no project. Although I had room to include extensive
narratives from only twenty-two of the respondents, I learned immensely from each
of them.
I also gleaned a great deal of insight and technique from my committee
members at the University of Southern California. Estela Mara Bensimon, Marjorie
Becker and Gretchen Guiton started on the committee and stayed through the
qualifying examination. Linda Hagedom continued on, and provided continuous
support and opportunities to speak about and teach from the project. Paul Knoll
deserves special acknowledgment, for believing in my work and agreeing to aide me
in a moment of need.
I can honestly say that without Bill Tiemey, this dissertation would be shorter
(although he would disagree), completed later (to which he would agree), and far
less thorough. While divas might differ about how and why to proceed, they agree
upon the need for veracity, validity and vitality in their work. If a men and a de exist
in this project, that would be us, but I cannot decide who is which. Thank you. Dr.
Tiemey, for your time, your patience, your support, and your trust.
Finally, I want to acknowledge two family members who made this project
possible: my mother, Marsha Dilley, who never dreamed when she would tell her
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IV
young son that he would go to college that he would stay there so damned long;
and our cousin, Patty Workman, who as my fourth grade teacher made me believe
that I was limited only by the constraints of what I could imagine to ask and to learn.
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Table of Contents
Acknowfedg ments................................................................................................................. ii
List of Charts........................................................................................................................ vl
Chapter One
Calling Names, Naming Tales.............................................................................................. 1
Chapter Two
Queer Theory, Identity Development Theories and
Non-Heterosexual Students.............................................................................................. 16
Chapter Three
Methodologies.................................................................................................................... 67
Chapter Four
Tea Rooms and No Sympathy:
Homosexuals and the Closet............................................................................................ 92
Chapter Five
From the Margins to the Ivory Tower
Gay and Queer Students.................................................................................................136
Chapter Six
Beyond Textbook Definitions:
“Normal” and Parallel Students........................................................................................196
Chapter Seven
Collegiate Non-Heterosexual Identities:
1945 to 1999..................................................................................................................... 251
Chapter Eight
On the Fluidity of Identity................................................................................................ 282
Bibliography...................................................................................................................... 311
Appendix A: Protocol Questionnaire.................................................................................. 329
Appendix B: E-mail Questionnaire.................................................................................... 332
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VI
List of Charts
Chart 1.1
Non-Heterosexual Collegiate Male identity Typology,
Late Twentieth Century........................................................................................................ 5
Chart 2.1
Chickering's Vectors of Identity Development.................................................................. 42
Chart 2.2
Cass' Model of Homosexual Identity Formation............................................................... 49
Chart 3.1
Participants' States of Residence for Collegiate Attendance.......................................... 72
Chart 7.1
How Specific Non-Heterosexual Identity Types Viewed Their Relation
to Other Sexual Male Identity Types...............................................................................255
Chart 8.1
Summary of Observations for Theory and Practice....................................................... 287
Chart 8.2
Relevance of Findings to Identity Types................................................................. 277-289
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Chapter One
Calling Names, Naming Tales
When I was in the fourth grade, sitting alone at home one afternoon, I was
perusing the World Book Encyclopedia we kept in the den. I looked up sex and read
about the physiological facts and functions. I dutifully studied - a prospective
researcher even then - each cross reference. I came across an entry in the H
volume. As I read it, I thought, lh a t is talking about me and why I like boys." That
moment, for me and for others whose first naming of a part of themselves which
they could not convey before learning new names, was a powerful experience.
Three years later, the winter of my thirteenth birthday, my family stayed in the
Florida Keys. A grandson of one of my mother’s friends arrived a few days later.
Karl was fourteen, dramatic in a 1940s Joan Crawford way, dressed a la Truman
Capote (long knitted scarf and gloves, even in Florida), and a year older than I. I
knew, immediately, he was, like me, “not like the other kids,” but I did not understand
how or why I knew that. We shared a fast rapport. That night was the first time I
ever stayed awake the entire night, as we lay on the floor, watching and listening to
the waves of the ocean, telling our stories about our Midwestern adolescence in the
dark.
The researcher I have become recognizes the patterns that form my life
evident in those moments. I continue to study identity, particularly of people “not like
the others,” who are sexually and emotionally drawn to members of the same
gender. I still listen to their stories, asking questions, comparing and contrasting the
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2
tales I gather. College life — the extracurricular activities in which I participated, the
topics I chose to study, the professional focus I developed - built upon both aspects
of my identity - as a non-heterosexual male and as a scholar. The two aspects are
intertwined; without one, the other makes little sense on its own.
“Common” Sense and “Queer” Sensibilities
How, then, did other men who do not identify as heterosexual make sense of
their lives in school? How did they understand whom they are? What impact did
their college experiences have upon those understandings? What elements of
postsecondary education contributed (or detracted) to the identities and experiences
of non-heterosexual males?
In this project, I provide answers to these questions. In doing so, I proffer a
theory of how non-heterosexual males can be classified during their college years.
The theory is typological, providing classifications for identity based upon the
patterns of how individual students thought of their identity while in college, what
activities they engaged in while a student (and the motivations behind those
actions), and how the self-concepts and actions related to other concepts of identity
(both heterosexual and non-heterosexual). In much of the research on the lives of
these students, a paired master category (akin to those of power and subservience
in Marxism, or male and female in feminism) exists: one is assumed to be either
heterosexual or not, with few (if any) gradations between the two. The typology I
provide, however, moves beyond the binary definitions of “straight” and “gay”,” or
even “straight” and “gay, lesbian or bisexual.”
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3
Although recent research has advocated separate theories for development
for the those identities (Brown, 1995; de Montefiores & Schultz, 1978; Esterberg,
1997; Fassinger, 1998; Henderson, 1984; Jenness, 1992, 1998), the latter three
terms are usually paired collectively against “heterosexual.” Because of the
compelling evidence of the differences in experiencing non-heterosexual contexts
and concepts for women and for individuals who identify as bisexual, I limited this
study to the experiences of men. In addition, I was able, due to my gender and my
identification as a non-heterosexual man, to talk to men about the intimate details of
their early lives in ways that I doubt lesbian and bisexual women would feel as
comfortable discussing with a man (Coffey, 1999; Denzin, 1989; Fontana & Frey,
2000; Gergen & Gergen, 2000; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Merriam, 1998; Warren,
1998). This decreased the barriers to obtaining trustworthy data as well as
increased the practicality of completing this project in a timely manner.
The categories of classification of the typology are outlined in Chart 1.1.
Taking into account Bravmann’s call for “new investigations of the varied histories of
gay men and lesbians [that] include looking at how queer subjects have made and
made sense of their cultures” (1997, 38), the typology provides a pattern of
understanding non-heterosexual collegians’ histories, based upon formations of
common components of identity development: experiences (what happened to
these students in college), senses (how the students perceived what happened),
and sensibilities (the meanings they ascribed to those experiences and perceptions).
The difference is that, for non-heterosexual male students, those three qualities of
collegiate life have not been studied extensively; further, no study has placed the
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4
concepts of identity in a historical context. To read the research literature on “gay”
college students, one would assume that all men in college who do not identify as
heterosexual have a fairly homogenous, unified pattern of experiences and
understandings. In short, the narratives in this study convey complexities that
escape current theories of development, both of college students and of gay
identity.
Indeed, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, gay identity development
models rarely address collegiate experiences, if at all; one would think that
achieving postsecondary education had no bearing upon the development of a non
heterosexual man. As the stories of the respondents in this project demonstrate,
such representations are facile and misleading; the participants in this study spoke
frankly about love and sex (both public and private), relations with other non
heterosexuals on campus, demonstrating for change on campus (in manners
unauthorized and official), and perceptions of how their self-concepts compared to
those of their peers (both straight and not).
Many of the terms in this study might seem to overlap, if not be synonymous,
for each other; several appear to have multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings.
Does riomosexua/differ from gay? The data, in the form of narrative responses
from the men I interviewed, show the answer was paradoxically yes and no. In
some instances, terms like gay and gueer might be interchangeable in the stories of
the men, but at other times each will have distinct meanings. I have endeavored to
use the terminology with discrimination, to correspond to the sensibilities of the
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73
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Late 1980s
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Chart 1.1
Non Heterosexual Collegiate Mate
Identity Typology,
Late Twentieth Century
Identity Type
Denial - rejected affectional and erotic feelings for and attractions to other males.
Homosexual - acknowledged feellngs/attractlons, but did not necessarily tell others; sex and Identity viewed
as a very private matter. Clandestine socialization with other non-heterosexuals, If at all.
Gay - publicly announced/acknowledged feellngs/attractlons; often Involved within Institutional systems to
create change. Public socialization with other non-heterosexuals.
Queer - very publicly deployed Identity, in opposition to normative ("straight") culture; often tried to create
change from mores.
Identities Evident Across Decades
■ D
CD
C/)
if)
“Normal” - Identified as heterosexual (“just like everyone else"); homosexual activity did not have an effect
upon self-ldentlty, and the dissonance between self-concept and deeds was not recognized.
Closeted - recognized feellngs/attractlons to other males, and acknowledged to self the meanings of those
feelings and attractions. Did not tell many others of his feelings (If anyone at all). Tried to avoid social
contexts that might reveal his feellngs/attractlons.
Parallel - Identified and experienced as "straight" (non-homosexual) while within those situations and contexts,
and as non-heterosexual In non-straight situations and contexts. The cognitive and emotional
dissonance. If experienced at all, was compartmentalized, so long as the two worlds were kept separate.
01
6
narrators’ use when presenting their words, as well as my own when discussing
theoretical constructs of identity based upon those distinctions.
Consequently, I offer a few clarifications. Most of the meanings I utilize have
historical distinctions (Chauncey, 1994; Dilley, 1999; Jogose, 1996). While within
the context of the narrators' stories the meanings might differ, I offer the following as
my working, contemporary definitions.
Heterosexual: sexual and/or affectional relationships with members of
the opposite gender; also, a person exhibiting those qualities.
Hetero-sex: actual physical sexual activities between members of
opposite genders.
Homo-erotic: pertaining to sexual desire of one person toward a person
of the same on the gender.
Homo-sex: actual physical sexual activities between members of the
same gender.
Homo-affection: Intimate and/or romantic feelings from one person
toward a person of the same gender.
Homosexual: sexual and/or affection relationships with members of the
same gender, but usually indicating that the acts or relationships have
some marker of influence upon the actor’s personality (i.e., someone
identifying as the oppositive of - or other than - heterosexual at least
in part because of those actions and relationships); also, a person
exhibiting those qualitites.
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7
Gay: having homosexual and/or homo-affectional relationships with
members of the same gender (by the late 1970s, usually, but not
exclusively, referring to gay males); more specifically, used to
describe men who identify socially and/or politically in such ways.
Queer: in current context, a collective, inclusive adjective (incorporating
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and at times transgendered people and
perspectives), as well as a political adjective (in opposition to the
norm of heterosexuality); often the two go hand-in-glove. In previous
contexts (prior to the 1980s), the word did not have political
connotations.
Closeted: denying to others homo-sexual or -affectional feelings while
recognizing within oneself those feelings.
Denial: denying homo-sexual or -affectional feelings for others while
also not recognizing, or denying, to oneself those feelings.
Non-heterosexual: sexual and/or affectional relationships with members
of the same gender, but not necessarily indicating that the acts or
relationships have any marker or influence upon the actor's personal
identity (i.e., someone engaging in sexual activity with another of the
same gender, but not identifying himself with a label or term because
of the action).
In this study, I utilize the term "non-heterosexual" from the viewpoint of the
men in this study; they conceptualize heterosexuality as a fixed, monolithic quality,
which was separate and different from their own sexuality. What the respondents'
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8
narratives will show is that identities apart from heterosexual are not fixed, but are
fluid and contextually based. Their comments, however, explicitly relate only to their
own identities, and my use of the inclusive term "non-heterosexual" is this study is
not intended to make statements about heterosexual identity nor bisexual identity (a
concept which encompasses its own body of scholarship, research and theory).
From this basis of classifying actions and self-concepts flows the typology
(Chart 1.1), comprised of: homosexual, closeted, gay, queer, “normal,” parallel and
denial. While the data portion of this project (Chapters Four, Five and Six) provides
fuller understandings of the identities on campuses during the last part of the
twentieth century, in the next section I offer a brief overview of the differing identity
types, along with how I conceptualized the typological model.
Different Voices, Different Lives
This project is an attempt to map out the intricacies of being a student and a
man who is not heterosexual. It explores, on the one hand, the nexus between what
researchers have shown as ways students develop and change while in or because
of college, and, on the other hand, how the experiences and qualities of men who
identify as non-heterosexuals bring them to such an understanding of whom they
are. It combines interview data with historical documents and scholarship; the
interviews provide the data for the typology, while the historical material provides a
context for understanding how and why differences exist in the data - and in the
self-concepts and -identities - of the respondents.
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9
The study continues the fairly recent examination of gay and lesbian issues
and experiences as topics of inquiry in higher education, history, and identity
development of students (cf., Tiemey & Dilley, 1998). In Chapter Two, I review
those areas of research and theory, through the critical lens of queer theory. Queer
theory is an important concept for discovering the respondents’ sensibilities, and I
explore (and attempt to explain) this recent area of scholarship in Chapter Two. I
utilize queer theory analytically, to examine how the concepts, the “norms,” of
identity were formed in relation to the master categories of heterosexual and non
heterosexual, and to other concepts of “non-heterosexuality;” in doing so, I expand
upon Rhoads' challenge for those working with non-heterosexual Identities to resist
the dominant developmental inclinations of portraying a monolithic “homosexual”
identity, without acknowledging that “significant differences exist among lesbian,
gay, and bisexual students” (Rhoads, 1997b, 461), as well as their conceptions and
constructs of whom they are. Indeed, identity for non-heterosexual men in the
United States over the latter part of the twentieth century was as much a matter of
accepting that one was not one “name” or label instead of another, a process as
much of unbecoming as it was of becoming. For many men, the college years were
a peculiar twilight time between what was considered "normal" for heterosexuals and
what was often considered "normal" for non-heterosexuals. To understand what
these men thought they could become in their lives, one must understand both
concepts of "normal" and how those concepts meant to the lives of these men.
Some men knew, at relatively early ages, that their feelings of difference
placed them in a category juxtaposed to "straight." In the mid-century, their
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10
ideations of how they could live, their relations to other people (both straight and
non-straight), and their personal goals were conscripted by the secretive and
penalized nature of their non-straight identities. Homosexual collegians could find
others whose feelings and experiences mirrored theirs, and with whom they could
socialize more freely, but not necessarily openly: private gatherings and parties
were the main form of socialization, and if sex were found, it was usually quick,
anonymous and secret. The consequences for transgressing these boundaries -
being too open sexually, socializing too frequently with homosexuals "known" by
straight authorities - could be dire. Expulsions from college were not uncommon,
either for being caught in flagrante delicto or simply being associated with those who
were. In almost all cases, homosexual collegians considered their sexuality a
private matter, at most important only to close friends (but rarely family). And in this,
their identities were juxtaposed to the public lives and emotions of heterosexuals;
homosexuals not only were opposite in their sexual affections but also in their ability
to deploy or enact those identities.
By the 1970s, the precepts of what it meant to be non-straight had changed:
some forms of visibility were encouraged, and non-heterosexual collegians began to
socialize with others who identified as gay. The concepts of self-identity and life
goals transformed accordingly: in the politics of the time, “gay is good" represented
an paradigm shift from the clandestine and whispered to the visible and spoken. For
students viewing themselves and their lives as gay, the integration of sexual
orientation into their identity fostered a need to become involved in the local
community; others brought their sexual identity to the fore of their campus
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11
experience, through work in collegiate organizations and/or political movements.
Some gay collegians, however, maintained the homosexual collegian's separation of
social activities and scholastic endeavors during their undergraduate years.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer came into prominent use not only
as a marker of difference from normal (which the term had been, evident in the
experiences and the sensibilities of students as early as the 1970s) but also as a
political and social rallying cry. Not just visible, queer students confronted social
mores and traditions; not just spoken, queer ideology - and students - was often
shouted. Queer students tended not simply to join campus or community
organizations, but instead to attempt to subvert or to reinvent the structures of those
very institutions. Whereas gay students working for change on a college campus
might become involved in university governance, student politics or campus
activities, queer students formed coalitions to protest many of those very elements
of campus life, or to plan events that highlight the social stigmatization they felt in a
non-homosexual environment. It is also possible, in a historical analysis, to see that
the type “queer” was visible long before the term emerged in its current use.
Throughout these decades, closeted individuals realized their non
heterosexual feelings but consciously and actively avoided addressing and/or
reconciling those feelings with their self-concepts. Closeted collegians might act
upon their desires, but never very often and rarely within their own social circles. For
still other men, there was a sense, during their college years, of leading parallel
lives: they had one set of self-concepts and behaviors for straight contexts and
friends, and another set of for non-heterosexual contexts. Also consistently
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12
throughout the periods, some men were in denial about their feelings, either
consciously or unconsciously choosing to avoid even admitting to themselves their
attractions and/or emotions.
During each of these times, a significant number of collegiate men defied the
norms of both the straight and the non-straight cultures. They did not identify
socially or politically as gay, homosexual or queen indeed, they did not seem to
undergo the process of "finding" or "establishing" an identity, the "unbecoming" that
many of their non-heterosexual peers experienced, an act that those who are non
homosexual (or not a member of other minorities) often never experience. Yet at the
same time as they were not questioning their identities, these men were engaging in
homo-sex, often quite frequently. While they were not denying to themselves that
they enjoyed the sex, it had no correlation to their sensibility of whom they were, to
how they viewed themselves in relation to their (straight) peers; indeed, many of
these peers were their (secretive) sexual partners. These men found, at the time, no
dissonance between their actions and their "selves:" they were "just like everybody
else," they were, in their own estimation if not that of others, "norm al."
What Lies Ahead: The Contents o f This Study
Each of the seven identities types - all save one - are explored in the
narratives from the data section, Section II of this dissertation. Chapter Four
explores the experiences of men whose experiences place them into the
homosexual (corresponding primarily to the years 1945 to 1970) and closeted types
(also beginning in the 1940s but applicable through the 1990s). Chapter Five covers
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13
identities that came afterwards, gay (starting from the late 1960s) and queer
(starting in the 1970s, but more public from the late 1980s). Chapter Six examines
two identities that evident across the entire second half of the twentieth century that
are not covered in earlier studies; parallel and “normal.”
The conclusions I made from the data comprise the final section of this
dissertation, Section ill. Chapter Seven includes a brief chronological overview of
the different identities, focusing on the qualities that make each unique. That
chapter contains a fairly traditional historical narrative, intended to provide historical
context for the changing culture o f the United States over the latter half of the
twentieth century, along with analysis of the development of each particular identity
type, as well as how each type relates to the other identities. In Chapter Eight I offer
six major findings from the narrative data that provide challenges and guidance for
identity development theorists as well as higher education practioners and
programmers.
Without meeting these challenges, neither student identity development nor
gay identity development theories will truly reflect the formation of non-heterosexual
identity for males through their collegiate experiences. Further, the differences
outlined through the typological model in this study calls into question the validity of
the dominant developmental models as progressive stage and/or static models of a
singular identity. If the understandings and presumptions of educators,
administrators and programmers are incorrect, then the services and guidance they
can offer to their non-heterosexual students are faulty. If identity development
theorists do not incorporate the incongruities of this student population, not only will
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theories not be as valid as they could (and should) be but what theorists teach
educational practioners, programmers and administrators will continue to be
disconnected from the reality of non-heterosexual students, perpetuating the
problems of representation and education.
As the interview data exhibit, male collegians viewed their sexual activity,
self-identity, and campus roles and participation more recursively, more bound by
the contexts of participants and settings, and paradoxically more and less
dependent upon the judgments of others' views of their identity. Before the data
chapters or the conclusions, though, I present in the rest of Section I information on
how I constructed this project, which should aid the reader to understand the
contexts into which I place the data as well as the typology. Chapter Three provides
the methodology I utilized in this work, answering who, how, when, where and why I
conducted the research and the analysis for the typology. Chapter Two summarizes
the three bodies of relevant scholarship pertaining to my research; previous studies
of non-heterosexual college students, student development theory, and gay identity
development theory. My summation of these distinct disciplines is presented
through the application of queer theory, to explain how the study of what is
considered normal (and who considered it so) illuminates the benefits and deficits
inherent in the existing literature.
Those limitations to "the utility of developmental models of gay identity, such
as stages theories" (Rhoads, 1997b, 461) covered in Chapter Two, became clear to
me as I talked with the men who agreed to share their memories of their collegiate
experiences, senses and sensibilities with me. As I listened to them, I was not only
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a researcher completing a study; I was also someone who believed strongly in the
ability of theory to guide student affairs practice and programming, so long as theory
is valid and representative. I also remained, in many ways, the teenager listening to
others tell their stories of how they figured out whom they were, whom they are, and
what those senses of identity affected (or, in some instances, effected) their
collegiate experiences and sensibilities.
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Chapter Two
Queer Theory, identity Development Theories and
Non-Heterosexual Students
Just as human lives have many components that influence identities, this
project draws from several areas of scholastic research. In this chapter, I critique
four areas of research that inform my understanding. First, I outline the tenants of
queer theory; the critical lens of “normal” and “deviant” of queer theory focuses the
organization and questions o f the project, the analysis of the narrative and historical
data, and the resulting typological theory. I also utilize queer theory to examine
three other bodies of research and theorization.
I review work student identity development theories, paying particular
attention to widely utilized and studied psychosocial models. I focus on these
models because the corpus of gay identity development theories are also
psychosocial models. Finally, descriptive and analytical studies of collegiate gay
and lesbian experiences also influence my study, and an examination of them
concludes this chapter. I draw upon this literature for models of inquiry and analysis,
if not necessarily particular subject matter or focus.
Previous Research on Non-heterosexuals in Coilege
In addition to the works on identity development of college students and non
heterosexual identity development among youths who might be college age, other
research provides insight into the experiences, senses and sensibilities of non
heterosexual college students. Often their work investigates the publically unseen
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as well as the seen, positing the “queer” experience of people who identified as
something other than heterosexual (be that gay, lesbian, queer, or another term
relating to sexual and/or affection status) against the “normal” experience of those
who identify as heterosexual.
Several of the (male) subjects of Nardi, Sanders and Marmor’s study (1994)
reflected on college life before the 1970s. Fellows (1996) presented a collection of
recollections from gay men from the Midwest who came of age during the twentieth
century; almost all of the men attended college, and mention their collegiate lives at
least in passing. Marotta (1982) presented interviews he conducted with gay men
from Harvard’s class of 1967; similarly, MacKay (1993) collected reminiscences
from lesbian and gay Vassar alums from the 1930s to the 1990s. D’Emilio’s (1990,
1992) essays on gay life in higher education spanned the 1950s to the 1980s. Teal
(1995) outlined the origins and actions of many of the early gay student
organizations, as part of his history of the beginning of the gay liberation movement
in the United States. Chandler (1995) and Due (1995) portrayed lives of gay youth,
several of whom were in college in the 1990s, while Howard and Stevens (2000)
collected personal accounts of lives of non-heterosexuals in college in the last two
decades. Rhoads (1994) presented findings from a two-year ethnographic study of
non-heterosexual college students, focusing on their “struggle for a queer identity.”
In addition to these studies, a growing number of memoirs in the late
twentieth century by non-heterosexuals addressed their recollections of life in
college, from the 1940s to the present (Boyd, 1978; Duberman, 1991; Helms,
1995; Kantrowitz, 1977; Louganis with Marcus, 1995). Gay service people, whose
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collegiate environments are very different from civilians’, reflected upon higher
education within the military (i.e., Staffan, 1992). Fraternity members who were gay
also depicted vivid portraits of living with multiple dimensions of identity (Windmeyer
& Freeman, 1998). Perhaps most uniquely, primary source materials, such as the
diaries of Jeb Alexander (1993) and Donald Vining (1996), provide insight into non
heterosexual experiences during college at the beginning of this century.
Tentative investigations into the experiences and beliefs of ethnic minority
non-heterosexuals have appeared only within the last decade. Loiacano's (1989)
interviews with black American non-heterosexuals indicated their need for validation
from both the black and the gay communities. Chan (1989) reported that Asian-
American homosexual college students perceived a choice - or a refusal of choice -
between ethnic identity and gay or lesbian identity; One chooses to emphasize
sexual-orientation aspects of one's self-identity at the expense of one’s ethnic
identity, or one refuses to choose to do so. Espin (1987) reached a similar
conclusion from her subjects’ lives: the desire to identify as both lesbian and Latina
can be a fundamental dilemma. These studies of the multiple identities found within
members of multiple sub-cultures support an idea of multiple, contemporaneous,
and/or potentially conflicting aspects of identity.
Researchers have also begun to demonstrate aspects of community, both
within the non-heterosexual populations and within the college student populations.
Davises’ (1992) observation of gay male communities echoed Herdt and Boxer’s
(1993); he stated that the crucial point for gay men coming out is that they choose
new life-styles, companions, and social structures. Rhoads (1993) posited a theory
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of gay male student contracuiture, a set of socialized communities that reflected
differing values, interests and ideologies of gay students. One such community was
centered around a concept of queer identity, which Rhoads defined (using his
subjects' responses) as a political exposition of personal identity to challenge
prevalent heterosexual norms.
While Rhoads utilized a theoretical perspective to examine and analyze non
heterosexual lives in the works listed above, most of the other researchers did not.
In this study, I utilized queer theory to examine and understand those lives, and I
examine it next. Queer theory is not the only theory to be utilized, to be sure, when
examining the lives of either non-heterosexuals or college students; later in this
chapter I offer an overview of student identity development theories, followed by gay
identity development theories. As I will endeavor to prove, however, queer theory is
more beneficial for understanding the complexities of identity formation than either
student or gay identity development theories.
Queer Theory
In this chapter section, I answer two questions, "What is queer theory? For
that matter, what's queer?" The answers, however, are neither as definite nor as
simple as I would like them to be. The state of queer and queer theory, ever the
post-postmodem concepts, is as elusive to nail down as mercury. Like that element,
we can contain queer theory, and it will fill - even overflow - our container; we can
use it as gauge (or guide) to the climate of lives and experiences. To begin, I briefly
review definitions and uses of the concept of queer, and follow that with a lengthier
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review of what queer theory Is, is not, and still might be. I will give particular
emphasis to queer theory applied to the study and writing of history.
What is Queer? The flexibility of the English language, compounded by
academics' transformation of general words into jargon, necessitates a few
definitions. Queer can be an adjective, a noun, or a verb. In general use, it is most
commonly an adjective, meaning "not normal," or, more specifically, not
heterosexual. The word has a negative connotation, particularly in school settings
(D'Augelli, 1989a, 1989b; D'Augelli and Rose, 1990; Herdt and Boxer, 1993;
Rhoads, 1994; Chandler, 1995; Due, 1995; O'Connor, 1995). Queer, as
operationally defined by Doty (1993), "is a quality related to any expression that can
be marked as contra-, non-, or anti-straight" (xv), which serves not to identify people
as much as forms of communication, and the positions that afford inform that
expression. In this usage, the queer reflects the work of Foucalt, 1978), who
demonstrated that one's sexual identity is formulated and judged within larger
cultural themes of normality (with which heterosexuality is aligned) and deviance
(including homosexuality). Within the past decade, however, the adjective queer
has been used in increasing frequency as a substitute for gay and lesbian, and to
include others whose sexuality and/or gender places them outside of society's idea
of "normal:" bisexuals and transgendered people (Penn, 1995; Rhoads, 1994;
Warner, 1993).
But queer developed a meaning beyond its use as inclusive categorization;
as a noun, the word can be used to refer to one included in the marginalized group:
a queer. Often there is a political ideology or intent in the use of this word, based
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in part upon a decision to confront what is experienced as discrimination and to
commit to a collective identity based upon being marginalized because of one's
sexuality, rather than simply identification because of one's gender and object of
one's affection (Rhoads, 1994, 1997a; Jogose, 1996). In a sense, such a definition
of queer is not about a lack of something (a lack of heterosexuality) (Hocquenghem,
1978), but a presence of something: a desire for same-sex experiences, a position
outside of the normal trope of daily life that affords perspectives apart from the
norm. Queer is a term that by its very use questions "conventional understandings
of sexual identity by deconstructing the categories, oppositions and equations that
sustain them" (Jagose, 1996). As Honeychurch (1996) summarized, "It is perhaps
in the more expansive term queeri that the most possibilities emerge for
denominating and declaring a range of differences and positions arising from the
gamut of sexual diversities " (341).
Ettinger (1992) viewed these transformations as "discursive strategies that
reject and transform the categories produced by a hostile and hegemonic
heterosexual discourse" (53). Indeed, Abelove's (1995) descriptions of his queer
students showed the effects, intentional or not, of postmodern reflection upon
positionality and the power of naming by many of today's non-heterosexual
students: "[Qjueer students think that there is not and cannot be such a thing as
authenticity, and that there certainly is not and cannot be such a thing as an
authentic lesbian sexuality " (Abelove, 1995, 52).
Furthermore, over the past two decades students not identifying as straight
have experienced lives that differ in varying degrees from those of their
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predecessors, and the result is that while not being straight might not be a terrific
experience for many of them, such lives and experiences are no longer considered
entirely abnormal, or without precedence. W hether the result of better research and
writing about growing up non-heterosexual or a solipsism of Generation X, today's
non-heterosexual students have found the transformation of queer from adjective to
noun empowering (Escoffier & Berube, 1991).
[Queer undergrads] do not typically experience their own
subjectivity as marginal, even at those moments when they feel
most oppressed by homophobic and heterosexist discourses and
institutions. Marginalization isn't their preferred trope. It doesn't
seem to them to be cogent as a narrative device for organizing the
telling of their own lives, or, for that matter, of their history. What
these queers prefer to say and believe or try to believe instead is
that they are both present and at the center (Abelove, 1995, 48).
Such a transition from the margins of concept and study to the center creates a
queered position for reflection, expression, and action. From that position, analysts
change queer into a verb. In academic circles, to queer something is to analyze a
situation or a text to determine the relationship between sexuality, power, gender,
and conceptions of normal and deviant, insider and outsider. As Honeychurch
observed,
A queered position requires an ontological shift comprehensively
resistant in its exceptions to dominant normativity. A queering of
standpoint in social research is a vigorous challenge to that which
has constrained what may be known, who may be the knower, and
how knowledge has come to be generated and circulated,... [and]
queers participate in positioning themselves through both
authoring and authorizing experience (1996, 342).
These analysts in queered positions developed queer theory.
What is Queer Theory? To understandrimagine queer theory, one must
make distinctions between queer as a quality (essentialism) and queer as an
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attribute (constructionism). The former posits sexual orientation (not necessarily
identity) as immutable and unchanged across time and culture; people did - and do
- desire and have sexual relations with others of the same gender. The latter
defines "sexuality as a product of social relations and thereby suggests the history of
sexuality to be the history of the subject whose meaning and content are in a
continual process of change " (Penn, 1995, 26). The construction of those
meanings and contents, along with the power and concurrent identification of and
with them, is at the heart of queer theory (Britzman, 1995, 1997; Seidman, 1995;
Slagle, 1995).
The most conspicuous strain of queer theory draws heavily on French
poststructural theory and the critical method of deconstruction (Seidman, 1995;
Slagle, 1995). Deconstruction, simply stated, is a social analysis of who, why, and
what produced a text; an analysis of what is said - and unsaid - through the
language, form, structure, and style of a text (a written work, a film, art). Queer
theory enlarges that definition of text to include any form(s) of communication
utilized to convey an understanding of one's world; it could be a book or a film,
obviously, but a text could also be a conversation, a life story, a memory, sexual
activity, history, a gathering place, o ra social trend.
Queer theory supposes a position if not within the marginalized then at least
outside of the margins of "normality" (Britzman, 1995). This new standpoint creates
unique ways of looking, new paradigms of analyzing, and new methods of
representing queer data. It represents a change from how and why the experiences
of non-heterosexual people are studied, a "shifting theory away from its present
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grounding in identity concepts to a cultural or epistemological centering " (Seidman,
1995, 130). Even the very language used to conceptualize and to relay our
thoughts and inquiries is questioned:
Queer theory might better remind us that we are inhabited always
by states of desire that exceed our capacity to name them. Every
name only gives those desires — conflictuel, contradictory,
inconsistent, undefined — a fictive border... (Edelman, 1995, 345).
This process is not a question of "who is queer," but "how is queen" now so
much "why are they queer," but "why are we saying they are queer?"" The key to
answering those questions is through examining the binarism of homosexuality and
heterosexuality, in response "to the damaged lives and suffering engendered by a
compulsively heterosexual society" (Seidman, 1995,134). Much as Marxist theorists
utilize the opposition of bourgeois and proletariat as a master category for social
analysis, and as feminists do with masculine and feminine, "queer analysts claim for
the hetero/homo binary the status of a master category of social analysis" (Seidman,
1995, 132).
In some ways, queer theory is a logical extension of ontological philosophy.
If modernism and empiricism are about objectively researching and reporting what
we see/know, and postmodernism and constructivism are about investigating and
reporting how the positions between researcher, researched, and research construct
what we see/know, queer theory is about how both the knowledge (found and
produced) and the positions (also both found and produced) create a new body of
knowledge, a delimitation of the space between position and product, investigator
and investigation. Queer theory inverts the notion of outsider giving voice to the
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insider as well as the notion of insider information being untouched by outsider
information.
Postmodern constructionism serves as the obvious structural framework of
queer theory. As the queer undergraduates in Abelove's courses demonstrated,
sexuality is important and provides a focal point for understanding the relation of
individuals (and groups) to what others (individuals and groups) consider “normal.”
While sexuality is not the only dimension of human experience that define queers, it
is one that informs all others.
Sexual orientations are not a private matter that impacts only
personal sexual practices, but are dimensions of subjectivity that
infuse all human experience, including higher cognitive functions;
are imbricated in that sexuality, gender, class, etc.; are layered
and interimplicated and therefore cannot be read monolithically;
and are viewed as identities coherent enough to be recognized,
but fluid enough to be interrogated (Honeychurch, 1996, 345).
Not every study of gay lives is queer, or benefits from queer theory. Indeed,
in many ways, queer theory contradicts traditional studies that do not question the
very framework of the investigation. The shift in viewpoint necessitates a shift in
sensibility, style, tone, values, and commitments. Britzman (1997) argued against
examination of gay lives as overly simplistic; the questions should regard why, how,
and who determines that those lives are queer 'The study of why gay rights are so
difficult to achieve requires not a look into the lives of gays and lesbians but into the
questions and conditions of why sexuality must be regulated, outlawed, and fought
fo r (1997, 36).
Duggan posited that queer theorists critique three elements of research and
representation; (a) humanist progressive narratives of gay identities and gay
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liberation against repressive forces; (b) empiricist methods claiming to present
"reality" through simple and objective events, dates, and motives; and (c) "stable,
unitary, or authentic' identity categories" (Duggan, 1995a, 181). Indeed, Seidman
believed
Queer theory is less a matter of explaining the repression or
expression o f a homosexual minority than an analysis of the
hetero/homosexual figure as a power/knowledge regime that
shapes the ordering of desires, behaviors, and social institutions,
and social relations - in a word, the constitution of the self and
society (Seidman, 1995, 128).
Queer theory is not easily understood partly because it challenges basic
tropes used to organize our society and our language: even words are gendered,
and through that gendering an elliptical view of the hierarchy of society, and
presumption of what is male and what is female, shines through. Queer theory
rejects such binary distinctions as arbitrarily determined and defined by those with
social power. As Edelman's earlier quote hinted, if all of these concepts are
constructed out of whole cloth, it becomes difficult to explain what queer is if it is not
in opposition to straight - or even to gay. Duggan (1995b) related a funny story of a
fact-checker for Rolling Stone trying to ascertain from literary critic and queer
theorist Eve Sedgwick whether Sedgwick was straight or gay. The fact-checker
dogged Sedgwick with questions like, "Are you straight? If you're not straight, you
must be gay? But if you're married, you're straight, right?" Sedgwick sidestepped
answering through a series of Socratic responses: "Did I say I was straight? Did I
say I was gay? Did I say I was married? In some ways, I might be considered
queer."
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The fact-checker's questions were based in the essentialist language of
facts, of course, while Sedgwick was responding from a very consciously
constructed position. If queer is so troublesome to use as a word that means
something personally and can be easily understood by the public, it is even more
difficult to explain in plain language what queer theory is. This problem is but one
example "to illustrate the difficulty of communication across the gap between the
predominantly constructionist language of queer studies and the essentialist
presumptions of public discourse" (Duggan, 1995b, 183).
Queer theory, then, comes from queered perspectives of the researcher and
the researched. The sexual dimensions of a subject become the central site of
investigation, primarily in juxtaposing the queer to the norm. This positioning
represents both a change in the interests of researchers and theorists, and in those
about whose lives we report. In Abelove's estimation, queer students desire a shift
in the lens of study of non-heterosexual lives:
[Fjocus not on the margins, but on what was "queer" in the center,
such as musicals, or comedies, or films by or with homosexual (or
bisexual) creators. "What could be queerer?... All these cultural
productions were central rather than marginal. By ignoring or
neglecting them, we misconceive the past and unwittingly reduce
our presence in and claim to the present," they say (Abelove,
1995, 49).
Such actions and ideas go against much of what is thought, and believed, in
both the academic and the lay worlds - and in doing so call into question the very
concepts of those thoughts and beliefs (Penn, 1995; Honeychurch, 1996;
Seidman, 1995). Who is making the claim/determination of what is normal and what
is queer? W hat are his agendas? What are her politics? The text (broadly defined.
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in social sciences, as analyses, theories, identities, and discourses) is our source of
knowledge, but like that text, knowledge is constructed by constructed people. In
questioning such conventional wisdom both gay and straight, queer theory is all the
queerer for its subjects and its subjectivities. As Britzman stated.
Queer Theory signifies improper subjects and improper theories,
even as it questions the very grounds of identity and theory.
Queer Theory occupies a difficult space between the signifier and
the signified, where something queer happens to the signified - to
history and to bodies — and something queer happens to the
signifier- t o language and to representation (1995, 153).
In many respects, queer theory might offer the most qualitative of
methodologies for collecting and analyzing data. As queer theory questions, even
defies, notions of objectivity and the essentiality of fact, queer theory opens more
"texts" for study, and more bodies of knowledge to compile, compare, and evaluate.
"[Ijt mobilizes a radically wide range of knowledge - modes of understanding from
science to gossip - to reconstitute information about queemess, thus transforming
the range of reference 'queer* has by multiplying its specifications" (Sériant and
Freedman, 1992, 153). Again, the flexibility overflows the delimitations of words to
contain what queer theory could be.
Queer theory is not simply about the studying of people whose sex lives are
not heterosexual, or even the positionalities of those people; at its core, it is about
questioning the presumptions, values, and viewpoints from those positions (marginal
and central), especially those that normally go unquestioned. Queer theory is in part
about opening and reclaiming spaces, both public and private (Sériant and
Freeman, 1992; cf. Chauncey, 1994; Bredbeck, 1995; Edelman, 1995). It "offers
methods of critiques to mark the repetitions of normalcy as a structure and as a
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pedagogy " (Britzman, 1995, 153). It is the process, rather than the product, in part
because the product of queer theory is often more inquiry rather than declaration.
Elsewhere (Dilley, 1999), I have posited that queer theory is more tmns-
disciplinary than inter-discipHnary: the concepts and the methods can be, and are,
utilized by a number of researchers in various disciplines, but the particular product
or analysis in one discipline might not have any impact or influence upon another
discipline. In other words, while the results of, say, a queered investigation of film
studies might not interest or be applicable for educational research, the
methodologies of investigation, analysis, and representation might be very relevant
and provocative. And, as Britzman's (1995, 155) tri-part methodology - studying
limits, studying incongruence, and studying reading practices - implied, analytical
reading in areas in which one does not normally read - a reading practice - can in
itself be a queer method.
In reviewing published studies which utilize queer theory, I have observed three
tenets to queer research, regardless of discipline;
• Examination of lives and experiences of those considered non-
heterosexual.
• Juxtaposition of those lives/experiences with lives/experiences
considered "normal."
• Examination of how/why those lives and experiences are considered
outside of the norm.
Not all queer research considers equally each tenet, but at minimum at least one is
emphasized. In addition, researchers using queer theory also often try to find novel.
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creative ways of representing in print data that aid in fulfilling those tenets. In doing
so, the texts become queer as well.
I stated that queer theory is trans-disciplinary; the body of literature of queer
theory reflects this, showing connections between disciplines, and advancement of
the theory's development across the disciplines, while the works produced remain
tied to particular disciplines. Consequently, I categorized queer research into four
categories; language, literature, and the arts (where the concepts and tenants of
queer theory were first formed); history; queer life histories/stories; and queer
praxis (Dilley, 1999). In this study, I will concentrate upon how queer theory
impacted the process of analyzing and writing history.
Queer Theory in Historiography
If the study of literature and film were the flashpoint of queer theory, history is
surely the discipline which has applied queer theory in a practical sense (and, I feel,
history is also more akin to qualitative educational research); as Abelove pointed
out, "this change has apparently produced a partly new way of reading and thinking
history" (1905, 44). Duggan (1992, 1995a, 1995b) has been one of the proponents
for a queer historiography, trying to energize practice through queer theory;
Bravmann (1990, 1998) also called for use of queered (and other non-conformist)
manners and methods of depicting gay lives. The histories that have resulted from
queer methods are important. Katz's (1995) recounting of the "invention of
heterosexuality " used the same type of analysis that had previously been used to
place historically the construction of homosexuality. By inverting that procedure,
Katz showed that, in this case, the margin, the queer, was used to define the center.
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Prior to construction of categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality as
components of identity in the late nineteenth century, the "norm" of sexuality did not
reside in identity.
Chauncey (1994) showed that sexual actions did not always determine the
identities within sexual relationships of men who had sex with other men (the
definitions were not based upon specific actions), but rather that gendered roles
sometimes created an identity based upon social roles within the relationship and
the community, no matter who did what to whom. Chauncey's path-breaking work
was also queer, in a sense. Conventional wisdom held that social and personal
definitions of gay or homosexual did not begin until after World War II, and that the
history of public "gay" lives started after the Stonewall Riots of 1969. But Chauncey
countered one of the "norms" of gay and lesbian studies, unveiling a publicly social
world of gay life in New York City from 1890 to 1940, documenting its public status,
and presenting gay - and queer - identities as stated through interviews with
members of that subculture. Kaiser's (1997) more recent work also examined New
York City; although not necessarily queer in its concept (the work examined non
heterosexual lives, but did not consider the relationship of those lives to the norm), it
moved beyond the historigraphical norm, drawing from published reports of people
we now know had same-sex relations, from gossip, from popular culture, and from
more traditional historical sources as diaries, interviews, and printed accounts.
Perhaps the most queer of all of the recent histories was Sadownick's (1996)
history of Sex Between Men. In it, Sadownick attempted to find a locus between
sexuality, identity, and spirituality, using qualitative data about men's sexual lives
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and experiences, the places they lives and had sex, their thoughts and feelings
about those events, and how all of those concepts changed for those men over the
past fifty years. These lives of the past come sharply into focus through queer
application of qualitative and ethnographic methods. Beemyn's (1997) edited
volume of community histories illustrated how, for several generations, non
heterosexuals in communities large and small responded - personally, collectively,
and politically - to the dominant perceptions of what normal was. Using qualitative
ethnographic methods in addition to traditional historical methodology, the historians
in Beemyn's collection demonstrated how historiographical methods can be used in
conjunction - and in opposition - to discover and (re)present lives of queers.
Queer Life Histories/Stories
Into this category falls most of the queer work in education, due, I believe, to
examination of the lives and identities of students (and, to a lesser extent,
educators). Sears (1992) offered a comprehensive analysis of the benefits of
qualitative research into issues of homosexuality (and homosexual identity,
particularly) in education; his article is a fine starting point for understanding how
qualitative methods aid in the understanding and representation of non-heterosexual
lives (certainly an endeavor related to historiography, if not a component part). This
benefit is partly because qualitative research provides for unusual methods of data
representation.
O'Connor (1995) used constructed narrative, both composite and
representative, "to give voice to these [queer] teenagers and protect their identities"
(9). Similarly, Tierney (1997) employed ethnographic fiction to "highlight the multiple
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tensions that exist for us [queers] daily on campus" (116). Sedgwick (1993) created
a pedagogical satire worthy of Swift in "How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay," which
draws from the experiences reported by non-heterosexual children. Lather (1995;
Lather and Smithies, 1997) reported struggling with how best to represent textually
the lives of women living with AIDS (certainly on the margins of more than one
center of focus in research) in ways that would be accessible, accurate, insightful,
and methodologically sound; her resulting product juxtaposed on the printed page
data, research journal entries, responses from the participants in the study (including
creative works such as poetry), and traditional analysis.
But the novelty need not be entirely in format; queer theory can also be
found in more traditional works that examine queered lives, even if the researchers
at the time would not necessarily recognize the queemess of their work. Bensimon
(1992) utilized life history to convey a deep sense of the life of one lesbian academic
("Julia"), and in her analyses called into question central tenants of queer theory.
At Greenvalley University, sexuality and sexual identity are viewed
as private and personal concerns that are separate from the public
act of being a faculty member. Yet heterosexuality is the norm. ..
To avoid calling attention to herself she has to produce a "Julia"
that does not challenge the heterosexual narrative of "normal"
sexual relations, nor the male narrative of what a woman should be
like (Bensimon, 1992, 104-105).
Solid queer qualitative work was also published for a larger, non-academic
public. Browning's (1993, 1996) produced a geography not of physical spaces (such
as Chauncey's work did) but of queer peoples' spirit and culture. Signorile (1993,
1997) offered journalistic representation and analysis of lives of non-heterosexual
men from political (1993) and interpersonal (1997) vantage points. Seidman (1991)
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presented a history of the concept of love (not to be confused with sex) in America,
including same-sex loves. Harris (1997) examined how what were markers of what
is/was considered queer were disappearing due to queers being assimilated into
mainstream culture and the mainstream culture's appropriation of those markers as
“style.” While none of these works dealt directly with queer theory, all of them
benefit from its use; the questioning of what is normal and abnormal about the lives
of people whose identification as a people are based upon their sexuality.
Bernstein and Silberman's (1996) collection of personal essays by people
under age thirty reflected how this generation considers itself queer, and the ways in
which the dominant culture - particularly popular culture - has helped to create that
feeling. Whether it was one boy's identification with the character of Batgirl in
television reruns (Musbach, 1996), "a working-class bicultural Black lesbian Buddhist
martial artist incest survivor with a college education " (Tuggle, 1996, 140)
contemplating the labels attached to actions and attractions in sexuality, or the
experience of not "fitting" into the clothes or gender or sexuality or life that the
dominant culture implicitly requires (Cooper, 1996), one can see personal
autobiography used to examine and critique one's self and one's society from queer
positions.
Bred beck's (1996) examination of the sociological dimensions of disco was
perhaps the most imaginative work of queer theory and analysis I have come
across. While not falling into the realm of educational research, Bredbeck used an
array of qualitative methods besides simply interviewing people who frequent discos
now (which he does do, asking them why they are there and what they think about
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discos of twenty years ago). For his analyses he drew from advertising, song lyrics,
historical records, film, academic theory, record and video packaging, literature,
personal recollections and private memory. It is a tour de force that effectively and
insightfully fulfills the three tenants of queer theory; examination of non
heterosexual lives and/or cultures, reclamation of public or common experience or
knowledge to shed light upon those non-heterosexual lives, and the examination of
the juxtaposition between "normal" and "non-normal" lives to illustrate what we know
about each. In this case, what Bredbeck and his reader learn was how disco helped
both to create and to Justify the creation of identity, both solitary and collective.
Reflections on Queer Theory. To return to the two questions I posed at the
beginning of this chapter: Queer, in the context of educational studies, pertains to
issues of homosexuality, and refers more specifically to lives or practices considered
not "normal." Queer theory houses the analytic tools used to examine what is
"normal" and "abnormal," primarily through deconstructing issues of sexuality in
society. Queer studies is more than researching homosexual lives, whether those
lives were lived on the margins or in the forefront of public conversation and
consciousness; it is researching/theorizing why/how/when lives are
homosexualized, "queered" outside of the norm. This queering is the result of
someone, either the subject, the researcher, or the audience, determining that the
senses, sensibilities and experiences of - the data derived from - the subjects are
not what an audience, or a writer, thinks the data "should" be.
Queer theory is a postmodern concept, an outgrowth of movements both
political and personal. It seeks to invert the delineations and borders of our culture.
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the very concepts we use to create knowledge. Queer theorists attempt to show the
structures and concepts created by those limits and borders, and how the people
involved in creating theory are effect and are affected by those concepts. They
challenge - and sometimes reject — the notions of epistemological certainty, normal
and abnormal, inclusion and exclusion, homosexual and heterosexual. And the
questions, once posed and answered, must continue to be re-examined, for, if
nothing else, queer theory has taught us the inefficiency of language to convey so
complex a notion as identity, especially an identity based upon sexuality.
These questions and answers originate from particular (queer) people in
particular (queered) positions, which are useful but not exclusive:
A queered position insists not only on the partiality of exclusionary
heterosexual assertions, but also on the necessity of recognizing
the admittedly equally partial yet productive differences of queered
presence (Honeychurch, 1996, 343).
In that respect, anyone can find a queered position (although some might have a
better vantage point than others); just as Sedgwick's encounter with the fact-
checker showed, such a position is not dependent upon one's sexual orientation or
predilections, but rather upon one's ability to utilize the (dis)advantages of such a
position.
[A] queered position could also be utilized by a variety of
researchers in a wide range of social research undertakings that
inquire into an array of eccentric social identities. All could be
enunciated under a queer umbrella (Honeychurch, 1996, 342).
As I have displayed, much of queer theory in historical research pertains to
identity; still, it is far from overused, or lacking in potential. As the positions of non
straight identities become less shadowy, if not less marginal, new understandings of
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where the spotlight of normality shines - and whom it illuminates - can inform our
understanding of (and outreach efforts to) queer(ed) people and those we currently
consider "straight. "
I began this review of queer theory by comparing the concept to mercury,
and although I have spent many pages trying to capture its essence and define it, it
is still an elusive subject. In the words of Edelman (1995, 345), "the condition of
wanting... constitutes the only state that queer theory can ever properly know."
Those who use queer theory often try to find a name for it, but the language is
vague; we try to find a boundary for it, but it is about questioning boundaries; we try
to understand it, to know it, but it is about questioning what we know. And with each
new position that utilizes it, each new researcher who finds innovative application of
it in her work, those words, boundaries, and understandings change, just as the
what is considered queer changes as the abnormal becomes known, understood,
and accepted.
"The paradox of queemess is that it survives by continually collapsing and
recreating itself" (Browning, 1993, 229). Like Madonna, who reinvents her image
and style with each artistic endeavor, so too queer and queer theory change as the
concepts of "normal" and ""abnormal" or ""deviant" change due to the a/effect of
queers. In this respect, queer theory demonstrates that constructionism is a two-
way street, and that identities are fluid and descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Theorists who work with non-heterosexual identities and cultures must take into
account the tenants of queer theory; as Rhoads noted, for "lesbian, gay, and
bisexual people, their struggle to develop a positive sense of sexual identity takes
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place within a larger cultural frame that situates heterosexuality as the norm and
homosexuality as a deviant expression” (1997b, 462).
Accordingly, I chose queer theory as the prime operational analytical tool for
examining non-heterosexual collegiate lives, sensibilities and identities. Although
this study is among the initial investigations to utilize queer theory in this manner, it
is certainly not the first to research student experiences. Most of the other
educational research on student lives is based upon notions of progressive identity
development, which I assess next.
Student Identity Development
Brown (1972) first coined the term “student development theory” in reviewing
a number of theoretical perspectives on interpersonal student change in college and
as a result of college policies and practices. Student development theories have
been produced from a number of perspectives, including psychological, sociological,
and cognitive development theories (Moore & Upcraft, 1990). Moore and Upcraft
also identified “five basic clusters of theories and models about college students,” to
understand and map the changes students experience during their college years
(1990, 19);
personal development
cognitive development
• growth and change of students
campus environmental effects on students
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effects of personal qualities. Including culture, race, ethnicity,
age, gender and sexual orientation
Evans, Forney and Guido-DiBrito (1998) later classified the theories into three more
general clusters:
psychosocial and identity development theories (combining
personal development, the effects of personal qualities, and
some theories of growth and change)
cognitive-structural theories (enveloping cognitive
development, campus environmental effects, and the
remaining theories of student growth and change)
typology theories
Psychosocial models are among the most prevalent theories utilized in
college student advising, programming and study (Evans, Forney & Guido-DiBrito,
1998; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991); psychosocial models of student development
are often stage models, with clear points articulating paths of progression from
issues facing entering freshmen to challenges confronting graduating seniors. While
the other types of theories are utilized by student development practioners,
cognitive-structural are often curtailed to academic planning and viewed as
summative, rather than formative, in their application. The latter assessment
continues to typological theories, which usually present identities as fundamentally
fixed and static; I will address typological theories more fully in the next chapter.
Methodologies. In this following section, however, I review psychosocial models
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of student development, the component elements which extend to gay identity
development models.
Psychosocial Theories
Erickson (1980) first outlined the series of progressions of issues at various
times in a person’s life. Particular issues become so important at those times that
how a person responds reflects how a person conceptualizes himself and his role in
society. These interpersonal or intra-social matters pose "developmental tasks,
[which] arise and present compelling questions that must be resolved” (Evans,
Forney, & DiBrito, 1998, 32). The concerns are grouped into stages of
development, in each of which a "developmental crisis, or turning point” (Evans,
Forney, & DiBrito, 1998, 32) occurs. How a person answers those questions,
responds to the presses, resolves the crises is indicative of his development and
identity, as well as how he will approach and resolve other issues in later stages.
Stemming from the work of Erickson (1980, 1968), Chickering and his later
colleagues (Chickering, 1969; Chickering & Reisser, 1993; Thomas & Chickering,
1984) applied the idea of psychosocial development to college students.
Chickering’s Vectors
Chickering's theory of student development (Chickering, 1969; Chickering &
Reisser, 1993), is primarily a psychosocial model. The theory identifies seven
stages, or vectors, of human development, a consecutive (although not necessarily
strictly sequential; the theory allows room for overlap and repetition, in certain
circumstances) series of changes that college students (and presumably others the
same ages) experience (Chart 3.1). There is a hierarchy to the vectors, presuming a
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change from less to more developed senses of Identity; however, a baseline of
development (although not necessarily full resolution of the developmental Issues In
that vector) can lead a student to begin developmental processes In other vectors.
Movement along any one [vector] can occur at different rates and
can Interact with movement along the others. Each step from
“lower" to “higher" brings more awareness, skill, confidence,
complexity, stability, and Integration but does not rule out an
accidental or Intentional return to ground already traversed
(Chickering & Reisser, 1993, 34).
The seven vectors each represent an area of personality and Identity, each
Increasing In specificity. Growth and development requires stimulation, either
physical, mental, social or emotional, to move the student to change (Chickering
referred to this stimulation as a “developmental press"); each vector has one or more
“developmental challenges,” or goals, to be addressed and. If successfully met,
resolved. Development depends upon and comes from the ability to symbolize the
events and objects (the presses) causing stimulation to form a meaning or pattern
relevant to the student's life (which would presumably complete the student’s
progression through the vector).
Through encountering and comprehending more complex situations and
thoughts, the student Integrates and organizes the different perceptions (the
different patters and meanings), beliefs and behaviors of others (and himself) Into a
more coherent view of himself and his place In the world. By the time he reaches
the final vector, the student should have discovered and resolved questions of
Identity and purpose In life.
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Chart 2.1
Chickering’s Vectors of identity Development
(Chickering & Reisser, 1993)
Vector One:
Achieving Competence
Vector Two:
Managing Emotions
Vector Three:
Moving Through Autonomy Toward interdependence
Vector Four:
Developing Mature Interpersonal Relationships
Vector Five:
Establishing Identity
Vector Six:
Developing Purpose
Vector Seven:
Developing Integrity
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Vector One: Achieving Competence. The challenges of the primary vector
stem from intellectual areas, physical and manual skills, and relationships with
others. One’s perception of competence is at the hear of vector one; “confidence in
one’s ability to cope with what comes and to achieve successfully what [one] sets
out to do” (Chickering, 1969, 9). Although physical competence is important,
intellectual and interpersonal competence are more influential upon further
development. This vector stresses changes in the behavior domain, in learning how
to become more competent at college-level activities, and in developing a strong
sense of self-competence about one’s abilities and competencies.
Vector Two: Managing Emotions. Sexual and aggressive emotions are, at
least for Chickering’s predominately male sample populations, the two emotions
most in need of resolution, and most apparently operating within the second vector.
The second vector deals with learning to handle these and other emotions,
personally and socially: conscious choice in behavior and expression of emotions in
varying contexts . Chickering (1969) stated that the main goal of this vector is “to
develop increasing capacity for passion and commitment accompanied by
increasing capacity for passion and commitment through intelligent behavior” (53).
Students undergoing the presses of this vector often begin to examine reflective
controls (parental rules, societal norms). Students can respond to these presses by
understanding, maintain, or replacing adopted standards and controls with internally
adopted standards and controls, or by any combination of the three.
Vector Three: Moving Through Autonomy Toward Interdependence. College
life allows increasing independence for students, a situational independence due to
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the lack of proximity to parental control and the increase of responsibility for
maintaining academic and social status. Beyond this is Ih e independence of
maturity... emotional and instrumental independence, and a recognition of one’s
independence” (Chickering, 1969, 12). Away from parental guidance and
regulations, students have less reassurance for, and approval or disapproval of,
choices and actions. This, in turn, allows the student for a better understanding and
appreciation of his abilities.
One of the main developmental challenges of this vector is learning to
manage time, commitments, and priorities. Relationships for students in this vector
take on new meaning, based on mutual respect, benefit and cooperation. Other
people might increase in importance to the student, creating for the student the
paradox of new-found personal (instrumental) independence and tentative personal
interdependence.
Vector Four Developing Mature Interpersonal Relationships. After becoming
comfortable with themselves, students must increase their ability to interact with
others. The developmental goals at this stage of personal development are
“increased tolerance and respect for those of different backgrounds, habits, values
and appearance” (Chickering, 1969, 94). Tolerance refers not just to the ability to
endure unpleasant people or events but to the ability to have a greater openness
and acceptance of diversity.
In Vector Four there is an increased shift in the quality of relationships with
close friends and intimates (Chickering, 1969, 94). This reflects the development of
the student's capacity for intimacy, resulting from the acceptance of the self in vector
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three and the new perceptions of relationships emerging from vector two. Students
must learn the differences between types of, and levels of, relationships: then must
work out their attitudes about those relationships; and then they must develop
relational behaviors to match their knowledge and values. This vector was originally
the fifth vector in Chickering’s (1969) theory, but Chickering and Reisser retitled and
moved it “primarily to recognize the importance of students’ experiences with
relationships in the formation of their sense of s e lf (Chickering and Reisser, 1993,
39).
Vector Five: Establishing Identity. The fifth vector is pivotal to Chickering’s
theory. Growth, or progression, among the first four vectors influences the ability to
accomplish the challenges and meet the goals of vector four; vector five itself fosters
and facilitates the last two vectors. Students must think about self-identity
component issues, discover or create attitudes and self-concepts that are realistic
and positive, and match their behavior to acknowledge these attitudes. The key
challenges here are gaining confidence in one’s self and recognizing one’s core
qualities.
To establish a positive identity, one must clarify and become comfortable with
one’s conception of one’s physical characteristics and personal appearance.
Further, one must accommodate to appropriate sexual behaviors and roles to fit
one’s identity. Other factors influencing identity might include how one incorporates
the changes encountered in the previous vectors into one’s personality, how one
chooses to be a part of society after incorporating those changes, and how one
compares one’s self to others.
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Vector Six: Developing Purpose. The challenge of this vector for the student
is to gain a sense of future direction and a purpose in living. Students in this stage
will often need to develop plans that integrate personal interests, vocational goals
and aspirations, and lifestyle choices; this cognition about one's interests, abilities,
and opportunities; behavior changes to match those interests to “[m]ore sustained,
focused, rewarding activities” (Chickering & Reisser, 1993, 39); and attitudinal
changes to strengthen family and interpersonal commitments. These tasks will help
to refine students’ values and lifestyles.
Vector Seven: Developing Integrity. The final vector harbors “clarification of
a personally valid set of beliefs that have some internal consistency and that provide
at least at least a tentative guide for behavior” (Chickering, 1969, 17). Developing
integrity requires humanizing and personalizing one’s values, discovering a sense of
social responsibility instead of only self-interest, and changing actions to discard
discrepancies between values and actions in favor of congruency between values
and actions. The task is to re-examine one’s values (through understanding,
organizing, and integrating everything that one has learned from experiences in the
previous vectors) into a comprehensive whole that reflects one’s values through
actions and perceptions. In reconsidering , one becomes aware that no absolute
rules exist, and all rules and their purposes must be considered realistically.
Although in the revisions of the theory, Chickering and his colleagues
reference differences in gender and sexuality upon identity development, those
variations would appear to have little or no effect upon a student’s progress or
general challenges to identity development. Such a presumption, though, is
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disproved by theorists who research the experiences and Identities of non
heterosexuals.
Gay identity Development
Contrasted to research conducted on the lives and development of
(presumably heterosexual) college students, very little has been produced about
gay, lesbian or bisexual college students. In terms of homosexual identity
development theory, most researchers have produced works that address gay and
lesbian youth more generally, rather than specifically on changes occurring during
college. What is known or theorized about gay male students’ identity development
and experience is not extensive, but some research and theories exist.
Levine and Evans (1991) found that most gay identity development models
fall into either the psychological or the sociological perspectives. The psychological
“concentrate on internal changes experienced by individuals as they come to identify
as homosexual” (Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 91), while the sociological
“tend to focus on the impact of community, development of social roles, and
managing stigma” (Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 91). In this section, I
outline the thoughts of the prominent researchers in both the psychological (Cass,
Troiden & Goode, Savin-Williams) and the sociological (D’Augelli’s lifespan schema)
approaches to identity theorization.
Cass* Stage Model
Cass' (1979, 1983/1984, 1984) psychological model of homosexual identity
formation was seminal in the field, particularly as a primary source for understanding
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gay identity development among college-aged people (Evans & Levine, 1990, 51-
55). According to Cass, through increasing tolerance of one's own homosexual
identity and increasing socialization and identification with other gays, one forges
identity pride, a recognition of the incongruence between one's homosexuality and
society's rejections of homosexuals, and reconciling this discrepancy into one's
personal self-concept. Cass proposes six developmental stages (Chart 3.2) that "all
individuals move through in order to acquire an identity of 'homosexual' fully
integrated within the individual's overall concept of s e lf (1979, 220).
Cass’ model supposed a subject who has a socially-supported self-image as
heterosexual and non-homosexual. Homosexual identity formation begins in Stage
One: Identity Confusion, a "conscious awareness” that homosexuality is relevant to
his behavior, either overt (as in kissing) or internal (thoughts, emotions or
physiological responses) (Cass, 1979, 222). The self-awareness is important, for
the process beings only when the subject is able to label his own behavior as
possibly homosexual (Cass, 1979, 222).
After this acknowledgment, “‘Who am I?" becomes the burning question.
Feelings of personal alienation are paramount” (Cass, 1979, 223). These feelings
are characteristically addressed through one of three ways: a search for more
information about homosexuality and homosexuals; the curtailing of all behaviors
which the subject perceives as homosexual, the avoidance of information about
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Chart 2.2
Cass’ Model of Homosexual Identity Formation
(Cass, 1979)
Stage One:
Identity Confusion
Stage Two:
Identity Comparison
Stage Three:
Identity Tolerance
Stage Four:
Identity Acceptance
Stage Five:
Identity Pride
Stage Six:
Identity Synthesis
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50
homosexuality, and the denial of its relevance to him and his life; or the personal
redefinition of the behavior or emotions within a non-homosexual context; it is
discounted as simply what the subject's peers are doing, or are due to the effects of
intoxicants.
In Stage Two: Identity Comparison, the subject accepts the possibility that he
might be homosexual. The increased congruity between the subject’s sense of self
and his behavior creates greater incongruity with others’ concepts of the subject.
The developmental task of Stage Two is how to handle social alienation, including
the lack of models and guidelines for behavior, ideals and expectations for the future
(Cass, 1979, 225).
Stage Three: Identity Tolerance marks the passage from the possibility that
the subject might be homosexual to the probability that he is. This stage is
characterized by the subject’s acknowledging social, emotional and sexual needs,
and conversely by a heightened alienation between the subject and his non
homosexual peers. To alleviate this alienation, subjects at Stage Three seek out
other homosexuals and their subcultures fora sense of place and belonging.
The ability for the subject to say I am a homosexual marks the passing of
Stage Three and the entry to Stage Four Identity Acceptance. Continued and
increasing contacts with other homosexuals "validate[sj and ‘normalize[s]’
homosexuality as an identity and a way of life” for the subject (Cass, 1979, 231).
Groups within the gay subculture influence how the subject restructures his
interpersonal environment and how he progresses through the remaining stages. To
alleviate the ver-growing dissonance between his self-concept and how others
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perceive him, the subject might begin to “selectively disclose [his] homosexual
identity to significant heterosexual others” (Cass, 1979, 232).
Stage Five: Identity Pride consists of the process of recognizing the
incongruency between the subject’s homosexuality and society’s rejection of
homosexuals, and reconciling the incongruence into the subject’s personal self-
concept.
In order to manage this incongruency [the subject] uses strategies
to devalue the importance of heterosexual others to self, and to
revalue homosexual others more positively. This program allows
[the subject] to give less weight to a perception of how
heterosexual others see [him] and more to how homosexual others
see [him] (Cass, 1979, 233).
“Commitment to the gay group is strong, generating a sense of group identity
(’These are my people ) and of belonging” (Cass, 1979, 233). Subjects become
angry with heterosexual norms and proud of their sense of selves, and can become
activists against established institutions. “The slogan ‘How dare you presume I’m a
heterosexual’ is indicative of feelings at this stage” (Cass, 1979, 233). The rejection
of established norms gives the subject less concern about how heterosexuals
perceive him and more freedom to disclose his orientation.
The final stage is Stage Six: Identity Synthesis. Positive reactions from
heterosexuals prompts the subject to re-evaluate his attitude of opposition with
heterosexuals. The subject “accepts the possibility o f considerable similarity
between self and heterosexuals, as well as dissimilarity between self and [other]
homosexuals” (Cass, 1979, 234). The sexual identity component of the subject’s
self-concept is integrated with the other aspects of self. “Instead of being seen as
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the identity, it is now given the status of being merely one aspect of s e lf (Cass,
1979, 235).
In later revisions, Cass augmented her theory (1983/1984, 1984), and allows
that "there is no such ting as a single homosexual identity. Rather, its nature may
vary from person to person, from situation to situation, and from period to period”
(Cass, 1983/1984, 111). Still, Cass' theory is a progressive, psychosocial
developmental model. Movement from early to later stages is motivated by
incongruity between a prior understanding of feelings, thoughts or behavior and
newly assigned homosexual meanings to those feelings, thoughts or behavior. That
progression, though, does not always occur; one’s experiences within any of the
stages might cause foreclosure of the process.
Also in her later writings (1983/1984, 1984) Cass noted the difference
highlighted by other researchers between homosexual identity, describing one's
sexual orientation and focused on explicit sexual acts and coincidental behavior, and
gay identity, which reflects an affiliation with a community in a cultural and social
sense (cf., Cheseboro, 1981; Warren, 1974). This distinction has continued within
the past fifteen years, offering researchers and theorists new ways of
conceptualizing the entire process of sexual orientation and identification (including,
as outlined earlier in this chapter, queer theory).
Other Psychosocial Gay Identity Models
Despite her prominence, Cass is not the only psychological/social theorist of
gay identity development. Troiden and Goode (1980) investigated variables related
to the acquisition of a gay identity. They identified three variables - age cohort, high
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school heterosexual activity, and high school homosexual activity - which are
related to the age at which respondents first self-recognize and self-identify as gay.
A trend appeared in these later studies, for younger (i.e., college-aged and younger)
identification as non-heterosexual, which were earlier than Cass’ findings. I believe
this reflects both changes in the cultures between Australia in the mid- to early-
1970s (Cass) and the United States at that same time (Troiden and Goode), as well
as differences in the population samples of the two studies. I also find it worth
noting that Cass' subjects are older than most of the participants in the other studies
reviewed here, as well as incarcerated. Troiden and Goode’s subjects
demonstrated a specific sequence of identity acquisition;
First, they suspected they might be homosexual (mean age 16).
This was followed by the decision to label certain feelings as
homosexual (18). Next (coincident with or shortly after initial
interactions which committed members of the gay subculture -
mean 19), our respondents labeled themselves homosexual (19).
The last step was to enter into their first homosexual love
relationship (mean 20) (Troiden & Goode, 1980, 387).
Obviously, these activities occur during traditional years of college
attendance in the U.S., and other have also observed sociological phenomena of
how gays of this age group identify and socialize. Browning (1993), in constructing
gay (primarily gay male) culture, utilized the life experiences of college-aged men in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Herdt and Boxer (1993) reported on a multi-faceted
longitudinal study of non-heterosexual teenagers involved in the youth group of
Horizons, a Chicago gay and lesbian community center. From multiple interviews
and observations of the youth, Herdt and Boxer presented an argument for viewing
coming - acknowledging and incorporating a gay (or non-heterosexual identity) into
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54
one’s self-identity - as a rite of passage into homosexual culture; in doing so, they
examined the common experiences of coming out, the affects and effects coming
out had for the youth, and how the youth interacted with the older gay society.
Herdt and Boxer believed that “[l]n American society... coming out" is a polarizing
process that leads to social roles being more clearly defined as ‘gay’ and lesbian’
than in other societies;” they feel their “study shows how important it is to
understand individual development in cultural context as a system o f interpretation”
(Herdt and Boxer, 1993, 3).
Herdt and Boxer argued that cultural context, in both the homosexual
cultures and the dominant culture, was changing. For the current cohorts of youths,
increased access to information about homosexuality and homosexuals created
better (although not complete) ideations - conceptualization models or categories
for potential self-identity - for gay youth. This was a shift for the ideations, beliefs,
and actions of many of the older cohorts.
The great majority of youth come of age self-identifying as gay or
lesbian, and thus expecting not only to live their lives openly, but to
tell all of their family and friends, and their employers of their
desires and lifestyles (Herdt and Boxer, 1993, 12).
Much of the existing theoretical work is based on gays’ and (more rarely)
lesbians’ shared or common experiences of interactions with heterosexual, majority
communities. Savin-Williams (1990) was one of the few gay-youth identity theorists
to include lesbians (at least in his earlier studies). His theories stressed the
commonalities of gay and lesbian youth due to their status as a group oppressed by
the majority society; these commonalities are compounded by the majority’s joint
classification of youth based on their sexual orientation. Savin-Witiiams did not
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55
address possible distinctions, or lack of societal perceptions o f distinctions, between
lesbians and gay men.
Savin-Williams’ recent work (1998) depicted 'young men’s stories” of their
lives, placed within the context of Savin-Williams’ gay identity development theory.
He did this to expand (his) earlier notions of gay identity development; The
perspective that I propose in this book to account for this richness of diversity in the
lives of gay and bisexual youths is differential developmental trajectories” (Savin-
Williams, 19998, xii). This was Savin-Williams’ attempted to create a more detailed
map of different (yet still progressive) ways gay men develop their concepts of self-
identity and incorporate their sexuality into those concepts of self-identity.
[A] differential developmental trajectories approach proposes that
the task of developmental research is to investigate the ways in
which sexual-minority youth are similar to and different from all
other adolescents, as well as the way sin which they vary among
themselves throughout the life course. .. [This] heightens the focus
on diversity within sexual-minority populations, recognizes
continuities and discontinuities in development, and highlights the
tuming points in individual lives (Savin-Williams, 1998, 10).
Through conveying the “personal stories” of gay men’s youth - from first
sexual attraction through experiences of final self-identification - Savin-Williams
attempted to correct misconceptions of both the sexual experiences of young people
and how those experiences are (un)related to identity development:
[T]he young men interviewed... were asked to recall their
developmental progression from first memories of being attracted
to other males - which for some was as early as their first
memories o f life - to a subsequent integration of their sexual
identity with their personal identity. This chain of feelings and
events often included labeling feelings as “homosexual,” first
having sex with a male, first having heterosexual sex, labeling self
as gay/bisexual, first disclosing this information to another, and first
having a same-sex romantic relationship (Savin-Williams, 1998,1).
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While the respondents’ narratives are illuminating (particularly in regards to
adolescent sexuality), Savin-Williams’ main contribution is in the depiction of the
broad range of developmental markers or presses within his (progressive)
categories of gay identity development. While not every marker might be
experienced by a non-heterosexual youth, nor might the markers not be in this
particular order, Savin-Williams (1998,15 ) noted these markers, and this pattern, as
the most common:
identifying feelings of “difference” from gender norms of other
males
identifying attraction to other males
understanding definition of “homosexuality”
labeling feelings as “homosexual”
experiencing sex with another male
experiencing sex with female
labeling self as “gay” or “bisexual”
disclosing that self-labeling to others
experiencing a romantic relationship with another male
integrating self-concepts and experiences into a positive
identity
Despite the similarities of development patterns in general, distinct
differences often exist in individuals. To understand these differences within
similarities, Savin-Williams proposed using “differential developmental trajectories”
(1998, 8) that name
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the variability within and across individuals, and... refers not only to
specific events during particular moments o f time but to the full
range of milestones and processes that occur throughout the life
course (Savin-Williams, 1998, 9).
Hetrick and Martin (1987; Martin & Hetrick, 1988) reached similar
conclusions, and propose that Ih e primary developmental task for homosexually
oriented adolescents is adjustment to a socially stigmatized role" (1987, 25), but did
not suggest any approaches to deal with that task. Herdt and Boxer (1993) spent
two years observing several teens involved in a youth group for gays and lesbians in
Chicago. Coming out, the process of identifying as gay or lesbian to oneself and to
others, was viewed by Herdt and Boxer as a ritual rite of passage into a new culture,
a new community apart from and yet existing within the heterosexual community.
D’Augelli: Social Construction of Gay identity Over the Life Span
D’Augelli (1989a, 1989b, 1991, 1994; D’Augelli & Rose, 1990) also
investigated homophobia and the experiences of homosexual and bisexual youth in
college. He noted in analyzing the responses of gay youth to his questioning that
they "may seek to explore their sexual orientation in what they presume to be a
more accepting context” - institutions of higher education - than they had
previously known (D’Augelli, 1989a, 546).
The late adolescent and early adulthood years of college and
university life are culturally conceived of as a time for identity
exploration, with the result that major career and relationship
dilemmas are (at least temporarily) resolved. For lesbian and gay
college students, these normative expectations are rendered much
more complex because of the additional identity components they
must manage (D’Augelli, 1991, 140).
He also denoted the primary developmental challenge for gay college
students is a process of identity transformation: "negotiating exists from
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heterosexual rôles,” developing an identity with a gay context, and learning
socialization skills within the context of sexual orientation (“relating to lesbian and
gay people, becoming involved in lesbian and gay communities, and integrating
lesbian and gay status into all domains of personal life") (D’Augelli, 1991, 140).
D’Augelli concluded that for the college students in his studies,
gay identity is in transition although they have long known they
were gay. Many other aspects of gay identity - among them the
most challenging - are in flux. .. Not fully hidden nor fully
disclosed, these men experienced worries and fears related to the
dilemmas they h ave yet to confront... (D’Augelli, 1991, 145).
Rather than accept the assumptions of sequential stages of developmental
models, D’Augelli based his theory of lesbian, gay and bisexual identity development
(1994) on life span models of identity development (i.e.. Baltes, 1987). His model
also utilized postmodern concepts, to posit homosexuality and gay identities as
social constructions rather than essential identities (or components thereof), “shaped
to varying degrees by social circumstances and environment and changeable
throughout life” (Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 95). Accordingly, this life
span model accounts for “the complex factors that influence the development of
people in context over historical time” (D’Augelli, 1994, 317): for instance, fifty years
ago a person might not have had any concept of how to “be” anything, any social
role, other than he saw in his own environment, and consequently probably
identified as “normal,” just like everyone else. Within the past thirty years, different
conceptions of non-heterosexual lives and roles have proliferated and have
consequently been available for consideration and/or adoption by individuals
(Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 95; etc.).
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D’Augeili (1994) identified three sets of interrelated variables involved in
identity formation, accounting in various ways for the societal pressures and barriers
to developing a positive self-identity as a gay, lesbian or bisexual person. Personal
subjectivities and actions include a person’s sexual behaviors, the meanings
ascribed to those behaviors, and perceptions and emotions about the person’s
sexual identity. Interactive intimacies incorporate influences of family, peers, and
other social/emotional intimates, as well as the meanings a person ascribes to them.
Sociohiston'cal connections are Ih e social norms, policies, and laws found in various
geographic locations and cultures as well as the values existing during particular
historical periods" (Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 95).
Instead of stages, D’Augelli (1994) posited six “interactive processes” that
affect non-heterosexual identity development. Rather than occur sequentially (or
during particular times of one’s life), any might take prominence depending upon the
social and/or cultural contexts in which the person is in.
Recognizing one’s attractions and feelings are not
heterosexual, as well as telling others one is not heterosexual.
Summarizing self-concepts, emotions and desires into a
personal identity as gay/lesbian/bisexual.
Developing a non-heterosexual social identity.
Disclosing one’s identity to parents and redefining familial
relationships aftenwards.
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Developing capabilities to have intimate gay/lesbian^isexual
relationships.
Becoming a member of a gay/lesbian/bisexual community.
D'Augelli also stressed the importance of the individual upon his own
development, both in understanding the social construction of his identity as well as
in choosing (or not) to address the interactive processes. In that regard, he echoed
somewhat Astin’s (1993) notion of student involvement — engagement with one’s
contexts and environments, to consciously choose to accent or develop particular
skills, functions or roles. In arguing fo r this change in understanding how identity for
non-heterosexuals is formed, D’Augelli stated,
A revision of our operational definition of sexual orientation must
occur, allowing for study of the continuities and discontinuities, the
flexibilities and cohesiveness, of sexual and affectional feelings
across the life span, in diverse contexts, and in relationship to life
and culture (D’Augelli, 1994, 331).
in the same manner as student development theory, gay identity
development theory does not move beyond the normative presumptions of
heterosexuality. Gay identity development theory presumes a fixed non
heterosexual identity fitting within the binary distinction between "normal” or
heterosexual and “different” or homosexual; one is either heterosexual or one is
gay. Both types of theories depict students (straight or not) as developing from one
identity (or understanding of their lives and relation to society) to another. But the
path is singular, the outcome unquestioned, and unquestionably either achieved or
not. Queer approaches to identity, as Mendelsohn (1999) displayed, question those
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presumptions, paths and identities In relation to the norms o f heterosexuality and
non-heterosexuality.
Mendelsohn: Men and De of Queer Uves
Although not a full-fledged theory or developmental model, Mendelsohn’s
autobiographical examination, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of
Identity (1999), provides provocative insight into gay male identity formation. His
work is troubling to one’s attempt to understand how identities (particularly gay male
identities) are formed when examined In traditional student development theories or
gay identity development theories. The trouble, however, is quite informative; as
Mendelsohn expressed, identities are neither consistent nor constant; gay men
inhabit multiple realities (sometimes contiguously, sometimes simultaneously) that
both contradict and depend upon the other for definition.
In the grammar of the ancient Greek language, sentences were constructed
between two halves, the men (in a manner of speaking, the idea of the sentence as
subject) and the de (the idea of the sentence as object). The “untranslatable
monosyllables - particles, they are called, not really full-fledged words at all - whose
presence in any given sentence tells you about the balance of that sentence, what
its rhythm, and, ultimately, its meaning will be” (Mendelsohn, 1999, 25) are in
juxtaposition to each other “on the one hand x, but on the other hand y”
(Mendelsohn, 1999, 25). Both are necessary to understand the full context of
ancient Greek sentences.
Mendelsohn comprehended his life, and the experiences of other gay men,
though this understanding of constant connection to both the men and the de of
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their lives, the comfort of conformity and the desire for (or to be) the “other.” For
Mendelsohn, the attraction to the de of gay life (often found in or symbolized by
urban gay ghettos) leads one away from the men of one’s past (the sense of place
and priority found in the circumstances of one's childhood). He told of a young man
whom he met in New York City. The young man told Mendelsohn that he was
leaving New York, returning to St. Louis. After the two had sex, as the young man
was leaving, he relayed to Mendelsohn a telling statement: “I came here to find
myself... but instead, I got lost” (Mendelsohn, 1999, 13). This was the conflict, at
least for that man, between the men of the life he observed, learned, and felt he did
not fit in in St. Louis (suburban, heterosexually oriented), and the de of the life he
lived, experienced, and felt he did not fit in in New York City (urban, gay oriented,
with a “dizzying nightlife, [and] the sheer, confusing superabundance of
opportunities” [Mendehlson, 1999, 13]).
The attraction to those opportunities is, for Mendehlson, contra posed to the
suburban life of his past and his present. Reflecting upon his discontent with either
life in suburbia or life in the gay ghetto, Mendehlson “... thought [he] had to be one
thing, a man who could wholly possess the thing he wanted in a way that was
continuous with who he was. And this, it was clear, was impossible” (Mendehlson,
1999, 203).
In The Elusive Embrace, Mendelsohn chronicled how he divides his time
between the city, where he socialized primarily with gay friends, and the suburbs,
where he established a relationship as a father to the son of a female friend. He
was gay in the city, heterosexual in the suburbs, and consequently occupying a
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63
queer position in places because of the relationship of both identities to his
sensibility, to the meaning he made of his life. This compromise, to “move between
two places" (Mendehlson, 1999, 204), fulfilled both of his concepts of identity, both
of his desires of whom he wanted to be. The concession is the actualization of the
paradox of gay identity:
Gay identity, as we actually experience it, so many of us who live
here, is, in the end, nothing if not structured by paradox and
conflict, by the mysteries of men and de. You can be two things at
once; you can life in the middle voice. You can, some of us have
learned, to be “queer" and “mainstream" at the same time,
someone equally committed to your family in the suburbs, men,
and to the pleasures of random encounters with strange men in
the city, de (Mendehlson, 1999, 34).
One could not be one's self, a complete self, a real self, without acknowledging that
both aspects of gay male identity are simultaneously at work (and play) at all times.
It is conceivable, though, that the two aspects - queer and mainstream -
could be something other than gay and to straight, but the concept of one notion of
(sexual) identity being juxtaposed diametrically to a different notion of (sexual)
identity is key. Neither notion is complete without reference to the other concept,
just as a Greek sentence was incomplete without both parts: the general idea could
be understood, but the true meaning of the expression (or of the identity) is partial,
at best, without knowing both the men and the de. Mendelsohn's work is a queer
move, from a linear approach - identity as a process from one concept to another,
both based upon the binarism of heterosexual or not - to a recursive, paradoxical
integration of seemingly contradictory concepts.
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Reflections on Gay Collegiate Identity Development
Perhaps the greatest criticism of stage development models, both those
describing homosexuals and those pertaining to college students, is that if one does
not fit the model, one is by necessity flawed. A student whose experiences bring
him to different sensibilities of how he views himself in the world in ways that differ
from Chickering would, by implication at least, be classified as not as fully developed
(since the student did not achieve mastery over the particular challenges of one or
more advanced vectors). Similarly, as Rhoads pointed out, “Cass implies that queer
students... need to work through their hostile attitudes and achieve a less radicalized
sense of identity" (Rhoads, 1997b, 477). The theories do not allow for diversity of
experience or sensibility, and only account for it in terms of deviance from the norm
of the model. Such a viewpoint highlights how fertile the relatively unexplored field
of non-heterosexual collegiate identity is, for issues of normality and deviance frame
(and are framed within) queer theory. Consequently, theorists can benefit from
applying queer theory to student and to gay identity development theories, to
explore how what is not considered “normal" is understood, situated in the
developmental theories, expressed in the literature, and utilized for student
advisement and programming.
The existing models have impacted the typological model I posit. Despite
their grounding in psychosocial identity development theories, in some respects the
gay identity development models are typological; that is, each theorist posits a
progression of identity development in which an individual views himself - and his
relationship to society - a s a particular role or quality of person. A gay youth who in
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his identity management is consciously closeted, could be said, broadly, to be a
particular “type” of gay person. The same could be said of the Queer Nationalist, or
the gay activist- As Evans, Forney, and Guido-DiBrito (1998) noted.
Typology theories reflect individual stylistic differences in how
students approach their worlds.... Typology, then, serves as a
framework within which psychosocial and cognitive structural
development takes place, and it influences the manner in which
students address development in these aspects of their lives
(Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 204).
I contend that these two epistemologies of personal identity development are
not mutually exclusive, no more so than Mendelsohn's men and de make sense
without understanding the relation of one to the other (and the other to the one).
Rather, particular contexts create environments where specific identities are fostered
or discouraged, but those identities are not static nor permanent; one can “be” a
type in certain contexts, at certain times, but can also display the qualities and
sensibilities of another type (as Mendelsohn’s conflicting self-concepts
demonstrate).
Indeed, the binary division between queer and normal, or homosexual and
heterosexual, is, to an extent, arbitrary. Human identity is rarely so clear, for gay
and straight people interact, and share some common cultural values. Moreover,
other aspects of personal identity are always present, perhaps even competing (or
complementing) against the label of straight or gay. Certainly, men who engaged in
non-heterosexual behavior or emotions managed their identities in different ways,
during different times and in different situations. This study seeks to begin to map
those manners, in those differing contexts, for men who attended college over the
past fifty years.
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Much of the historical literature - memoirs and autobiographies, oral
histories, diaries, histories - relates differing ways of how people who are
homosexual (or bisexual) have identified their different experiences as individuals
and groups to themselves and others. “[A]ll classes and groups write their collective
autobiographies. History is the way people(s) create, in part, their identities”
(Jenkins, 1991, 19). Historical analysis is one way to explore gay identity, as is
typological theory of identification; I focus upon these concepts in the next chapter,
as they constitute the methodologies of data analysis.
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67
Chapter Three
Methodologies
As I conveyed in the previous chapter, I framed this research project within
three bases of knowledge: student identity development theory, gay identity
development theory, and historical work conceming non-heterosexuals on college
campuses. A number of goals influenced my decision to undertake this project and
to make it a qualitative, typological study. One goal echoed Hesford’s call (1999) "to
explore multiple articulations of authority and identity and to discover how authority
and agency shift form one pedagogical context to another" (1999, xxix). Another
goal was to document and examine experiences previously hidden (McLaughlin &
Tierney, 1993), while a third questioned existing notions of what we know about "gay
college students:" their experiences, their identities, and their history.
To begin to attempt a framework for engaging in conversations with non
heterosexual men in which I ask them to consider their identity in relationship to their
college experiences, I studied the topics outlined in the literature review. I was left
with a number of questions that the existing research did not answer:
► Experiences and thoughts. Within the past five decades, what
experiences or thoughts influenced how non-heterosexual male
college students conceived of themselves and their sexual
orientation, particularly in relation to their collegiate experiences?
How might have those experiences, thoughts and/or self-concepts
differed, if at all, overtime?
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* - Influences. How did those experiences influence the actions and
beliefs of these non-heterosexual students? How might have
collegiate experiences contributed to — or detracted from -
identification based upon sexual orientation? In what contexts -
places, times, social settings - has this type of identification
occurred?
Interaction. How did those students behave, interact with other
students, and/or socialize with other non-heterosexuals?
* ■ Campus. What elements of the institution of higher education
contribute(d) to the identities and experiences of these students?
► Implications. How can these patterns of identity inform educators'
understandings of, and practice for, this student population?
► Theorv. What patterns of identification for non-heterosexual male
college students exist in those contexts and through those
experiences?
These queries form the basis of my dissertation. Although I provide answers
to the questions in the chapters that follow, the responses are more formative than
summative, less definitive than evocative. The typology of the project, then, is ideal
for this mapping of areas and aspects of college student identity development and
non-heterosexual identity development, for it is an overview of multiple patterns,
each with its own set of characteristics and complexities.
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69
Before presenting the data, though, I must provide background information
about how I gathered the stories of these men's lives, and about how I analyzed and
presented their experiences and identities. The first portion of this chapter. The
Interviews, outlines the protocol of the interview project: the where, when, who and
how of the interview process. The second section. Identity Analysis, defines
typological theories and explains why I determined a typological model the best to
represent non-heterosexual male collegiate identities. In that section I provide an
overview of the typological model I based this study on, Horowitz’s historical study of
collegiate student identities.
The next portion. Historical Analysis, confronts the issues of validity and
veracity in historical and identity research, and outlines the precautions I employed
to assure that the individuals’ answers to my questions, my analysis and
representation of their lives into the typology were "real." The final section of this
chapter, Narratives in Contexts, conveys how I moved from the answers the
respondents provided to the presentation and analysis of their narratives (which will
be Sections II and III of this dissertation). The last three parts of this chapter, the
analysis sections, address both the theoretical and the practical aspects of a
personal "retrospective method" (Gandara, 1995) of data collection and analysis.
The interviews
Where and When: Interview Solicitation
Between October of 1998 and December of 1999, I interviewed fifty-seven
men who were undergraduates between 1945 and 1999. The interview respondents
were solicited primarily through direct contact with key informants from academic.
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70
alumni and/or social groups (chiefly graduate/faculty/staff groups at the University of
Southern California and the University of California at Irvine), as well as from non
heterosexual social clubs (particularly the Phoenix, Arizona, chapter of Primetimers,
a national organization for senior gay men), academic conferences (including
meetings at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of
Califomia at Irvine, as well as the 1999 Annual Meeting of the Association for the
Study of Higher Education in San Antonio, Texas), and establishments catering to
non-heterosexual males (gay bars and restaurants in the Phoenix, Los Angeles and
San Diego areas). I deliberately chose a range of ages of potential respondents, to
provide access to informants who were (or continue to be) students from five
decades. From those informants, I employed “snowball” or “network” techniques of
recruiting interview respondents (Glesne & Peshken, 1992, 27; Merriam, 1998, 63;
Patton, 1990); Snowballing, coupled with the response from initial respondents in
the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas, help narrow the focus of the in-person
interviews to those two metropolitan areas.
I also placed advertisements in local publications with target audiences of
gay men who would be of an age to have attended college from the 1940s (including
chapter newsletters of the Primetimers organization in Palm Springs, Califomia and
Phoenix, Arizona). Finally, I utilized postsecondary institutions' gay/lesbian/bisexual
student and/or alumni electronic list-servs (primarily at the University of Southern
Califomia and Arizona State University, although, given the distributive nature of
electronic communication, respondents replied from other lists, both private and
public).
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71
Who: Respondents Profile
The interviews did not concentrate on any single period of time, but rather
represent fairly equally each year of the fifty-five year period. Of the fifty-seven
respondents, three primarily attended institutions outside of the United States for
their undergraduate education (as opposed to attending as part of a study-abroad or
exchange program); the remaining fifty-four attended over fifty different institutions
(some attended more than one institution to complete their undergraduate
education), located in twenty-two states across the U.S. The states are listed in
Chart 3.1 (“Participants’ States of Residence for College Attendance”) and include
public and private, religiously-affiliated and state-supported, smaller liberal-arts
institutions and larger research universities. Within the data chapters that follow, I
group each type and then arranged the narratives chronologically, to show changes
over time in the concepts of identities and within experiences and sensibilities that
comprise the individual identity types as well.
How: Interview Profile
The in-person interviews were, for the most part, conducted privately, one-
on-one. Although I prefer to interview in this method, which allows for more
concentrated analysis from the respondent and richer data, in some instances the
practicalities of the lives of the respondents did not allow this. Five of the interviews
were of couples who had been living together for varying numbers of years, and
another was of a couple whom had just recently met. Interviewing these men
together, as pairs, brought out new challenges (giving attention to detail and follow-
up to both respondents within a limited amount of time) while presenting distinct
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Chart 3.1
Participants’ States of Residence
for Collegiate Attendance
72
r
22 states represented:
Arkansas
Connecticut
Indiana
Kentucky
Maine
Massachusetts
Missouri
New Jersey
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Texas
California
Illinois
Kansas
Louisiana
Maryland
Michigan
Nevada
New York
Oregon
Tennessee
Wisconsin
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73
benefits (having someone as part of the intenriew who could act not only as a source
of validity and veracity for the respondents but also as a sounding board for
reflections about college experience and identity ideation). In addition, I conducted
one small focus group of three friends. I did not conduct all of the interviews in
person: six of the interviews were conducted via electronic mail, and consisted of
two or three sets of questions posed to the informants.
The single-meeting interviews lasted between forty-five minutes and three
hours, depending upon the number of respondents being interviewed at the time,
their time available for the interview, and the depth of our conversations. The
interviews were semi-structured, ethnographic interviews designed to elicit each
respondent's life story (delimited, usually, to the time from their entering high school
to graduating and/or leaving postsecondary institutions). Given the comfort, interest
and experiences of the individual respondents, the interviews often deviated from
the protocol, but always focused on the men's self-concepts, concepts of sexuality,
and college memories.
The protocol questions (included as Appendix A, “Interview Protocol”) were
crafted to elicit personal oral histories (Denzin, 1995), focusing on the issues of
sexuality, identity, and how experiences during the college years (and, to a lesser
extent, the high school and immediate post-graduation years) impacted both.
Although I did not ask every question in every interview, the questions I posed were
a balance of close-ended (Where did you attend college?) and open-ended (When
you went to college, how did you define yourself in terms of your sexuality?), as well
as the different types of ethnographic questions Spradly (1979) outlines, including
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74
descriptive (Please tell me what a typical Tuesday night of, say, junior year, was like:
what would you be doing?), structural (What words or terms did you use to refer to
someone you might be dating?), and contrasting (Can you tell if someone is not
heterosexual? How?).
The in-person interviews I tape recorded for later transcription. I also took
field notes during the interviews and drafted interview summaries immediately
following the interviews. For those men I interviewed via e-mail, I edited the
interview protocol to two sets of questions (included as Appendix B. “E-Mail
Interview Protocol"). Initially, I e-mailed the first set of questions; when the
respondents returned that set, I fonmrarded them the second (utilizing recent research
methods for electronic research [cf., Goldman-Segall, 1995; Goldman-Segall,
Wallinsky & Halff, 1997]. After receiving their second set of answers, I conducted a
brief content analysis, and followed up, in the third and final collection of questions,
on their first two sets of responses. That set of questions included inquiries of
veracity as well as questions chosen to probe for deeper, more analytical responses
to the first sets of questions, utilizing recursive and comparative/contrast techniques.
In each of the interviews, I used a variety of styles of posting queries. Most
often I employed a recursive questioning technique - a model of interpersonal
communication I crafted to address sensitive, potentially confusing, or distant
events, approaching the topics from through a number of redundant questions and
varied vantage points - to probe a respondent's memories of his collegiate
experience, his concepts (both past and present) of his identity and sexuality, and
his analysis of the meanings and/or importance of each. This style is a variant of
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both the respondent validation and comparison/contrast techniques: not only was I
repeating respondents' terms and stories back to them for confirmation (and at times
clarification), I also compared their beginning ideas and ideations about their identity
with apparent changes (evident from their responses) that occurred during college
(or, for a very few, soon after college).
Further, in some interviews I employed a constant/comparative approach to
the interview subjects' identity formations and analyses of those formations,
particularly after I began to discern the actual identity types. Utilizing this method I
compared the respondents' ideations with those of other interview subjects, theories
of gay and/or student development, and/or other published research. For other
interviews, I adopted a life-history approach (Atkinson, 1998; Dollard, 1935; Linde,
1993; Mandelbaum, 1973; Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992) to better understand (and
later, convey) changes that the individual fe lt conceming his ideation of himself and
his collegiate experiences. Each of these styles of eliciting data works within
Garmezy's (1974) retrospective method of data collection. I attempted, though, to
adopt a conversational style of interviewing that best elicited narratives from the
respondents.
When speaking with the men, I also utilized tenants of queer theory,
juxtaposing the memories and identities that the men recalled against a variety of
"norms," including the concepts of student identity and related development models,
gay identity development models, and other cultural markers, both within higher
educational systems and the broader society as a whole.
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Identity Analysis: Typologies
If identity development theories suggest (or at least imply) that almost
everyone develops along specific paths within a given population (comprised of
college students, non-heterosexuals, or members of differing races), typological
theories work from a different set of precepts. Typologies examine dissimilarities
within specific (similar) populations, mapping identifiable trends and characteristics
that denote differences within those populations. 'Typology theories reflect
individual stylistic differences in how students approach their words " (Evans, Forney
& Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 204). In this manner, typological theories are more inclusive,
more expansive, and better represent a variety of experiences, serving "as a
framework within which psychosocial and cognitive-structural development takes
place, and... [influencing] the manner in which students address development in
these aspects of their lives" (Evens, Forney & Guido-DiBrito, 1998, 204). As such,
typological theories are both descriptive rather than prescriptive, but can be utilized
as guides for educational and student development programming.
One of the strengths of typological models is the ability to “give us important
information about sources of support and challenge for students who are othenvise
developmentally similar” (Evans, Forney, & DiBrito, 1998, 204). Moreover, that
information is not used to classify people as “good” or “bad,” but rather as different
(and how); “Each type is seen as contributing something positive and unique to any
situation” (Evans, Forney, & DiBrito, 1998, 204). Beyond describing individual or
group characteristics, typological models describe the methods and manners of
interpersonal interactions within and across types.
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A number of well-known psychological and developmental theories are
typologies, Including Kolb’s (1984, 1985) theory of experiential learning, Astln’s
(1993) theory of student Involvement, Clark and Trow’s (1966) theory of collegiate
student Identities, Holland's theories of vocational personalities and work
environments (1958, 1992), the Myers-Briggs (Briggs Myers, 1980; Myers &
McCaulley, 1985) adaption of Jung’s (1923/1971) theories of types of personality,
and most recently Kuh’s typology based upon student activities (Kuh, Hu, & Vesper,
2000). Tierney (1997) posited a typology of gay men (Passers, Castro Clones,
Queer Nationals, and Cultural Citizens). One might notice that these examples are
primarily concerned with experiences and identities apart from educational settings;
moreover, most of these typological theories present individuals as maintaining a
(fairly) fixed identity, not open to much fluctuation, let alone change. Most theorists
who study college student development do not utilize typological models, perhaps in
part because mapping change is a vital component of student identity development.
I believe the same to be true for those who work in gay identity development as well.
But the typological model offers a broader context for conveying experiences, and
how those experiences affect (and effect) changes in identity for individuals, over
time and in particular contexts.
A Model Model: Campus Life
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Campus Life (1987) is a historical typological
study that has served as the model for this dissertation project. Her work provides a
clear typological model of various student identities. She “attempts to describe the
variety of ways that undergraduates have described themselves, viewed their
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professors and fellow collegians, formed associations, and created systems of
meanings and codes of behavior” (Horowitz, 1987, ix). In doing so, she proposes a
system of student identity development based upon three basic classifications:
college men, outsiders, and rebels.
College men (and later, females Horowitz termed college women) forged
their collective identity through struggles against the faculty of the earliest colleges in
the United States. From the end of the eighteenth century on, they created clubs,
associations and extracurricular activities for themselves, in part to relate what they
were learning to the world they perceived, and in part to provide support (numerical
and emotional) for reform efforts aimed at their college. College men did not expect
to take interest in their instructors, nor much in their studies; the purpose of college,
in their minds, was to discover how to operate in society and make contacts for life
after college. College men could be viewed as insiders, working within social and
campus structures to create a privileged (and privileging) social system.
Outsiders, the second type of student to appear in Horowitz’s schema, were
typically poorer than the college men, often attending institutions on scholarships
and reliant upon faculty for their continued sponsorship. Rather than looking to their
collegiate peers for role models, outsiders looked to faculty members for examples
of how they saw themselves fitting into society after college. Because of their
ethnicity or religious beliefs, college men excluded outsiders from many of the
associations and fraternities; by the mid-nineteenth century, some outsiders tried to
form their own extracurricular activities (usually study groups or literary societies).
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but for the most part outsiders studied, tried to remain on neutral if not good terms
with their instructors, and prepared for a “serious" life.
Unlike the college men and the outsiders, rebels perceived that life was not
confined to the college or its campus: “Outside its gates stood a vital world of
economics, politics, and the arts, more real than the fun and games of football" or
the “grind” of simply studying (Horowitz, 1987, 86). Rebels combined the studying of
the outsiders with the non-academic aspirations of the college men, and applied
both to the world in which they planned to enter after graduation. They felt more ties
to current political and artistic movements than to traditions of either students or
institutions, and they used college as a training ground, testing their abilities to effect
change upon their immediate world, the campus. By the early twentieth century,
rebels created their own associations, and more importantly, their own publications,
if they could not be active in the established ones.
Using these three types of collegiate identity, Horowitz traces the history of
student life from the late eighteenth century through the mid-1980s. Along the way,
she describes the changes each group experienced, including the institutionalization
of the traditions of college men, the changes of peer and public attitudes toward
outsiders in the 1950s and 1980s, and the cultural and political importance of the
rebels, particularly in the 1910s and 1960s. Horowitz’s analysis is largely based
upon how students defined or understood themselves and their actions, which is
often quite different from the definitions institutions or researchers might place upon
the students and/or their actions.
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Resisting the temptation to simplify this dissertation by using existing and
agreed upon terms and definitions was not easy. When I proposed this study,
members of my dissertation committee were concerned that I would conduct
qualitative research without a goal, without answerable questions. Specifically, they
questioned what typology I would find, and I fear my answer at the time was not
comforting: "I do not know. That is why I am conducting the project, to find out what
the typology is." I did not even care to hazzard a guess, in the proposal defense, as
to what the typology might eventually be, for fear I would create a self-fulfilling study.
i4 priori research is particularly troublesome in work conceming identity. After
all, we must know something about our research topics in order to know what
questions to ask, and of whom. But those of us who investigate how and why those
who identify in particular ways must guard against the initial evaluative response that
so often occurs: "That answer does not reflect my experience; can that response
be true?" Even after many interviews, I sometimes asked myself, while I was in the
midst of conducting an interview, That story does not fit into the pattems you have
recognized so fa r can it be true, or even relevant? The key to working through
these impulses, I believe from this study, is not to ignore that voice, that questioning
impulse, but to do two things when I hear it: one, to utilize the recursive and/or
comparative/contrast techniques, to probe the respondent further and (with luck)
glean information that will help with later analysis (including of veracity of the data);
and two, to note (preferably within the field notes) the thoughts of the potential
discrepancies for consideration during the analysis of the entire project. The
confounding data should not be discounted out of hand, however.
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While I was conducting the interviews for this dissertation, pattems of
identification and experience began to emerge, eventually developing into the
typology I outlined in the Chapter One. Theorization about identity formation -
particularly for a typological theory - must be open to multiple paths of development,
even within discernable pattems or types. As I mentioned before, though,
incongruity does not negate validity or veracity.
Historical Analysis: Validity and Veracity
Using retrospective data collection methods requires one to address two
issues of truthfulness: Did the data (in this case, college experiences and self
ideations) provided by the respondents actually happen, or occur as the researcher
presented it {veracity, or what can be proven to have occurred)? Second, did the
respondents' analyses, as well as the researcher's, represent truthfully the data
{validity, or what can be said to be true or relevant). Researchers who mine other
people's memories for data should obviously do so with a plan for why and how they
will gather the information. Menneer (1978) proffered guidelines for assessing
memory-based data:
■ Is the subject matter sensitive to time errors?
■ If so, will the errors be important to the study?
■ Can erroneous data be corrected by comparing it to data from other
existing sources?
■ Can other, more mechanical (i.e., less human) methods be used to
collect the data?
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8 2
In planning this project, I determined that the understanding of changes in
non-heterosexual male identities in the latter half of the twentieth century was not
highly dependent upon respondents' perceptions of single events; rather, I
examined pattems, through the culmination of experiences, of ideas about the
respondents' self-identity. The project was consequently less vulnerable to
distortion of respondents' experiences in college, for the interview questions could
be answered with reference to events over time, rather than in specific instances.
As the data in the next three chapters will reveal, some respondents represented
themselves as quite sexually active, even promiscuous, before and during college;
such a respondent's current concept of himself has tells us not only about his
understanding of his collegiate experiences but also how his concept of himself in
college changed - or did not change - because of those experiences and
sensibilities. Moreover, the typological model is less susceptible to such distortions,
as it based upon how a number of individuals experience the same kinds of events,
emotions or ideations, creating pattems of development; such pattems would, by
design, not exist if multiple men did not have similar (and thus verifiable)
experiences.
Several factors can, however, limit the availability, as well as veracity and
validity, of retrospective data. Social norms, guilt, respondents' levels of interest in
the subject, and, perhaps most of all, memory error pose serious threats against
respondents’ abilities to provide accurate information (Menneer, 1978). Memory
error (whether it be forgetting what occurred or a "false consciousness " of what did
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83
happen) is an uncontrollable potential fallacy of any work utilizing retrospective
methods, for
it appears that our actual memories change over time, and that we
tend to "reconstruct" rather than “recover” them as details fade or
become lost. In short, we automatically seem to be remolding our
past to fit our present circumstances or emotional needs and to
maintain a consistent personal narrative (Ludwig, 1997, 22).
As Gandara (1995) pointed out, there is considerable evidence that the reporting of
general attitudes and factual information is relatively stable overtim e" (1995, 20);
she cited Gutek (1978) and Haaga (1986) as sources refuting most of these
inhibiting factors.
The respondents in this study were, for the most part, extremely interested in
the project. Most of them expressed a desire to see the finished product; several of
them indicated that not only did they enjoy the process of the interview, they
appreciated remembering events and emotions and thanked me for allowing them
"the opportunity to review their lives in such a nonthreatening forum" (Gandara,
1995, 21). In this regard, some of the men were remembering, in the words of
McLaren and Tadeu da Silva, "in a critical mode... in Freirean terms, to confront the
social amnesia of generations in flight from their own collective histories" (1993, 73-
74).
As another non-heterosexual man, I was viewed by the respondents as an
"insider" who shared many of the same formative questions of self-identity as the
respondents; this helped to increase their levels of comfort and insight, since
neither the respondents nor I had to confront layers of difference between us
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84
2000; Gergen & Gergen, 2000; Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Merriam, 1998; Warren,
1998). I feel this identification engendered a sense of trust and openness in the
responses of most of the men, causing them to feel less inhibited and less likely to
"reinterpret " their experiences or ideas into a heterosexual context. Further, as each
respondent had advanced to postsecondary education (and all but one graduated
with at least a bachelor's degree), these respondents were "uniquely predisposed to
accuracy in reporting" (Gandara, 1995, 21), and, as highly educated respondents,
their retrospective reporting and analyses were probably more accurate (Haaga,
1986).
Memory, though, is still a confounding issue when dealing with retrospective
qualitative research. I have used the terms "memories" and "experiences," or
variations thereof, relying upon a common understanding of the concepts. To
understand memory better - and to address its relation to this project - 1 shall clarify
the terms. Experiences are actual (verifiable) events that occur in a person's life; an
incident that occurred at a particular time, in a specific place.
Memories on the other hand, are placed [contextually] in the time
they are remembered, narrated, reinterpreted, sometimes rejected
and often forgotten. Recollections are immediately experienced.
Memory makes a critical difference to these: in being remembered
an experience becomes a memory (Hastrup, 1995, 102).
Consequently, I faced a Janus-like dilemma in this project: several of the
respondents had been in college so recently that they had not gained the time and
perspective with which to place those experiences into the realm of memory;
conversely, many of those I interviewed were so distant from the experiences - had
remembered, narrated, even reinterpreted the meanings of those experiences to
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85
their identities and lives - that the opportunity for their mis-remembering the
experiences (the development o f a false consciousness) confounded my ability to
verify the veracity of what they told me (how true their memories were to their
experiences) and the validity of what they told me (how true - or applicable - their
collective memories were to the experiences of others).
Perhaps it is unavoidable, as Proust might have cautioned us, to reflect upon
our past without re-coloring it in hues less harsh and more bright than the light of the
times allowed us to see. This is a problem in a field that is situated in the social
sciences; as Stoll chided those of us who work with others’ memories, "Factuality is
a legitimate issue for any narrative " (1999, 273). It is not enough that we avoid
improprieties in our questions, our data, our analyses, our presentations of the three;
we must avoid the appearance of impropriety. In this case, the one impropriety that I
cannot disprove is the potential fo r respondents' faulty memories.
Accordingly, it is not enough simply to repeat (even in edited format
corresponding to the standards of the field, as the narratives that follow this chapter
do) the stories these men have told me; I - the researcher, the theorist, and the
writer - must simultaneously accept and question what I am told. One challenge,
then, to the ethnographer, to the historian, to the theorist, is to find multiple sources
of data, both apart from and within the individual narrators. The addition of sources
of information outside of the study participants allowed greater historical
perspectives of the social and educational climates, provided insight from college
students who wrote of their experiences and sensibilities prior to this study, and
offered non-“professionar observations of participants and reporters of social
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8 6
change in the United States during the twentieth century. In the vernacular of the
profession, this is called "triangulation of data" (Denzin, 1988). My multiple sources
of information, which I used to check against the others to determine validity of the
information, included;
* > interviews with non-heterosexual men who attend college in the
United States between 1945 and 1999;
study of memoirs written by non-heterosexual men who attended
college in the U.S. between those same years;
study of historical documents from selected postsecondary
institutions, conceming the activities and politics of non-heterosexuals
on campuses (particularly University of Kansas, Stanford University,
Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, and University of
Michigan);
* ■ study of journalistic accounts of non-heterosexuals (on campus and
off, both historic and contemporary);
► study of other histories of the lives and experiences of non
heterosexuals in the U.S., 1945 to the present;
► study of other research projects on identity formation for non
heterosexuals;
- study of other research projects on identity formation for college
students.
I also utilized multiple methods of recording the data. Making field notes
while tape-recording the interviews allowed me freedom to comment to myself
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connections within the context of the conversation I was having with the respondent
as well as to other men's comments and my (then current) thoughts on the identity
typologies.
To further safeguard for veracity of the respondents’ narratives and
experiences, I invited the respondents in this project to provide a “member check"
(Kushner & Norris, 1980/1981; Lather, 1986), by reviewing and commenting upon
the first draft of the manuscript of the data. I posted the data section of the project
(Chapters Four, Five and Six) on a website I maintained at the University of
Southern California. The pages were not listed on the homepage of the site, but
they were accessible to the respondents who entered the complete page address
into their web browser, which I provided via e-mail.
Multiple sources helped to clarify the validity of the data, but the veracity of
individuals' memories was another matter. The second challenge to someone
attempting something as nebular as a "typological history" is to find multiple ways of
asking individual interview subjects to express their recollections and analyses of
their collegiate lives. I had to question, and re-question, what meanings they made
of their collegiate experiences, both while in college and later. Consequently, I
conducted the interviews using the recursive method I mentioned earlier in this
chapter, along with the contrast method of questioning outlined by Spradly (1979).
History shows changes in people over time; a typological history shows
changes in how people identified (or were identified, or were identifiable). If history
can rely upon facts (or at least the assumption of facts), typologies can rely only
upon the larger perspectives of the patterns of those memories of our subjects, upon
our analyses of those memories.
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8 8
Narratives In Context
Ethnography is an act of memory..., [and] Memories are Individual
and collective, the result of shared experiences and individual
quests (Coffey, 1999, 127).
As I noted earlier, I endeavored throughout this project to avoid determining
the types of identity I would find (or was finding) - based as they are, on memory
and experiences - until after I finished my conversations with the informants. I
wanted to nullify, to the extent possible, biasing the study with my own memories,
ideations and experiences. In addition, typologies present to (and from) researchers
views of patterns o f individuals' lives. “The biographer should let his material form
its own shapes; lives do form patterns, but patterns accumulate one piece at a time"
(Reid, 1990, 6). However, the patterns in non-heterosexual lives are not always
linear; as Gale wrote,
the trouble with homosexual biography is that it tends to fall into
overlapping narratives rather than an easily assimilated line.
Where even a philandering straight subject will tend to have a
succession of mistresses or a succession of wives, gay lives,
especially gay lives before the mid-1970s, tend to be lived several
at a time. Official lovers, rough lovers, family, non family, those
who know, those who don’t; the mere fact of the subject's
alternative sexuality causes narrative fractures (Gale, 1999, 7).
In my representation of the collegiate experiences and influences upon the
respondents' identities, I have attempted to smooth out, as much as possible, the
men and de of the lives of the narrators, as well as to be, as Reid (1990) implores,
“decently selective rather than drudgingly inclusive," sparing “the truly trivial" while
“not fear[ing] to find certain small things significant" (1990, 6).
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89
The construction of the narratives - choosing what passages from a
particular interview to include, to combine with other statements to make sense and
convey meaning (both that the interview respondent intended and that I, as the
researcher, found) - is a complex process (Polkinghome, 1988) in which
transcription and analysis overlap (Kvale, 1996): indeed, "Analysis cannot be easily
distinguished from transcription" (Riessman, 1993, 60). The narratives I produced
from the transcriptions, the audio tapes and my field notes were filtered through my
analysis of the totality of all three.
In the next three chapters, the data section of this project, I present those
narratives constructed from interviews with informants whose experiences and
stories convey key aspects of each type of identity for non-heterosexual collegiate
men. I have structured our conversations into chronological narratives with three
main components to guide the reader eariv college and later college. A few of the
narratives also contain adolescence and post-colleoe experiences that illuminate the
collegiate sensibilities formed from the narrators’ experiences and senses.
The accounts comply, for the most part, to Labov's (1972, 1982; Labov &
Waletzky, 1967) schematic for structuring narratives: each provides an orientation
to the narrative (time, place, setting), a complicating action (the sequence of the
relevant events), at least partial evaluation (the respondent's meaning and
significance of the experiences conveyed), the resolution (what finally happened; in
this case, how they adopted/accepted/ integrated a non-heterosexual identity), and,
for a few, a coda returning the narration to a present-day perspective (particularly
necessary for some of the men, whose identity - while impacted during college -
they did not accept or declare as non-heterosexual until after college).
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90
Some of the informants for this project wished to remain anonymous. While I
agree with Becker’s (1997, 354} charge to historians to reflect that “history is made
by real people possessing real names” and not pseudonyms, I respect the
complexities of the lives of the interview respondents. Anonymity, in this case,
assured greater detail of collegiate experiences, increased freedom to share ideas
and experiences of a sexual nature, and opportunities for me to strive for deeper
and more evocative data. Pseudonyms for the individuals who chose not to use
their true names - as well as for all persons named within respondents’ narratives
(who obviously did not provide consent to use their names) - are identified by an
asterisk (*) after pseudonym, following the first mention of that person.
In addition to the narratives, I will occasionally offer other forms of qualitative
and historical data. Some respondents whose full narratives I do not include
provided singular insightful comments that epitomize qualities of the experiences
and sensibilities of particular types; those comments I have added within the
analysis and explanation of the types. Also, selections from published memoirs of
non-heterosexuals I offer as further evidence of how I comprised the typological
theory, of how I made sense of the experience of surveying the sensibilities of non
heterosexual collegians’ identities. How those concepts of identity developed,
influenced each other, and changed over time is presented and analyzed in Chapter
Seven; the final chapter. Chapter Eight, examines components of non-heterosexual
identity, to address how higher education’s systems and policies affect (and
sometimes effect) non-heterosexual student identity development.
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Before the concluding section of the project, however, is Section II. The
reader will find little of my experience (either as researcher or conversationalist) in
the next section of this project, which contains the three chapters of data explaining
the details of the typolgoical categories, focusing upon the narratives of twenty-one
respondents. While this might appear to support a belief in "objective" reporting of
data, that is not my intent; fully cognizant of the criticism inherent in omniscient
narration, I chose to remove as much of myself from the respondents' narrations as
much as possible. I did so because their individual collegiate experiences, senses,
and sensibilities form the basis for the typology. Additionally, crafted the
conversations we had during the interviews (and e-mailings) into cohesive narratives
that attempted to convey, accurately and vividly, their stories. Further, the
chronological narrative structure imparts clearly and tellingly how each individual fits
into the typological classification. To be sure, my voice is in each paragraph, in the
restructuring of conversational and interview speech into cohesive narratives that
address the issues of identity and collegiate experience, in the analytical lives that
contextualize the men's stories. I hope this style conveys the understandings of the
lives of these men, presents the meanings they have made in (and because of)
postsecondary contexts, in their own words.
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Chapter Four
Tea Rooms and No Sympathy:
Homosexuals and the Closet
This chapter presents two classifications of non-heterosexual students
emerging by the 1940s and continuing to the present: those who identify (or are
identified by others) as "homosexual," a clinical term denoting sexual activity as an
(or the) indicator of identity (Greenberg, 1988; Katz, 1994), and those whose sexual
and emotional lives are led secretly, "in the closet" (Signorile, 1993; Tierney, 1995).
These labels were in direct opposition to what was considered the norm in American
culture: the open and visible heterosexual who has no questions or qualms about
his sexuality. Perhaps surprisingly, these two types of experience continued at least
through the 1980s.
In the three chapters that comprise this section, I present the recollections of
men who attended college in the U.S. since the mid-1940s, who recognized their
collegiate experiences as fitting within six categories of conceptualization; in this
chapter and the next, I discuss four classifications of experience and identity for
non-heterosexual students; Chapter Six is concerned with two distinct sets of
experiences and sensibilities of non-heterosexual students not discussed in the
existing literature. I have arranged the narratives chronologically, to demonstrate
the consistency of the classifications over time, as well as how cultural changes
might (or might not) e/affect those ideations. The narrators' individual experiences
and responses to the concepts highlight the differences as well as the similarities of
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93
their non-heterosexual experiences on campus, and, always, the juxtaposition of
their lives and sensibilities to those of the (presumed) norm of heterosexuality.
Homosexual
Although, as other scholars have noted (including, among others, D’Emilio,
1983; Howard, 1999; Loughery, 1998; Marcus, 1992; and Sears, 1997),
homosexual as a collective social identity did not really resonate among many non
heterosexuals until the late 1960s, the term was nevertheless used as early as the
1940s to distinguish certain people (distinct from certain acts) from the norm. The
U.S. Army's use of Question 18 to eliminate non-heterosexuals from military service,
as mentioned in Sam's narration in this chapter, focused on "tendencies," not
specific actions; indeed, the psychological rationale behind the question itself shows
the clinical origins of the idea of what meaning must be connoted not in camal
activity but in "tendencies" or preferences for those acts. Government officials were
less concerned about whether a man got o ff with another man than it was about to
what extent he liked it (or thought he would like it).
Collegians in the mid-twentieth century held similar views: the actions could
be overlooked if a man appeared to "like" girls. Despite this, social conformity to
sexual roles did not prescribe the self-concepts of non-heterosexuals as it might
have to their heterosexual peers. As Amie Kantrowitz, who in 1970s New York City
was on the one hand a gay activist and the other a college English professor, wrote
in his memoir of life in the closet:
Socially, I was a heterosexual. During the [high] school year I
escorted the daughters of Newark to movies and bowling alleys
and restaurants, to dances and hops and proms. Every date was
ended with interminable tongue kissing in the back hallway. I don't
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know if my attentions turned my dates on, but they didn't do much
for me. It was just that I knew everyone else did it, and there had
to be something to brag about the next day; but I couldn't escape
the feeling that I wasn't the only one for whom it was done out of
obligation rather than desire. Whatever their reasons, everybody
was pretending to have a good time. We were all afraid not to: it
would have seemed un-American (Kantrowitz, 1977, 48).
Although he continued to date women during his years at Rutgers University
(which were his late teens, as he matriculated at an early age), Kantrowitz ultimately
admitted his same-gender affections and desires. Beneath that revelation, however,
was resentment of those who were, like him, feeling (if not necessarily living) outside
of the norm.
I finally confessed to myself that I was a homosexual. I confessed
to my best friend, Leslie, too. And he confessed to me. The same
confession. We suffered the blow fate had dealt us in the years of
prolonged telephonings of mutual self-pity. We referred to our
common vice by the code name "Peanut Butter," because there
was a bar near school named Skippy's that was reputedly gay,
even though we were both afraid of being seen there. Although
we commiserated, we really felt contempt for each other’s
sexuality, because we saw disquieting reflections of ourselves in it.
Ultimately I could no longer endure the waspiness we engendered
in each other, and I asked him to stop calling. .. He was the only
homosexual friend I had until I was twenty-nine (Kantrowitz, 1977,
57).
For Kantrowitz, his identity was formed as much by his desires as it was by
the dissonance he experienced between those desires and the cultural norms he
perceived. He was sure of this identity, and confided it to another, before he ever
had a sexual encounter with another man (which happened at age 20, just after he
graduated from Rutgers) (Kantrowitz, 1977, 58). It was the intent, the emotional
investment, of the desire to have sex with another man that primarily determined the
homosexual identity.
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Other aspects were ascribed to the concept as well. Debauchery,
effeminacy, and passivity were perceived traits of the homosexual male. Even if one
displayed two of the three, a single trait could be enough to convince one's self (or
perhaps others) that one was not un-normal. A passage from The autobiography of
noted Episcopalian priest and peace activist Malcolm Boyd conveyed how one could
separate the homosexual act from the actor
Once when the four of us [high school friends, in Denver] were at a
drive-in, somebody pointed out several truck drivers walking out of
a parking-lot men's room. They rubbed their crotches and
laughed. A captive "queer" inside had "gone down" on them, we
were made to understand. So, I thought, that was homosexuality.
It would take a devastatingly long time before a concept of gay life
as something furtive and melancholy would change for me into
healthy, life-giving realities (Boyd, 1978, 44).
As a teen, Boyd felt homo-erotic and homo-affectional stirrings and while he
recognized the difference between himself and most of his peers, he did not see the
similarity between himself and the public definition of homosexuality he had
observed.
The private definition, however, could expand to include others to whom one
felt an affinity. Homosexual men gathered socially, if discretely (as Fellows' [1996]
narrators from the Midwest and Howard’s [1999] from the Mississippi demonstrate);
indeed, as early as the 1930s, non-heterosexuals formed social networks - including
house parties, public gatherings, and scholarship - were evident (to those who knew
or chose to look) at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (Loughery, 1998, 77-78).
Throughout the twentieth century, in smaller towns as well as larger cities,
homosexual men met fo r dinner, threw parties, and created webs of connection that
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stretched across states and social strata (Chauncey, 1994; Fellows, 1998; Howard,
1999; Loughery, 1998).
But these meetings were always at risk o f being discovered, the men of
being identified by those outside of the group as being a part of the group. The
meanings made from those experiences - and the definitions the men placed upon
those meanings and actions - were placed in opposition to the norm of
heterosexuality. As both of the following narrations from homosexual collegians
convey, meeting and gathering with others who identified as homosexuals became a
part of their collegiate experience (although it also took them both away from their
campuses, in two distinctly different ways).
Wattor
Adolescence. Walter* grew up in Chicago, living with his mother and
grandmother. "I was shy, didn't know anybody." He recognized his attraction to
other males - and his dislike of females - at an early age; his emotions were
apparent to his family: "My grandmother once, when I was about ten or eleven...
gave me a bear hug and said, 'You know, I hope someday when you grow up you
find a nice man to live with and be happy. I know you hate women but I love you
anyway." I said, 'Yeah, I think you're right, but I don't know why. "
Eariv College. Walter received a Catholic education and completed two
years of study at the University of Illinois - Navy Pier, in Chicago. In 1950, he
enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana, living alone in an apartment off
campus. From Walter's studies of history felt he was "bom 200 years late. I knew I
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was gay, always would be.... [But thought] there aren't many people like me. At the
time, it was harder for me to study, to plan for my life" because of this.
"I didn't have any [non-heterosexual] friends or any acquaintances. The only
place I can vaguely remember is a sort of gay cruising area in a park, at night. I
don't recall any other places where gay people were congregating, although I did
meet two or three professors. I'm trying to think of how I became acquainted with
them; maybe on the library or on campus or something. .. I would be at their
apartment, and they would - 1 guess they had little, quiet parties, social gatherings,
dinner parties occasionally. That was about it.
'They had what we would call an open relationship. After a while, it [Walter’s
relationship to the professors] wasn't sexual, it was social; we would discuss
literature and all sorts of things. One of them eventually moved to New Jersey, and
the other moved to Washington, D.C. They both had other lovers after that. We
wrote over the years.
"At the time, this was about 1951, maybe, they [the University of Illinois] had
what they called the programme,' like the Russian deal. One of the professors told
me, 'You have to be very careful.' He even had his telephone disconnected
because they were investigating everybody, and they said the college at that time
had a quota system. The college could have no more than five percent Jewish
students, no more than two percent Blacks, and zero tolerance for gays. These two
people that I knew [the professors] were discovered in the investigation. Ultimately...
they were given a transfer instead of just being fired. They were told to leave, and
they [each] transferred to another university. "
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During this time, Waiter came under the scrutiny of campus authorities. "I
got a call one time from the security police, and they asked me if I knew somebody.
I can't even remember his name, either. I don't know how I met him, but I did know
him; I think I might have met him at one of the dinner parties. He was a rather
outwardly gay person; promiscuous a little bit, I guess. So I just mentioned that I
knew him and that was all. Then after that, I was being investigated. Over the
Christmas holidays I might have been in a gay bar that was raided, in Chicago. It
was on Division Street. And I don't know whether that might have gone on my
record. They [the Chicago police] asked what I was doing, and I had to admit that I
was a student at the University. Without much of a hearing or a lawyer or anything,
[the University] just sent me a letter. They had a regents' meeting at the school; I
was dismissed for conduct unbecoming a student. It was a civil rights matter then,
as it is now, but that's what happened.
"At that time, I made up my mind I was going to get my degrees, and I had to
find out how. I didn't get a lawyer, which people would have done now, I suppose. I
had to tell my mother what happened; I had to come back home, give up my
apartment. Then I went to a short time to a psychoanalyst in Chicago. This was
maybe going to help me being dismissed, but it didn't. The psychoanalyst said,
'Well, you certainly should go on with your college career,' and he gave me a names
of several colleges that would take gay people. There were only three or four that
would ever let anybody in as a student in those circumstances, and one of them
happened to be Roosevelt College, now Roosevelt University. They were more than
happy to have somebody with a good academic background; whether they were
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gay or not had no effect whatsoever. So I managed in the next year or two to get
my degree from there. After that, I went on and took a graduate program at
Northwestern University in Chicago, and I went for my M.B.A. at that point."
Recalling the other names on the list of schools accepting students after
dismissal for homosexual conduct, Walter remembered, "Northwestern I think was
one of them, and there was another university in Ohio (it might have been Oberiin),
and it seems to me there was a journalism school at the University of Missouri, but
I'm not certain of that." But the list provided by the psychoanalyst proved to Walter
that there were institutions of higher education at the time that were not adverse to
homosexual students.
Later College. After leaving University of Illinois, Waiter continued to
maintain a private, interior life; "I didn't think there was any point in saying anything
one way or another. " At Roosevelt, "they didn't really have a gay and lesbian group
there, either." Nonetheless, Walter did not feel he had to be as discreet as he had
been at Illinois and continued to have sex with men. "I was looking for a long-term
relationship, but because of the nature of context... it didn't crystallize into a long
term relationship." Although he had a car, "I had a very limited social life. I didn't
know where to go, really. I just have vague remembrances of parks or places like
that to meet people, and that was a rather limited encounter. There were certainly,
as I recall, no gay bars or restaurants."
Compounding Walter's isolationism was his disconnection from his family.
His father had moved away from Chicago when W alter was very young, and Walter
did not seem to be emotionally close to his mother. They only discussed his
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sexuality, his "private matter," once. "When I told my mother. W ell, I have to come
home. I'm being expelled' and I told her why, she said, 'You should have told me all
those things. Why didn't you tell me?' And I said, 'It's none of your business. " She
wasn't upset, and she didn't have any feelings about it. I never mentioned it to the
rest of my family, and they never knew."
Over time, Walter's conception of how his sexuality impacted his self-concept
changed. The physical acts were no longer paramount: "Sex was very important,
but the identity - social, intellectual - was the most important." Being gay was "a
private, personal m a tte r-b u t the political aspect... political and social power" held
forth as W alter went on to complete graduate work at Northwestern.
Duchess
Eariv College. Duchess* enrolled at a large university in Los Angeles in
1979. Originally from the Tropics but from a Western-educated family. Duchess felt
constrained by the reception he felt from his classmates. He "didn't want to be just
stereotyped with the ethnic population. I wanted them liking me as an individual, not
as an ethnicity." He recognized his interests and feelings for other boys before
coming to the United States at age eighteen, but had neither the opportunity nor the
inclination to act upon them. "For me, [homosexuality] wasn't even real when I was
growing up in the Tropics. It didn't exist. I never could see that it actually existed in
real life."
Even after matriculating. Duchess found it difficult, if not Impossible, to
express himself. "I had a very limited number of friends, certainly nobody I could talk
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to. I was so naive, I didn't even know that a community existed, that social places
existed, that there were books about gay people."
He also did not have a vocabulary to convey his desires or emotions, but that
changed during his first year in college. In his second semester. Duchess answered
a classified advertisement in the campus newspaper, from a photographer searching
for male models, "all types, for print work and runway work... It was a legitimate ad,
very short." Duchess called the number listed, made an appointment, and then rode
the bus to meet the photographer. "The bus happened to go through West
Hollywood. .. I remember looking down and seeing these guys, and thinking There's
something very- excuse the word - odd here. I guess it was a start to make me
think that there's an actual life that revolves around that." The photographer
became Duchess' first gay friend, who introduced him to gay social life in Los
Angeles in the early 1980s.
Later College. Duchess stopped out of course work to explore his social life,
choosing to explore cultural settings more accepting and to associate with others
more akin to his burgeoning self-concept. When he returned to campus a few
semesters later, he found it difficult to feel as comfortable in scholastic settings as in
socially gay contexts. "I wanted to seek out what the university had as far as
meeting other people, what kind of support or social programs. So I heard about the
gay and lesbian student union. It was a very loosely-held organization. I think it
received enough support from the student senate to make the student senate look
politically correct, but nothing more than that. I wanted to be a part of something
more, so I became more active. " He was executive director of the organization in
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1985-1987, "but unfortunately it was more in title than anything else. I was still
feeling very closeted in school, and finding it difficult to really be active and open at
the same time." Others on campus were displeased with Duchess because he was
not open on campus or in classes about his sexual orientation; his involvement with
the gay and lesbian student union dwindled.
Although he might have used the term gay at the time, and although he
became increasingly involved in Los Angeles' gay society (and less involved with
campus life). Duchess' sensibility - his understanding of the meaning of his actions
and emotions - was more akin to the homosexual identity than to gay identity. " I
guess back then, especially considering being nineteen, twenty years old, I think
more than anything it was about the sex. It was the fact that I could have sex with
another guy. But I don't want to say that was what it was all about; I met my first
lover when I was nineteen, and I had no idea that two men, I couldn't fathom the
idea that two men could live together like a married couple, like a heterosexual
couple."
Despite the changes this insight created for Duchess, his concept of who he
was, and how that concept affected his behavior, was compartmentalized. His
sexuality "was an attachment to my life. My life didn't revolve around it. I think I still
identified with having a heterosexual existence; work, professionally; the way I
lived, socialized. Even when I was out with someone I liked, I became very straight-
passing. That's the way I lived back then. Even when I was out with someone I
liked, with people who knew we were a couple, we would still behave very hetero:
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not hold hands, not show any signs of affection, not address each other in
endearing terms."
Closeted
While some collegians were cautiously open about their sexuality during
college, feared the social approbation more than the isolation necessary to avoid
society's stings of denigration. The term "living in the closet" served as a metaphor
for denying, suppressing or hiding one's non-heterosexual feelings or activities
(Signorile, 1993; Tierney, 1995). As the narrators show, some closets were larger
than others, some were deeper, and some appeared to have revolving doors.
Closeted men felt distanced from classmates, despite their efforts at joining social
and living organizations. Some dated and even married women, to prove (or to
disprove) their sexuality to themselves and peers. Still others found sex, or at least
symbolic substitutes, in the most conspicuous and seemingly heterosexual places.
But the men in this type, who spent their college years evading, avoiding or lying
about their sexuality, were living, in the words of an undergraduate in the late 1970s,
a life "on the fringes."
The reminiscences of Malcolm Boyd (1978) of life in college in the 1940
again illustrated this experience;
In college, I dated for appearance's sake, and because I like to
dance and be in the social company of others. I made obsessive
efforts to achieve acceptable sexuality via the fraternity life. I
joined the jock fraternity, dated a number of girls, and hung my
Greek pin on two or three at successive intervals (Boyd, 1978, 44).
Boyd "lived constantly in a kind of hell, a world split down the middle between hard
social contradictions and insoluble personal dilemmas" (1978, 46), "playing the
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masquerade, trying to find some way to express the affection that other boys
expressed so easily and enviably with girls" (1978, 39). If the social norm was
heterosexuality, Boyd and others classified as closet types believed so firmly in its
power that they hid their emotions, actions, and identities.
The five respondents in this section conveyed similar responses to the duality
they felt the closet imposed upon them during college. Although four of the five
narrations concern college life in the 1950s, the final story illustrates the closet
remains the identity of choice or necessity for some non-heterosexual college
students through today. These stories show how closet life was similar, and yet
varied, across the U.S. The narrators' self-reflection, afforded by distance from the
collegiate experience, also created a richer depiction of the ramifications of living in
the closet.
Paul
Adolescence. Paul* grew up in a town of 2,300 in central New York state;
"Everybody knows everybody there. I had the notion that once I got out of my
hometown, it [life and feeling unpopular] would be different. I certainly made that so.
The first thing that was different [upon leaving for college] was that I was called by
my first name, instead of by my middle name." He attended Fordham College, a
Catholic institution in New York City's Bronx borough, in the early 1950s, where he
majored In sociology. "The freshman year was the happiest time of life, up to that
point. I was totally accepted. I was in the 'in' crowd. I had been a kind of social
leper in high school, up until senior year. It was a big adjustment, to go from being
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on the out to being on the Inside. At college they didn't base social acceptance on
whether you were on the basketball team or the football team.”
Early College. His religion influenced both his choice of school and his
concepts of his sexuality. " I was very much a Catholic young man.... When I was in
college I was in denial. I thought I was straight, with homosexual tendencies. While
I knew that I had gay tendencies, I didn't acknowledge to myself that I was in fact
gay until ten years, at least, after college. It was, for me, an identity crisis."
The crisis was not so much about his feelings toward others, but in his
response to their attraction to him. "I realized that I was attracted to other men, and
a lot of them were attracted to me. During college, I was really rather upset, quite
upset that other men were attracted to me. I didn't have as much of a problem with
my being attracted to other men, because I didn't think it was that serious," unlike
their interest in him. "When men were attracted to me, it scared the shit out of me. I
put them down as gently as I could. It bothered me that I attracted men. Had I been
attracted [to those I attracted], I probably would have succumbed, because there
were a couple of guys that I was attracted to."
In his mind, his attractions were normal, or at least not sinful, while the
unwanted attention of other men to him signified both Paul and the others as not
normal. "All of the guilt about sex was related to females, because they told you how
wrong it was to pet or to have sex before you're married. But they never mentioned
having sex with friends from the same sex. So I didn't identify it particularly as a sin.
I went to confession about masturbation, but I didn't develop a Catholic guilt over the
attraction to other men. Given how Catholic I was, it's kind of amazing. It was kind
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of a social guilt, because I thought anything less than one hundred percent
heterosexual was not acceptable. I never identified it as being sinful until I was well
into my twenties, and I had to confess having sex with another man.”
Paul distinguished between sexual play with peer-aged boys and adult
sexual activity. Before college, he participated in “sexual experimentation in the Boy
Scouts and also before that, with a friend of mine. I just called them sexual
experimentation, because I was usually not the one who initiated it. I went along
with it. I never felt guilty about it." Nevertheless, homosexual acts were proscribed
by the Catholic Church, and Paul's actions put him in direct conflict to his beliefs. "In
the guidelines for confession you have to swear that you will never do it again, and I
knew that I was going to do it again. So, I stopped going to confession."
Sex for Paul happened only once during college, and then off campus. "I
had my first sex with a man when I was in college. It was the best sex I ever had in
my entire life - the most exciting, or whatever. He was a lot older than I was. I had
been getting more and more attracted to men, specifically [more to] black men. I
had heard on campus that some guys would go down to Central Park West and they
would get propositioned. It got to be known that Greenwich Village was a place
where the gay men - we called them fags, at the time - would be, or along Central
Park West. I thought maybe I'd go down to Central Park West. I did, and I was
nervous. My heart was pounding. I was walking along, and I saw this guy sort of
start to come up behind me. He got almost up to me, and I came to a little entrance
to the Park. I went into the entrance, thinking he was going to follow me. But he
didn't follow me; he walked along the sidewalk, and I walked along the path that
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was parallel to the sidewalk, until the next entrance. I was laughing at myself,
thinking. You take the high road, and I'll take the low road.... I finally came out [of
the park], and we finally met. We walked a ways, and he said, "Would you like to
have some fun?" I said, "Sure."
"I didn't know what it was going to be. He was a minister. We went to his
apartment on Ninety-ninth Street, just off Central Park West. It was a walk-up. We
had a drink, then he said, "Let's get these things off." We took our clothes off, and it
was beautiful. He asked if I wanted to fuck him, and I said, "Sure." I didn't know that
was possible, but I did. He wanted to do me, and that kind of scared me, because I
had heard all about disease and I didn't want disease there. .. But it was fabulous.
He gave me his phone number and his name. I went back [to campus]. I went to
confession the next morning, and I tore up the address. But within a matter of a
week I wanted to go back, but I never saw him again. I thought of him many, many
times. Remember, he was a minister, and he didn't have any hang ups about it. I
thought that was kind of a blessing, for me. I went back to being super-Catholic. I
said I was never going to do that again, " although he stopped confessing his sins.
"I was struggling with my attraction to men, and it was getting stronger and
stronger. In my junior year, I roomed with a guy to whom I was close to in love with.
I didn't feel a sexual attraction to him. He was a pre-med student. He was also the
only black on campus at the time." In addition to his attraction to the roommate, and
despite his wanting to keep his feelings and attractions hidden from others, by the
end of his college years Paul associated with other students who shared his
attractions. "There were another couple of students that I hung out with, one of
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whom was certain I was gay, and he was trying to find out by introducing me on
campus to different friends of his who were gay. The funny thing, whom he
introduced to me, to whom I really felt attracted to, whisked me away from, because
he wanted to take me down to the river. Had he left me with that one, I probably
would have succumbed, but he didn't pick up that I had any interest in that particular
guy. I look back on it with humor, because he was trying so desperately to look for
clues and I was not going to let on at all that I had any interest in that regard. But
with this guy, I could do it with this one. We only stayed at that guy's apartment for a
half-hour or an hour; we had to stop off for some reason. This seems like a century
ago now, but that memory comes back. Bryce never knew for a fact that I was gay
during my college years. [But] He had a conviction, and he was bound and
determined that I was going to reveal it to him."
Later College. Paul's attempts to hide his actions while simultaneously
exploring them also affected the life of one faculty member. "One of the professors
that a number of the other students hung around with was a closet gay who [felt]
really guilty. He got interested in me, and I was in a kind of love-hate relationship
[with him]. He was trying to seduce me, and I was trying to seduce him." When
Paul succeeded in his seduction, he went to the campus administration, claiming
that the professor had attempted the action untoward; in part this action was to
show, to himself and to others on campus, that Paul was not homosexual. "But they
[the administration] turned me over to a psychology professor who wisely wondered
aloud with me if there was anything that would point me in that direction. I denied it
at the time. The teacher resigned and went to another college. .. I denied [being
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sexually attracted to men] to myself, and really tried to punish anybody that would try
to bring It out."
Paul, too, felt the ascendency of heterosexuality as a powerful Influence
upon his self-ldentlty. "There was nothing to remotely suggest at the time I was In
school that homosexuality would be accepted. Everybody was In the closet,
although there were a few guys that you knew probably were [homosexual]. But the
atmosphere was so repressive that one would only reveal himself to someone whom
he thought was fairly safe."
Bob
Adolescence. Bob's family were upper-middle class residents, first In
suburban Boston and then later urban Chicago. "My home life was pretty typical:
Professional father; homemaker mother, two siblings, a dog. .. Higher education
was not an option; you knew you were going to college."
While Bob sensed he was different from his peers, those feelings had not
manifested Into a sensibility that included not being heterosexual. "I did not really
define my sexual orientation when I started college, although I knew that I had
Interestlng/affectlonal feelings toward men. It was expressed In ways that, if I were
to see a magazine with a man on It, It would do something to me. It would excite
me, both [physiologically and emotionally]. There were visual Images that came Into
my life that told me that was what I was Interested In. I was drawn to It."
Early College, in 1956 he matriculated to Hanover College, a private,
Presbyterian-affiliated Institution In southern Indiana. "I went to a church-related,
residential, isolated campus, so we never left the grounds of the campus."
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Although he majored in psychology and sociology, fields in which he might have
encountered such concepts to describe those feelings in his own life, Bob had "[n]o
terminology whatsoever. The terminology when I was growing up for gay men was
homo. And you wanted to avoid that terminology like the Plague, 'cause that was
very negative. I knew that it meant homosexuality, I didn't fully understand what
homosexuality was. I didn't connect it to me. It was something else, out there, that
was weird and different."
Bob joined a fraternity, which he found a "[vjery homoerotic fraternity
experience. You have a house full of late adolescents with raging hormones, and
you have bonding going on. The fraternities then, and today, are actually real strong
places where gay men are able to express their feelings about their homosexuality.
I think that they do a great deal of sen/ice, on the one hand, to people like me, in
order to understand that those feelings are real. On the other hand, the negative
part is they judge them. But I've found that the fraternity world still today is a
breeding ground for gay men to express themselves.
"I was on a campus where, socially, [pledging] was the correct thing to do.
My father had been a leader in the fraternity. It was a family history thing; it was a
no-brainer. Once I was there and enjoying the company of these hunky guys, it was
great," although it was non-sexual, at least in terms of physical contact.
Metaphysical homoerotics, however, were obvious to Bob in retrospect.
"There's no question to me that some of the experiences in the fraternity, some of
the rituals, some of the silly adolescent games that are played, have lots of sexual
symbolism to them. I think that's because it's the late adolescent who's planning it
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all and has been planning it over the years. Even the leaders of the fraternity, in
their sixties and seventies, are late adolescents. We had to wear eggs in our
underwear and dowel rods down our pants. You can make sexual symbolism out of
all that. I didn't at the time, but as I look back on it, there was an undercurrent of
sexuality."
Bob became a campus leader; the non-heterosexual attractions he felt in the
fraternity he kept hidden. "I was active on campus. I was involved in a young
Christian group, [in] residence hall management and leadership, [as an] officer in the
fratemity, [and] on the campus social recreation committee. [My experience] was
very traditional. I did date women and thought I was - and tried to perform as - a
heterosexual male in that environment. I pictured myself finding my mate on the
college campus; we would be married, and live in happiness. I was very traditional.
All the women I dated were sorority women, [or have] a connection to the g reek
community somehow. "
Despite his cover of normality. Bob began to sense his homo-erotic
attractions were not experienced by everyone. " I wasn't out or open with anyone
except starting to be with myself, and trying to do deal with that. When I was a
junior I made an appointment with a school psychiatrist, through the health service,
on a Wednesday afternoon, to go and talk about these feelings. I went in and
started talking about them. And he threw me out of his office. He said to me, "That's
the dirtiest, most awful thing I've ever heard. You're going to hell. Get out of here. I
don't want to talk about it." It made me feel terrible, but a peer of mine saved my life,
because I went back to my residence and he [the friend] was there.
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" I was obviously disturbed, so I had to tell him the story. He was just
wonderful. He called me a year or so ago and reminded me of that incident. I had
forgotten all about it, I had repressed it so much. He knew more about the incident
than I did. He told me what I told him [then]; he remembered in great detail what
the psychiatrist said, what he was wearing, because he found it to be so abhorrent
[for] a professional person. But that was in the late 50s."
The friend's response was "very accepting, very supportive. He was furious
[at the psychiatrist] and extremely supportive. He said. This is not a problem. You
don't worry about it. That's who you are or what you are, or whatever.' It didn't
affect our relationship. He was a fraternity brother, but I had known him before we
had joined the fraternity. I must have known him since I was a freshman. He was a
very queer person himself; he was physically tall, gangly, homely, from rural Ohio.
We had absolutely nothing in common. I think I latched onto him because we were
both very different... a little bit outcast, in a sense. But he was a very secure human
being, emotionally. He was right there for me. "
Later College. Bob's feelings fo r other men were also “right there,” which he
continued to recognize more fully and to hide as well. "When I was a senior, I
became very close to the dean of men. In fact, I was in love with the man. I knew
something was going on. I had very strong feelings, like the mentor/mentee
[relationship] and I was his mentee. I never felt sexual toward him, except he was a
big guy. Well, I guess I did; I must have had some sexual feelings toward him.
[But] there was no way to act on them, no. How could I act on them without getting
my head blown off or something? I didn't know; I wouldn't know how to do that."
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Bob built upon his undergraduate campus service by deciding to pursue a
master's degree in student affairs administration in higher education at Indiana
University. He still continued to hide his sexuality. His perspectives as both a
student and a campus administrator illuminated what could have happened had he
been found out. "I was at Indiana University between 1960 and 1962. If a student
were found to be having a sexual act with another student, there would be
disciplinary hearings. The sanctions would probably be what we called social
probation" at the time. It probably would be part of the permanent record. There's
the transcript. There are other records that had been kept over the years, about
social behavior. They're not governed by law as much as the transcript is." Those
documents were just as influential upon student lives, though. “If students wanted
"a letter of recommendation, they usually asked someone in student affairs
administration for it. You'd look in the file and if there were these problems, you'd
write it one way. That's changed today; the laws have come to cover that, too. You
have to be real careful about that [now], fortunately. "
Bob's deception was successful and extended to his participation in a
clandestine sting operation against lU students and faculty. "When I was in
graduate school, in the early 60s, there was rumored [to be] a gay male group that
was forming, underground. I was on the residence hall staff, and we were ordered
[to] go out one night, in our cars, trying to find these people, to turn them in to the
administration. I was with some fairly high[-ranking] administrators at Indiana
University, at midnight, in Bloomington, following cars here and these people there.
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We heard this group was meeting somewhere in Bloomington; we weren't sure if it
were on or off the campus, [but] we thought it was off the campus.
"We had a couple of key suspects. We'd watch for them. The phone would
ring, and you'd get in your car and follow. I'm here, we're going there, we'll meet
you over there; come here and pick me up....' It was like a movie. This lasted for
about a month, off and on. They key suspects were students. We thought there
might be some faculty involved. The stereotype was that there would be some
faculty who may be involved in this or getting these guys into this sexual ring. What
was the term they were called then? One of the terms was daisy chains,' where
men get together to have sex with men. It was frightening. It was the most bizarre
experience I've ever had. We didn't find a thing; [it] didn't lead anywhere."
None of his colleagues at Indiana University knew that Bob himself could
have been listed as one to watch, although he had still not had sex with a man.
While he later publicly came out, long after his college days and after establishing
himself professionally. Bob felt he was closeted as a student "partly because of
denial. All because of denial. I knew when I was [not heterosexual] in late high
school and in college, and in graduate school, that I had affectionate feelings toward
men, but I didn't connect the word, the community, the ideology [to me] until after
graduate school."
Sam
Adolescence. Sam was raised in a Woodville, Ohio, a small town about 260
miles from Toledo. He firmly understood his sexuality as homo-sexual prior to
enrolling in college; indeed he stated his first memories were of homosexual desire.
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"When I was three years old - that was before World War II, in 1940 - my mother
put me In bed with my uncle. We had a house that probably should have had about
four people in it, and [occasionally] we' have, like, seventeen. She put me in bed
with my uncle because he was up from the hills of Ohio and was staying over with
us. This was before he was even drafted in World War II. She put me in bed with
him, and I attacked him in the night. I wanted sex with him. I was three years old,
and I knew.
"The moment she put me down in that bed, lowering my body with her hands,
one on my back and one on my rump, and lowering me into that bed, I knew that I
was gay. I didn't know the word gay, didn't know the word homosexual, but I knew
that's where I belonged. He stopped me. I was in there, going for it. I can
remember it as if it were today, and I was three years old. .. It's my earliest memory;
being in bed with my uncle and trying to get in his clothes. Well, my uncle told my
mother the next day what had happened. My mother was one of these Nazerene
ministers' daughters, and she started in on me. She preached this being wrong, that
our family didn't do this, that was not what we did, not what we were supposed to
do, and that we were not going to live like dogs. And on and on and on."
Sam learned from this experience, and from others, two important social
lessons: sex was not to be talked about, and sex between men was not normal.
"We were also told you might have this... feeling... for other men, but when you got
married, it would go away. You would outgrow it. But I never outgrew it. It got
worse for me." Later, Sam realized that, at least in his family, homosexuality was
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not so abnormal: There were nine of us kids, and I'm not the only homosexual In
the family "
His homo-sexual feelings increased, and Sam finally had his opportunity to
express them. Unfortunately, the experience lead to further reprobation of his sense
and sensibility that would affect his identity through his college years. "Later on,
there was a man in the community who seduced me. Five years later; I was eight
It lasted three years, from eight to eleven. And I loved it. There was no sexual
abuse; there was no abuse whatsoever. I knew what I wanted; I knew how to get
it; I knew where to go. I knew that I wanted this. Then, after about three years of
this going on, I tried to convince another boy to join in. He went home and told his
family. And it went all over town, this tiny little town, you know? The man was run
out of town, the man that I had the sexual experience with. I stayed, because my
parents wouldn't leave. So after my mother found out I had another homosexual
experience, I just stayed in. She just really bore down. It was bad before, but then it
was even worse. I had to promise I wouldn't be involved, and I had to listen to her
preach. .. After my mother made me promise not to be a homosexual, I had no
contact with any man until two days before I [turned] fifty-eight."
Sam's social life suffered due to the stigma regarding his sexuality. "I went
through all those years of [grade and high] school with everybody hating me. They
wouldn't invite me to parties. No one wanted to be with me. I was the gay guy that
shouldn't be given a chance to be part of anything." But Sam did participate in some
school and community activities, including cheerieading in high school. " I still had
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talent. Do you think I didn't have talent because I was a homosexual? Most
homosexuals have talent I had talent galore!"
Early College. In 1955, he enrolled at the University of Indianapolis, majoring
in math and chemistry. He lived on campus; "It was [a requirement] at that time, but
by the time I graduated it was no longer required." The dorms were where Sam and
his friends socialized. "During the week, we met in the dorm rooms. On the
weekends, everybody went home. It was a suitcase college. No one stayed there
on weekends; it just cleared out. I lived two-hundred-and-sixty miles from home,
and I went every weekend, until the last semester of my junior year, and I said, 'I'm
tired of this,' and I'd stay in town."
"During the week, everybody was there [on campus]. We were not rich; it
was not a rich college. Almost everybody there was working their way through
college. We helped each other a lot with our problems: lots of Jam sessions. Very
few people studied together, only when it came to finals. Every night we had dress
up night, Monday through Friday. We had family meals where you went to the
dining hall (not the cafeteria). That's what promoted the jam sessions; you saw
people at dinner, talked to them, and the topics [of conversation, continued later]
started then.
"Once in a while, somebody would tell you, "Well, you know Walt Whitman
was homosexual," or would say with disgust, "Well, Leonardo Da Vinci was homo, so
was Michelangelo, so was W alt Whitman.' And about the only time you ever heard
one of those things was when you were in college. High school students didnt know
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those things. You got those things sort of fed to you on a personal basis, not on
classroom information."
Although Sam still recognized his desires, he did not act upon them. "A lot of
men tried me. When I was in college, there were a lot of guys who wanted me.
They told me, and they would try things with me. I was kind of popular, especially
around exam time; everyone would cram in my room. This one time, I was in my
room in my undershorts, and this guy just reached into my pants. He said. Let's go.'
I was very shy; I acted like it didn't happen. Two greek guys invited me out several
times in their car, told me they would teach me things. I told them no. I had another
who would come to my room, just as often as he could, for three months. I knew
what he wanted, but I wasn't going to talk to him about it. He was very familiar, in
his touching me, looking at me, longing. He was an older guy. He was always
willing to talk to me about sex, wanted to talk to me about sex, and brought the
subject up often. He invited me several times to go with him in his car. A car was a
very common [come on], back in those days. 'Go for a ride.'
"When I was in college, I was an evangelical United Brethren at the time.
There were a lot of pre-theology students, pre-ministerial. One of the things I noted
about pre-the students is that they are quite active [homosexually]. Lots of gay men
in pre-theology. While I was in college at University of Indianapolis, the come ons
were often for me, not because I had a big dick, but because I had a big chest. My
chest was big, and I had big pecs. And the men liked that. They'd see me in the
shower, and I'd get lots of proposals. But I never participated, because I was afraid
someone would find out. Back when I was eleven. Mom and the whole town found
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out; that was the fear that was instilled in me from that experience. The man I was
with was forced out of town; I was forced into a horrible life, like I was a leper.
When I went to college, I could have had a whole bunch of wonderful experiences, a
lot of loving, wonderful people. I could have had it all. But I was too afraid to come
out. The fear of being found out was overwhelming."
Later College. Despite the fear and the inhibition, Sam continued to
experience affections and desires toward men. His homo-affections led him to live
with one of his classmates for three years. "When I was a senior, I got a new
roommate. I fell in love with him, big time. The thing is, I didn't know he was in love
with me. He was a minister's son, and definitely was not going to have sex with a
man. And here I was, a confirmed person who was not going to have sex. And we
were madly in love with one another, beyond mention. Anyway, it became a co
dependent situation, and we just battled, fought like banshees, all though our senior
year and two more years after that, teaching together. Finally, we just had to call it
quits. We broke up in '64, on Memorial Day."
During those years, "We never touched each other. I didn't know he was in
love with me until years later. I didn't hear from him, and he didn't hear from me.
Then September 30, 1981, his brother called me and told me he had died. He had
died of AIDS. That's when I figured out what happened back there: we were madly
in love with one another, but neither one of us could do anything about it. Our minds
wouldn't let us. And we lived together! We slept in the same bed! We were just so
wanting one another so badly, and not partaking.
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"So I hid, in my eaiiy years until the time I got out of college, I hid behind
religion. Then I got married, and I hid behind that. But I was always homosexual. I
couldn't walk up to a mirror and say, "You're homosexual.' But I knew in my mind -
every sexual experience I had with my wife, I could not perform without having some
kind of fantasy about a man.
"I had a terrible marriage, a horrible marriage. The reason I came out was
that I needed some love and affection. I hadn't had any for years. I went to a porno
shop where they had a theater. I watched the men on the screen, and I watched the
men in the room. I had to convince myself that this stuff was really going on. Two
days before my fifty-eighth birthday, it was smorgasbord time. It was a wild party for
me. And it was fun."
Looking back upon his college experiences, Sam wishes he had not been
closeted during college and the ensuing years until he came out. "When my group
came along in high school, in the early 50s, things were starting [to change]. After
World W ar II, things were starting loosening up. Most of the country started feeling
relief. You felt a little happier in your life. You didn't feel so contained and restricted
on your options. When I graduated from high school, there were no options. There
were three things you could do: You could get married, you go to college, or you
could get drafted. If you got a job, you were going to be drafted; it didn't make any
difference. In 1955, what I should have done was not go to college. I would not
have gone to college if I knew then what I know today. If I had to do it all over again.
I'd go right to that draft board on September 6.1955, and I would say to question 18,
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Do you have any latent homosexual tendencies?' I would say, 'Yes! They're
blatant!"'
Rick
Early College. Rick* left his parents' home in South Pasadena, California, in
September of 1958, to enroll in Pomona College. His parents had met while at
Pomona, and moved to South Pasadena in 1948. "I had come from an upper-
middle class family. I was reasonably sheltered. I certainly did not come from a
deeply religious or morally straight family. On the contrary, my family were casual
church-goers, if that They raised us to be pretty independent. I would say I was a
pretty serious kid.
"My recollection of [myself] is someone who was withdrawn, not real
frightened but not sure of himself. But the feedback I've gotten... is that's not how I
came off at all. [Others] remember me as someone who was much more socially
aggressive than I ever thought I was. For example, when I was in college, a
freshman, I sort of had the mistaken understanding that if you got into college, you
didn't have to do anything else. So I played a lot of bridge my first year in college,
had a lot of fun. I loved being a freshman in college and got terrible grades as a
consequence. I didn't almost flunk out, but I had to have a real serious talk with
myself and kind of re-orient myself as to where I was and what I was going to do.
The problem, for me, was that I was an immature eighteen-year-old.”
Rick’s year’s at Pomona conformed to the “standard” college study
experience of the 1950s. "I lived on campus, in standard housing, all four years.
Mostly [I spent time] in small eateries in Claremont. We spent a good deal of time
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on campus. There were the standard beer-bust places, which I didn't go to a lot, but
there were those places as well. When I was in school, I was reasonably social
inside the dorm, but I didn't do a lot of outside socializing. I didnt do a lot of
'hanging around' with friends.”
This continued a pattern from Rick's high school experience. “My years in
high school, I didn't do a lot of socializing. I wouldn't say I was a loner, but I never
had a lot of self-confidence. Therefore, I did not put myself in the way of other
people. I wouldn't say I was shy and withdrawn, but I would say I was careful. I
suspect that comes from [my] orientation and other things. I've always had a sense
that I was different. I went to college as kind of a callow, inexperienced, not very
worldly fellow. I was the kind of kid that never did what the crowd did. It's funny. I
always had a sense of right and wrong for Rick. I don't really think that has anything
to be with being gay; it's just the sort of person I am. .. [But] I felt limited by who I
was."
That self-perceived limitation caused Rick both to hide his sexuality and to
retreat socially from others. "Did my sexual orientation affect [my self-confidence
and collegiate performance]? I suppose so, looking back. I didn't think so at the
time, but I think in all candor, I was always so afraid that someone would find out,
that I never really wanted to reveal my whole persona, sit down and chat with
somebody about it. I was just having to learn to deal with that as well. Probably the
worst thing you could be, when I was in college, was gay. It was frowned upon. It
was barely talked about, if it were talked about at all. The gay man of that time was
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a Clifton Webt)-type — a fussy Interior decorator or hair dresser. We didn't have a
benchmark by which to go from.”
Rick had felt the stifling effects of normative social values before he entered
college. "I had experienced some teasing and hazing in high school, but it was very
hurtful and you had no where to go.... Kids and children were just as cruel in the
1950s as they were in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. If they find you are different, they
go after you mercilessly; you're made to feel different, and you hurt inside. So my
defense was, I just didn't reveal a whole lot."
Later College. Like many other closeted students, Rick had sexual contact
with other males prior to college. "I had a couple of gay experiences when I was in
high school, with friends who were also in high school. Not a serious thing, but just
a physical kind of thing, just an exchange of physical-ness. I had that, but when I
went to college, I put that away in locked chest. I never looked, I never did anything.
Now, if the opportunity had come up, I might have, but I was very careful."
That care extended to denial of his feelings as well as further sexual
encounters. "I did not go looking for it. They way it came up in high school was, I
was not the aggressor someone else was. I was the reactor, and that was fine.
Since then, the roles have become reversed, and I have become more socially
aggressive than they have. [But] It never presented itself in college.”
Rick viewed his sexuality - and consequently, his identity - as a “problem”
that “normal” students did not have. "This sounds so naive, but when you're young
and you have this mystery wrapped up inside of you, you think you're the only one
who has this problem. But... there were others who had it, too. They all kept it quite
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under wraps. At least where I went to school, i've found out since there were a
whole lot of gay people at Pomona College that I didn't know were gay. When I was
growing up, being gay was sub rosa. I think I knew I was gay, I suspect, at nine or
ten years old. I always knew what I was, but I put this away in a closet. I am a
typical closet gay man. What I didn’t do is important. I never married because of
that. I did not want to hurt someone else because I couldn't face up to who I was.
Definitely, I had an identity." But that identity was of a person divorced from his
senses of emotion and desire.
"What [this repression] led to was a period of time of twenty years when I
was closeted, doing the things that closeted men do. That's probably the reason I'm
still alive today. In the 1970s, when this all came out, I was in my thirties. It was
what I call the dark decade: I did nothing, nothing! I did not come out - well, I was
out to myself; I knew what I was. But I did not act upon it, until 1983."
Juan
Earlv College. Juan attended the University of the Pacific, in Stockton,
California, between 1984 and 1988. "My school was so conservative. I was a
closeted Democrat at my school, because my school was so Republican, so white,
and so wealthy. There were no gay students that I was aware of on campus. [But] it
was a comfortable setting: my parents were immigrants, and I was raised in a
northern white suburb of Sacramento, so it wasn't far off from what I was used to
dealing with in high school.”
Juan perceived his sexual difference prior to moving to Stockton. "I knew I
was attracted to men. [Nevertheless,] I considered myself straight, or heterosexual.
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but 1 knew those feelings were there. I had never acted on the feelings in high
school, but I knew subconsciously that they were there."
Like other former students in this study, Juan found another, more accepted
climate on campus to enjoy being with men. "I joined a fraternity. I think I joined
because I wanted the social outlets of it It was a small private school; there wasn't
a lot to do in Stockton; a lot of my friends had gone greek. So I joined for the social
aspects of it. Feeling different, as a man of color on a predominantly white campus,
it was a way to fit in. I felt odd any way, being Mexican; socio-economically and
ethnically, I wasn't a part of the campus. To be greek kind of allowed me to fit in.
The irony of it, though, is how I really am as an individual: I'm not greek, in that I
don't like to be told what to do. I consider myself a leader, but when it comes to
someone putting me through an initiation and hell week. I'm not one to put up with
that kind of stuff."
Being in the fraternity was both an emotional outlet for, and an effective
cover of, his homo-sexual senses. "Over the years I've come to realize that I joined
the greek system to prove to myself I wasn't gay. My being a fraternity member
would alleviate anyone's doubts, if they thought I was gay. I think it helped me in the
quest to find the perfect woman, because I could date sorority women. I just kept
thinking I hadn't met the right woman. Maybe I knew I had attractions to men, but in
my mind I thought I just hadn't met the right woman. I also had not had any physical
encounters with any men, at that point, so I didn't have that to say. Well, I like that,
that's great I was making that conclusion not based on experience with men, but
based on my desire to want to fit in and be with a woman. "
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Though he dated women, Juan's striving for a perfect union precluded
serious relations with them. "When I look at relationships with any of my girlfriends I
had in college, it just never worked out. I remember breaking up with one of my
girlfriends because of my fraternity. She said, 'They're more important to you than I
am.' I replied, 'Yeah, they are.' I think that was where I was getting my relationship
needs; I was getting that camaraderie. The fraternity was the first place where,
because I wasn't sexually active, that I could have the closest thing to male
companionship, the camaraderie. But not dealing with those issues of, say, where
two men are going together to the theater and have to have a sit across [a seat
between them]. There have been a number of men who've come out since we've
graduated, of the men I knew when I was active. "
Later College. The fraternity proved a source of conjugal companionship as
well as friendship. "My first gay encounter was with one of my fraternity brothers. It
happened my senior year in college. New Year's Eve. A bunch of us had come back
to the fraternity house to spend New Years. There was another guy in the house,
who was my year. We were adversaries, in that we had different views on how the
house should be run, on how the fraternity should do different things. We never
agreed on things. He was very staunchly ‘Mr. Republican.’ He and I didn't run in the
same circles in the house.
"We were having a party. It was New Years [Eve], probably 1:30 or 2:00 in
the morning. There were six of us in a room, just talking and drinking. Slowly
people started leaving. [Finally] Ned* and I were just hanging out, talking, lamenting
about our senior year, our graduating. You know, the stuff you do when you're
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drinking. It got to the point - 1 don't know, it was just very dream like. I remember us
talking and kind of getting very somber and melancholy about the fact that we were
graduating and it was our last semester. It was all going to be over. I don't know if
it's that we inched closer to each other, but we just kind of knew that there was this
attraction. We started kissing. I still remember. It was great; it was like. Oh, my
gosh. I wasn't scared; we weren't nervous. We stayed together that night. I got up
early the next morning, because it was his room. We were in his roommate's bed,
which is kind of funny. I snuck out and went back to my room. It's one of those
[experiences] where you wake up and you think. Okay, what just happened? And
we never talked about it. It was this awkwardness between us.
"Two weeks after New Years, a bunch of us had planned to go skiing. We
went up to Oregon, to the house of one of our fraternity brothers. There were
probably six or eight of us. Ned and I had not talked about it and gone our separate
ways. He and I ended up together, sharing a sofa bed in the living room. We were
intimate that night again. No talking about it; it just happened. I think it happened a
couple of more times, during the remainder of that year. It was always late at night,
at a party. It was almost like we would search each other out. We had to find
someplace to go, someplace we wouldn't get caught. We had to actively make it
work."
These furtive encounters were "[a]ll related to alcohol; alcohol was always
involved. We never really talked about it. It just happened, then we moved on and
continued our distance as we always did, because we didn't hang out in the same
circles, if I had wanted to spend more time with him or make it more, I had a fear.
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because we didn't hang out in the house together, so why would we suddenly be
hanging out together. In some ways I did [want to spend more time with him],
because I wanted to explore this more, but I also didn't want to, because I didnt
want other people in the house to think something was weird. It was a purely
physical relationship: he was a fuck buddy. He drove me crazy from day to day.
"I ran into him, years later. He became a lawyer and was working in
Sacramento. We got together for dinner and were catching up. He asked me how I
was doing; I said I was dating somebody and things were going well. I asked how
he was doing, and he said he wasn't dating anyone. I said, 'You know, Ned,
everyone has to deal with it in their own way, in their own time frame, so maybe
someday you can be open about who you really are.' He didn't comment on it."
The advent of sex with men, during his senior year, placed new meanings
upon Juan's previous feelings, fostering the beginnings of a non-heterosexual
sensibility. "I think [the experience with Ned] was an awakening for me. It opened
up something inside of me that I had been trying to impress for so long. I think, for
me, there were so many self-esteem issues related to my ethnicity. I was struggling
so hard to be accepted, because I always felt different It's funny, when I look at my
grade school pictures: all blond kids, and then there's me. And then to throw the
sexuality on top of that, to feel doubly ugly, doubly unattractive. For me to fit in with
society, my thought was I had to find that right woman. Even though that fire had
been lit, the flood gates opened [at the end of my senior year]."
That insight, followed by immediate repudiation, mirrored prior advice from
another non-heterosexual man. "My older brother had a good friend in college who
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129
was gay. I knew that, for some reason. I don't know why I knew that, but every time
he came over to visit, I thought he was gay. It was subconsciously. This was in high
school. He came over one time, and my brother went outside. He said, 'Can I talk
to you? Do you think you're gay?' I said I didn't know. He told me, "You don't want
to be gay. It's, like, the worst thing. You don't want to do it.' It was really hard for
him to be gay, horrible. I think that pushed me back, so even when I had met Ned
and that thing happened, I still didn't have a positive role model who was
comfortably out. [Later] when I was home from college, he encouraged me to be
straight. One time I was wearing my greek letters, and he said, You joined a
fraternity. Good, I'm so proud of you. I'm so happy for you. I don't want you to go
through what I had to go through. "
Post College. By the end of college, Juan "had tasted the fruit, and it was
like, Okay! But there was just no way I could do it. I didn't come out until graduate
school, until 1991. After college I moved to the Bay Area with three of my fraternity
brothers. Four of us were sharing a two bedroom apartment, and trying to make
ends meet, because we were all working entry level jobs, working in the city for the
first time. So many people from my college just go to the Bay Area after college;
that's where everyone moves. All of our friends were there. We would go out on
the weekends. Two of my roommates were dating women we went to school with,
so they were over all the time. There is a U of P alumni network in the Bay Area,
and I just went right into that network and all that entailed. That year after college
just kind of continued college life, only we were adults and we were working. I
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wanted to explore, because by that time I had had [more] encounters with other
men.
"People have said to me, "You lived in San Francisco and you never
explored?' I didn't even know where the Castro was. I didn't even know where to
begin looking. I just knew it was there, somewhere. But I would never have the
opportunity to say to someone, 'I think I'm gay; lefs go check out these bars ' I
would have loved to been able to figure it out, but... [I] was still lamenting over
college life and how much fun it was. Now I wasn't in college, but we were still
replicating our [collegiate] lives. My life in college didn't include that, and so it didn't
include it aften«vards. I think if I had moved to a city where I didn't know a lot of
people, and I had a different roommate or was living on my own, maybe I would
have had [been able] to take the risk and go find it, but no, I didn't do anything."
Juan felt unable to escape the constraints of his identity - as a collegiate
student, as a man of Mexican descent, as someone who should find the right
woman - until he was able to leave both his friends and the state. "I came out in
graduate school. It was good. I think I knew I wanted to come out, I think I knew I
needed to. All the grad schools I looked at were out of state. I had to leave
California. I was tired having U of P all around me, my friends all around me. I knew
I had to go elsewhere. I enjoyed it because no one knew me. I didn't have to be
something that I [wasn't]. No one had these expectations of me. I got to introduce
myself, and people got to get to know me as a brand new person. I knew I needed
to deal with my sexuality [in graduate school]. I came out in a very supportive
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131
program, a program for higher ed. I didnt come out until my second year; the first
year I had to test the waters, to figure out how comfortable [I could be] with me."
Changes in the larger culture also empowered Juan to stop perpetuating a
false identity. Those changes were most noticeable in the late 1980s and early
1990s, when he was working on his master's degree, evident by his increased
inclusion of, and attention to, non-heterosexual experiences. "I was struggling and
striving for the identity. I would watch the [television] talk shows, and they were
always dealing with the drag queens, the male prostitutes and all that. I remember
watching Oprah, and they just had everyday individuals who were teachers, lawyers,
couples. None of them were drug-addicted. They were the role models I was
looking for. And I thought. Finally, there is someone I can identify with."
For Juan, his undergraduate years were "a wonderful experience; [I] loved
college. For the time that I was there, it was a good place for me and who I was at
that time. [It] didn't help me with my sexuality, didn’t help me with my identity
development - if anything, I think it pushed me further back. I didn't expect [college
would help me with my personal identity]. I don't see the 80s as a time of identity
development. It was the 'me' generation, and I just remember wanting to make
money, to have money, to drive fancy cars. I didn't see it as a way to deal with my
identity."
Reflections on Homosexuals and the Closet
Although locale and era affected non-heterosexual collegians' experiences
and senses (cf., Chauncey, 1994; Fellows, 1996; Howard, 1999; Sears, 1997), the
narratives of the men in this chapter show that the non-heterosexual identity types of
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homosexual and closeted were prevalent across time and geographic region, during
the last half of the twentieth century in the United States. While variations might
exist between the details of individual students’ experiences (expulsion, or fear of it,
for instance, was neither universal nor unusual among the students in the chapter;
some but not all homosexual students had other friends who so identified), the
sensibilities of these students - how they comprehended and ascribed meaning to
their experiences and senses - were consistent. The students realized that their
sexual feelings and activities set them apart from heterosexuals. They knew they
were different and felt that the social prohibitions against that particular form of
difference required discreet, or secretive, behavior and deployment of their identity.
The distinction of the homosexual and closeted types is that both were
formed in direct relation to heterosexuality as well as the contexts of individual
sexuality - both the physical and the emotional attachments for other males. They
did not so much identify with other non-heterosexuals as much as in opposition to
the (physical) sexual aspects of heterosexuality. These desires were contextualized
within medical or religious models that subjugated the actions and actors as
abhorrent and inferior to heterosexuality. Whereas a heterosexual might define
himself in terms of the dominant, binary master category (heterosexual or
homosexual), because of the objects and aims of his sexual attraction, that definition
was not formed in opposition to the norm; it was the norm. For non-heterosexuals,
though, new meanings were created to understand their experiences that did not fit
into the normative category. Those who identified as homosexual sometimes tried
to find others whose attachments were also evident, if quietly so; those who chose
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133
to live within the relative safety of the closet did their best to leave their attachments
there whenever they ventured into public spheres, although closet collegians felt not
quite themselves as they did so.
If closeted men could compartmentalize their lives, keep their sexuality
separate from their social milieus, homosexual men integrated the two just a bit
more. While their peers in the closet were afraid someone would discover their
personal secret, homosexual collegians feared the revelation of both their private
(sexual) and public (social) lives. Guilt by association was just as damning and
damaging as actual discovery of breaking social or judicial norms, as the
experiences relayed by both Walter and Bob showed.
The existing models of identity development represent the sensibilities of the
students. Gay identity theories would posit the identities as un- or underdeveloped:
integration of identity into a publicly acknowledged and deployed identity, capable of
being so despite public approbation, is the proposed end result of those models.
Neither the homosexual nor closeted students could do this, given their
understandings of their collegiate cultures, and in light of their sensibilities about
being non-heterosexual. These students, particularly the closeted types, probably
would not be considered as advanced along the stages of student identity
development, for their sexual identities were compartmentalized and separate from
their public identities as students (moreso even than were those of homosexual type
students). In this sense, these students were deviants from yet another norm, one
of theoretical analysis.
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To understand these students' lives and self concepts only in terms of
deviance, however, ignores the paradox of men and de in their lives. While
homosexual and closeted students often considered themselves deviant - as the
tropes of conceptualizing sexuality at the time promoted - these students also
identified with others. They found other individuals with whom to have sex, with
whom to socialize (either in bars in large urban areas or in private homes in smaller
towns), even with whom to live. But, how individual men in these types displayed or
deployed aspects of their sexual identity - and their senses of what and why they
were doing so - differentiated them from the other types of non-heterosexuals within
the typology.
The litmus test of "homosexual," whether closeted or open, was not the
sexual activity, but how and what the man thought of the activity (before and after
the deed), the sensibilities he displayed. The social meaning ascribed to that clinical
definition was clear in the image of what such a person would be, or be like; as Rick
noted, the homosexual "of that time was a Clifton Webb-type - a fussy interior
decorator or hair dresser." When revealed, either by others in the case of Waiter or
the self-realization experienced by Duchess, one's being homosexual caused one to
be removed from the social settings of those considered normal.
This exodus from campus and/or community, from either expulsion or choice,
was a very real threat to homosexual students' participation in and development
during college. As the narratives of the next chapter will demonstrate, however,
those students considered apart from the heterosexual norm did not always accept
the expulsion; particularly as societal mores changed, so too the self-definitions and
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sensibilities of non-heterosexual males transformed, and non-heterosexual students
found new ways to voice and to deploy their different identities on U.S. campuses.
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136
Chapter Five
From the Margins to the Ivory Tower:
Gay and Queer Students
Non-heterosexual collegians did not continue to identify themselves in
opposition to religious or medical models of pathology and/or abnormality. During
the late 1960s, counter-cultural movements in the United States led non
heterosexual students to re-examine concepts of gender, sexuality, and the norms
of the dominant society. For non-heterosexual students, these changes fostered
opportunities and contexts to position themselves alongside others who question the
norms as well as against the norm of heterosexuality; no longer was the marker of
identification based solely upon an individual’s sexuality (almost exclusively furtive
and non-sanctioned) but also by social interaction and political goals. These gay
collegians argued for inclusion and participation within campuses across the country.
They created structures and opportunities for campus activities to match - or, at
least, to emulate - the sanctioned enterprises of their heterosexual peers. Indeed,
gay students perceived and promoted their identities more publicly than the
homosexual type of student; “Gay is good” (Jay, 1999; Thompson, 1994; Witt,
Thomas & Marcus, 1995) certainly equitable to straight in concept if not in public
opinion. If homosexuality was, in the words of Oscar Wilde, the “love that dare not
speak its name,” then gay was the identity that spoke up.
By (at least) the late 1980s, another type of student began to conceive of his
identity differently still. Queer students juxtaposed their feelings and experiences
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against not only the heterosexual norm but also the gay (and/or homosexual) norms.
Queer collegians were not content with duplicating institutional values and
components, nor with mere inclusion in what they often viewed as a flawed and
suppressive system of controls of sexuality and identity. If gay students wished for
the freedom to participate in social and campus activities (whether as
representatives, or within separate but equal spaces and places), queer students
sought to disrupt the operations of those functions as (usually unquestioned)
components of a self-replicating and subjugating dominant, heterosexual society. If
gay students found a voice within society, queer students shouted chants indicating
their difference; instead of asking for validation (“gay is good") and equal rights,
queer students proclaimed “We’re here, we’re queer, and we re not going shopping”
(of. Browning, 1993; Duggan, 1992, 1995c) despite - and to spite - the crowd.
Such extensive changes in identification, both individual and collective, are
demonstrated within the narratives of collegians classified as gay and queer. In the
previous chapter, I discussed homosexual and closeted students, for when sexuality
was on the one hand a defining force upon their identity and on the other a “private,
personal” matter. In this chapter, I depict students for whom their sexual identity was
as much a public and collective affair as were the social elements of identity
construction. I first examine gay identity types, by way of four representative
narratives of students whose experiences and/or ideations of their sexual orientation
place them squarely within that type. Next, I offer three narratives of queer students,
whose deployment of their identity was a disrupting factor of institutional functions
and precepts and additionally formed directly in opposition to the identities that
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represented new normative values and identities (gay and homosexual), as well in
opposition to the traditional normative presumption (heterosexual).
“Gay Is Good:” Visible Students on Campus
By the late 1960s and eaiiy 1970s, a new identity for non-heterosexual men
began to emerge, both on campus and in the broader society: gay. Gay students
understood their identity as a social one, not one constructed in medical models of
pathology (cf., Greenberg, 1988; Katz, 1995). Consequently, their interactions with
peers and institutions differed from those of homosexual students or closeted
collegians. Gay students' ideology was two-fold: first, sexuality - in all of its
permeations, including those not considered "normal" - was viewed as a more
central (and visible) part of social life and thus far more "normal" than previously
understood. Second, just as "other" sexualities were to be included in the spectrum
of "normal" life, so too should gays be a part of regular social functions, whether as
a part of the existing system (university governance, the curriculum, campus
statements and missions) or separate (yet equal) functions that mirrored
heterosexual (or "straight") functions (student organizations and gay dances being
the two most obvious). These ideas brought larger numbers of non-heterosexual
men to participate in public life on campus. Four respondents fitting into the gay
type attended colleges from the 1960s through the 1990s; their stories display ways
gay students believed in their equality and how their differences from heterosexual
students were viewed primarily as with whom they socialized and had sex.
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James
Adolescence. As a teen, James was a Quaker attending a predominantly
Jewish school in a different neighborhood from his own. "I didn't feel I fit in in junior
high school, because I wasn't good at sports. I went to an all male public high
school in Baltimore, which was very unusual. It was a [academic] tracked
environment, and I was on the highest level track. It was a very rigorous academic
program. And even though I wasn't in a very macho environment, because we didn't
even have gym or sports in high school, it was a very insular environment, with a lot
of late adolescent male teasing.” Consequently, he felt isolated because of his
religion, his place of residence and his masculinity. “In an all-male environment, I
did not have interaction with girls, which was important in terms of developing certain
kinds of friendships and ways to interact positively. I felt very isolated because most
of the kids in my class were Jewish, lived in a different neighborhood, and had
networks of friends I didn't have.”
James perceived another distinction from his classmates; his sexual
feelings. "I also knew I had these [non-heterosexual] desires I didn't know what to
do with. I had a girlfriend, but I wasn't sexually desirous. It wasn't special. I always
felt I was trying to be something I wasn't. And because I was at an all-male high
school, my best friend (who still is my best friend) was my date to the junior and
senior proms. "
James cultivated a life, apart from school, that was more important to him
than his academic life. T he young Quaker youth group was very important. Also, I
did theater, from age eight to fifteen, in Baltimore. That was very important to me.
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because I knew subconsciously that I had homoerotic desires and that I was
different. I didn't know how to deal with that. The theater group was a community or
a family or a connection that made me feel very loved." But by his high school
years, James felt compelled to quit performing with the group, "because I didn't want
to become a homosexual. All of the older people in the group seemed to be
homosexuals. At the time, [my] logic was, if I didn't become an actor, I wouldn't
become a homosexual. Therefore I stopped being an actor. I thought all male
actors were homosexuals "
The fear of being associated with, or becoming, a homosexual "was not
something I ever articulated, but I knew at the time, and can see clearly back there,
that was what I was thinking. I couldn't name it, because naming it would associate
me with it. But it was a fear. I felt that I was effeminate, and it seemed to me that
that was what homosexuals were, or the older men [in the theater group were], to a
certain extent. But the fear was more that this would be this horrible, terrible life that
I would live. The image was older men in public bathrooms. The fear was dirty old
men who were alone, isolated, and whom everyone hates "
This emotion was coupled with James' understanding of his attraction to
other males. "Life Magazine had a very important article, and I remember reading
that when I was in junior high school. I don't know if I've reconstructed this memory
from the past; I have to check to see when it came out, to see if my dates are even
right. But what I remember is, I saw that, and they talked about men in tight white
pants and cashmere sweaters. And I went. This is me, and I don't want to be that.
I just did not want to be that, but I knew that I was. I knew very young that I was [not
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heterosexual]. I have a journal in which I talked about the secret that I had, but I
wouldn't talk more about that. In fact, I was afraid that even if I wrote that down, it
would be revelatory. But I knew I was attracted to guys, in some way.... I thought it
was something I could somehow overcome."
Eariv College. Part of James' plan to conquer his attraction to men revolved
around attending a co-educational college that he felt could both support his faith
and suppress his desires. "I went to Earlham College, which was a small, Quaker,
liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana. I went there from 1968 to 1972, [and]
majored in political science. I really wanted to go to a small liberal arts college. I
was raised a Quaker, and this was a Quaker school; that was important to me. I
think there were about 1,000 students in the college, perhaps 1,200. It was very
intimate, family- and community-oriented. I went to school early; I was sixteen, and
finished when I was twenty. "
Despite his intent to overcome his sexuality, James was clear of his sexual
identity when he arrived on campus. "I thought of myself as homosexual. This was
my first year. I was attracted to my roommate. I was attracted to a lot of guys, and I
just didn't know how to deal with it. I would masturbate, think of them, and then feel
very guilty and very bad. And I had a girlfriend. That was a way of maybe affirming
that I wasn't [homosexual]. My girlfriend was very good to me. She was Catholic,
and she presented to me this notion that we couldn't go all the way. She used to
stay over in my room. So we would not have direct intercourse; I don't remember
that I really came that much with her. But really, I let that situation be that way; that
was just fine.
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“Finally a woman on campus seduced me. She just took me up to her room
on a Sunday afternoon and had sex with me. I came quickly. She actually was a
good lover. And then, my girlfriend went o ff to Africa on a foreign exchange
program and got back together with her old boyfriend. I was devastated. So I
preceded to have another girlfriend, who was my most important friend/girlfriend for
several years after that. But by that time I had already had sex with guys.”
Sexual activity with other males was not entirely new to James. "I had sex
with my best friend when I was a kid, and my brother, but I was twelve or thirteen.
That was very clandestine. And then nothing. The first [adult] time was in January
of 1970, where I ended up in the same bed with some guy at a Quaker conference.
I got very excited, initiated something with him, then came and totally freaked out. I
wouldn't talk to him the next day. He had been the boyfriend of the woman whom I
became the boyfriend of. He was in the process of coming out; I freaked out, and
then soon thereafter I had sex with her and told her that I had had sex with him. She
knew he was bisexual, so that was okay. I was having sex with her, through college,
but really was attracted to men. "
Those attractions did not quickly become physical actions. " I did a lot of
fantasizing. My college had an opinion board, where people would put up
statements about anything, and then [others] would respond to it. I fantasized about
declaring that I was gay on the opinion board, and then immediately decided this
was not a good idea. That was a[n imagined] vehicle of coming out. But in college,
the second year, 1969-70,1 tried to organize a men's group. I put an ad on the
opinion board, saying This is not necessarily to deal with homosexuality but to deal
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with us as men.' It was subconsciously a way of my wanting to come out. I didn't
gel; there weren't that many people interested in doing it. I was also terrified, too.
At the women and men's conference, where I had sex, I remember being in a men's
group saying I had a secret that I wanted to tell people about. Which, was like,
come on, give me a break! And at the end, at an encounter group, this one guy who
was coming out or had come out, said. This is disgusting; you're just being a cock-
teaser.' He obviously was attracted to me, and he thought I was playing this game.
But basically it was just terror in my mind."
Later College. The cultural and social changes evident and increasing on
college campuses in the late 1960s informed James' actions, senses, and
sensibilities. These were anti-War days, counter-culture days. There was a Quaker
counterculture movement I was a part of, and there was a commune I would visit
while I was in school. It was at this commune, at a conference, where I met this guy
who I just totally fell in love with. We had sex, in the fields in the meadow, in the
sunny afternoon. It was really good, but he was essentially a heterosexual who was
dealing with his openness and bi-sexuality by having sex with men. But he was
essentially heterosexual. So that didn't work."
The openness of the period continued to produce some intimate relationships
for James, but ultimately they "didn't work " either. That summer I went to Mexico
with a friend, while I was still in college, whom I had the biggest crush on. To this
very day I think I must have a crush on him. He, too, would let me kind of have sex
with him a little bit, but it was because he was being politically correct - bisexual - at
the time. I think that's why a generation of people doesn’t trust bisexuality, because
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of the way bisexuality at the time was constructed as something that people did,"
rather than as a separate identity, as actions rather than sensibilities.
The notions of contesting sexuality were (literally) engendered by other
contemporaneous social movements. "The women's movement sort of had a huge
impact on the counter culture movement and the anti-war movement in '69:
immediately, all of a sudden in this Quaker anti-war countercultural youth movement,
there was a women's conference, a separate women's group, and a discussion of
people's sexuality and sexism. And one of the responses was a discourse that
everyone's basically just sexual, and people insisted on their bisexuality. Part of that
was pushed by people who later came out; others were pushed by this guy who I
had sex with a few times. I think [he] was trying to be very open in the counter
culture hippie days by saying, 'Yeah, we re all just sexual.' Even my girlfriend was
very tolerant at this time. She had other boyfriends.
"It was a time in which people had a lot of sex with a lot of people. .. The
counterculture and hippie movement really deconstructed the notion of gender in a
big way. Long hair, beads, flowery dress, meant that gender could be much more
fluid. The sexual revolution, with the notion of multiple partners and people were
basically bisexual or pan-sexual, was very important. That was the ideology in which
I was embedded at that time. I was a student, but within this I was an activist in the
anti-war movement and going to demonstrations. It was that whole period. And
then the women's movement, and a real critique of machismo and male sexism,
which I just embraced. The minute I understood feminist theory, I became a
feminist, because it was articulating all the critiques of the male dominated society
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and machismo which I suffered from since I was a kid. Those were cultural
backdrops that cushioned my coming out and made it less painful than it could have
been."
College, fo r James, was dominated by his questions about his sexual
identity. 'The whole time I was in college, the leitmotif under everything was, I dont
know how to deal with my sexuality; what is going on here? The homoerotic
desires were just strong, strong, strong. This discussion about sexuality and
counterculture was on campus as well as off campus, but it was very much a part of
being a student at that time.
"In '68, when I started going [to Earlham] women had curfews. In those four
years, [the college] went from women having curfews to eliminating the curfew for
women, to the fourth year when there were men and women in the same dorms. It's
just phenomenal, if you think of the change of those four years. All these things
were happening which were questioning profound values. So because I was very
political and very much linked to these social movements, it gave me some broader
comfort zone in which to come out [first as bisexual, and soon after college as gay].
I had very little contact with the [gay] culture, and yet I was already very politically
involved in it. The politicized movement which emerged gave me an incredibly
important way of coping. So when I came out [as gay, just after graduating from
college], I became an activist and a revolutionary. Within six months, it somehow
resolved within the context of how I was viewing the world as a whole, this gulf of a
contradiction. And I started feeling good about myself. .. [and] three months out of
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college I came out; gay would be the word [I used], because I was connected to the
movement.
"My whole college experience was struggling with homosexuality. College
was horrible; it was really bad. For example, I teach now, and I'm always surprised
that more students don't come in and come out to me. But then I realize, I wouldn't
have come out to one of my professors. Even the psychologist that they had at the
school, I think that would have been very hard to go to him, because then he would
have known my secret. I think that small, insular environment was very hard."
Cliff
Adolescence. Like James, Cliff felt he did not fit the image and experiences
of his peers. He, too, found a social outlet in the theater. During high school, in
suburban Pittsburgh, he “had a very small group of very close friends, but was not
into any crowd. I was suspicious of the “in" crowd, because they seemed vacuous. I
think of my high school days as defined by my family life [more] than my school life,
because I came from a family that does lots of things together always had dinner
together at the dinner table, tended to go on vacation every summer, car trips.
Those suburbs were more rural than I think of Los Angeles suburbs being, so it was
far enough out that there weren't close friends in the area there that wouldn't involve
a drive to be with. My sister and I both did more reading and things on our own.”
Cliff was also involved in a non-scholastic religious youth group. Two friends
from high school took Cliff to join one group, in downtown Pittsburgh. "In that group
there was one fellow with whom I got really aroused. But I didn't act on it. He tried
to kiss me; that was so frightening to me that I rejected him, in that sort of
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'stop/don't stop' way. Certainly, I was looking at the possibility I was gay then. This
was 1970 or 1971; would I have used the word gay or would I have used
homosexual? I rememljer looking at a few men in high school and thinking They're
really attractive, but I remember that, still in my high school years, as not [thinking].
Oh I must be gay but Oh that's interesting, that he's so cute. I didn't have a label for
it at that point."
Early College. After graduating from high school. Cliff severed all ties to his
high school relations. "I pretty much cut myself off from them [high school friends]
when I left high school and went to college. I think partly it was a subconscious
move, because I really wanted to find a new life. I had not realized that I was gay at
that point, but I wonder if maybe I knew I wanted a new beginning. I certainly didn't
acknowledge it to myself." In 1971, he enrolled in "Allegheny College, in Meadville,
Pennsylvania. It's a small, liberal arts school, a four year college.
"I had a great, great college experience. Because the school was so small,
everybody there got to pursue their interests really fully. So I was doing lots of art
classes, lots of drama classes, doing anything that I wanted to. The doing, for me,
had to do with the subjects I was studying: that was where my real interests were.
And many platonic relationships with true friends; I felt like I established a
community there. It was very, very fulfilling. That's partly why I stayed right through
the summers, and did college in three years instead of four, because I was having
such a good time."
After two years. C liffs subconscious, or semiconscious, desires came to the
surface. The related emotions and experiences changed his self-concept. "By 1973
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I had my first and only sexual experience with a woman, and then my first
consummated sexual experience with a man. It's got to be about that point that I
realized I must be gay, and probably gay was the word I would use at that point."
Certainly, C liffs collegiate experience affected his sexuality and identity - but
in quite unique ways. 'There was a teacher, a technical director, whose house we'd
all go over on a regular basis, and play poker and drink and smoke cigarettes and
have great times doing this with a bunch of people from the drama department.
[One night] the wife of the technical director sat me down in her kitchen, while
everyone was in the dining room next door playing poker. She said, 'What's the
story. Cliff?' She knew I was gay before I knew. I think I probably lied to her. She
said - and of course, this is way pre-AIDS - 'What you need to do. Cliff, is screw
around. You're never going to become a good designer' - which was my goal at
that point - 'if you don't know what love is. You'll never know what a sunset really
looks like; you'll never really be able to put fabulous color and lighting on stage, until
you know love. You have to go screw around.'
“I think what she was saying was, you've got to become whole. You've got to
fall in love, and you have to fall in love with the person, man or woman, who's really
right for you. She gave me fabulous, fabulous advice, and totally appropriate to me!
And probably to others she gave it to, too. It's a very 70s framework."
"College life didn't get sexual for me until '7 3 ,1 think. I became whole; all of
a sudden, there was definitely a sense o f completion. This Is who I am. Also, there
were concerns, the coming out concerns that so many people seem to experience:
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who's going to know, who do I let know, how do I tell my parents, is it true? Even
with the happiness, there was denial, probably, too.”
Sexuality had not been a visible or discussed concept in C liffs younger
experience. "When I was growing up, sexuality in all forms - not affection, but
sexuality - was something my family didn't talk about. It was - 1 don't want to say
dirty, but not to be spoken of, which is a pretty fine line in my book. So while I know
my sex with Tony" [C liffs first male sexual partner] was exciting, incredibly exciting,
and felt right, and in that sense complete, it also, maybe because it felt so great,
entered the world of the stuff you don't talk about. This is sex.”
Later College. Cliff identified other aspects of the higher educational
experience that helped him to form his sexual identity. "Part of it was [that] I left
home to go to school. So I was out on my own, and that gave me more sense of
stability and safety from my parents' knowing, so I could explore on my own without
having to be concerned about parents' judgement. I think of my parents as very
supportive, but I also know that they had apprehensions about homosexuality. We
never discussed homosexuality openly in my family, but I remember one moment
when I was sporting a new shirt my mom had made me - this was maybe junior high
or something - and I was modeling the shirt for my dad. Doing runway poses,
vogueing decades before it was popular. My dad said. Don't do that; you look like
a girl.' So there's that sort of thing going on, but it was never labeled homosexual.
It was clear that there were gender roles I was expected to fulfill.”
C liffs release of those concepts about sexuality and his self-identification as
both non-heterosexual and gay developed during his undergraduate and early
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graduate years. "It was a slow progression. At that point there's acceptance within,
but not enough to proclaim it. There must have been stages in this, where I became
more aware of the fact that there are other people who are gay and that this is a
possibility. This is '73; we re still in the Hippie era. Free love and sexual revolution
is in the air. I must be hearing about homosexuality as a component of the sexual
revolution. My college activities were very much focused on drama, art classes,
smoking dope, hanging out with friends. There must have been gay talk through
that."
Post-Colleoe. The cultural changes James identified as important for
contextual understandings of sexuality continued to play out for Cliff, after he left
Pennsylvania. Cliff spent two years in graduate school at California State University
at Long Beach, immediately following his undergraduate years. "The journey across
those two years is a journey of experimenting with more men, and because I had
great role models at that point, coming out - acknowledging these relationships,
flings, one-night adventures - until I could finally say I was gay. I know I took that
attitude of You mean you can't tell? before I said it. I had two teachers who were
gay. One of them taught stage makeup; I was his teaching assistant. He was out
and proud and loud and audacious. The very first time I started to get to know him,
that was slightly scary and tantalizing at the same time. From him, [becoming] able
to go on and acknowledge it to others, too. There was another teacher in the drama
department who was gay but much more reserved than [the first]. Both were in long
term relationships, one which was monogamous and one which was not, making it
very clear that you can be gay, happy and out, all at the same time. I think [the
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former instructor] served as a model for me to be able to acknowledge, probably first
to him, that I was having these adventures, that I was having sex with other men."
C liffs "adventures" consisted primarily of meeting other men in private
gatherings of students or university-related people. Cliff would see these men
again, in social or scholastic contexts, but not in sexual situations. "We were all
going to school together. Did I have sex with them repeatedly? Hmm... I think only
with my partner, whom I'm [still] with now. We met there. I think I was really
experimenting with lots of different guys. To my understanding, the folks I was doing
this with were doing the same thing elsewhere, too. The perception was that was
the milieu. Because it was still the spirit of sexual revolution, and peace-love Hippie
free-love. There may be shred of truth to the stereotype; there may have been
more sexual freedom among some groups of artists than other groups. I don't
know."
The Los Angeles area also offered other forms of institutionalized
socialization for non-heterosexuals. "One of [my] mentors took me to a gay bar,
probably my first year. It was kind of creepy, because it was foreign territory to me
and I didn't know what the rules were. I didn't know how far I could go. This was
1973 or 1974; it was totally Tales of the City, the whistles blowing, the tambourines,
the smell of dope in the air. It was exciting, but I didn't know how to pick somebody
up to dance with him.
"The visibility of gay culture, both at school and in the urban area, made it so
much easier, I believe, for people in that environment to come out, to say who they
are, then it would be in places where there isn't other visibility established. I don't
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think it had to be the West Coast, but I think it had to be an urban center with a gay
culture."
While he began coming out socially while at CSU-Long Beach, Cliff remained
cautious about how he deployed his identity in mixed (heterosexual and non-)
settings and contexts. "Certainly, among my friends, while I was in the process of
revealing who I was, I was not identifying as straight in my mind, and I think it's fair
to say I never lied by saying I'm straight,' but I think I was very careful about how
much information I would give to whom."
Tim
Adolescence. Similar to C liffs and James' experiences, Tim recognized
feeling different from his peers because of something internally felt (as opposed to
an external characteristic or action). "My father was in the Navy; I mostly grew up in
San Diego, but we lived in some other places, including out of the country for three
years. But mainly San Diego, from fourth grade on. I was teased in elementary
school. It feels like I always kind of knew [about being non-heterosexual]. Once
puberty hit, the sexual feelings I had were pretty obvious to me. I had the
terminology; I think I used [gay]. I felt that I was probably gay, and was trying to be
open about it. But trying to be accepting of that if that were the case, but if it were
going to be a phase, to be open to that.
Tim felt alienated from his high school peers. "The high school I went to I felt
was very backward. Ifs very redneck and consen/ative. [The community was] not
gay friendly; it's not progressive at all. I think I wasn't a very social person; I did all
of these very solitary kinds of things. I think I was stubborn; I felt like I didn't fit in.
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but I didn't make any real effort to [fit in], either. By the end of high school, I was in
this punk rock crowd, but I was also in this college prep crowd, but I wasn't really in
either in them; I was moving around the periphery of them. Even though I really
connected to the punk rock thing, I would refuse to wear my hair like that, dress like
that, or do that stuff. I think I was just trying to hold to something of my own. I wrote
a couple of essays where I came out to my English teacher; in the psychology class
journal assignment, I wrote stuff in there. I was trying to be open about it, I think, or
explore it or discuss it in some kind of way, that now seems really, really forward. I
wasn't out sharing stuff and was still quiet, but I was still doing these other things
that now surprise me."
Whereas James and Cliff found outside activities in which to engage, Tim's
activities were internal. "I would read a lot, and I would read stuff about gay people
or homosexuality. I can remember reading in junior high David Kopay [a
professional football player who declared he was gay, whose autobiography was
published in 1977]. I think that maybe stuff like that, which seemed to be saying it
was all right or not entirely negative I listened to a lot of David Bowie and Lou
Reed, that glitter-rock stuff, and that kind of lead me to Jean Genet and different
writers like that. I think part of it might be knowing that there were people out there,
whether it was David Bowie or Andy Warhol or Jean Genet, that there was
something bigger. I guess maybe in combination with having some sort of idea in
my head that it was okay and there was this prejudice to overcome. .. Maybe those
two things together. It seems some other people have sex and then it doesn't really
alter any of their” [ideas about their sexuality].
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Tim attributed his alienation from others to his sexuality. "I felt like I didn't fit
in [in high school], I guess, because I had already figured out I was gay. Plus, I
wasn't real skilled at making new friends or getting into a new situation." Despite
this, Tim accepted and displayed a public non-heterosexual, gay identity. "My senior
year, there was a guy that would have been my boyfriend, I guess; I don't think we
used that terminology. Or maybe we did. I thought of it that way, and I think he
thought of it that way. It was more like a dating thing, or something, than just fooling
around or exploring.” Their relationship was social as well as physical. "And the
group of people that I was in perceived us as being a couple. So we were a couple.
This guy whom I was with - which just seems amazing to me now - would come into
my art class from the class next door. He would just kind of hang out, and we would
talk. I got his name out of the phone book, and asked him to go see a movie. Now,
especially since I teach high school, it just seems like a very fonward thing to be
doing. My best friend was gay, and I knew a couple of other gay students in high
school that I would socialize with. I didn't have that I'm really isolated with my
sexuality thing, but it seems like a lot of other people in high school did feel that."
Tim's acknowledgment and deployment of a non-heterosexual identity in
social settings (even limited settings) was atypical of the pre-college experiences of
most gay men. But his experience represented a change overtim e in how gay-type
men viewed their self-identity and ability to relate to and with heterosexuals. He had
few questions about his definitions of his sexuality, "Which is kind of weird to me.
Hearing certain stories, [it] seems like, why would it take somebody that long or
something? I mean everybody's different, but it just seems like, especially with gay
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men, to figure out your sexuality doesn't seem like that difficult. It makes sense to
me that somebody could be a woman and it would take them a while to figure it out,
but it seems like an erection doesn't lie."
Tim suggested one reason for the difference in his experiences: "Maybe
because I lost my virginity at a very early age. I had sex with another guy before I
was in high school. It happened right before we moved. But I still talked to him on
the phone [after the move]. He was a little bit older, and he seemed to want some
kind of relationship. I, at fourteen or fifteen, didn't have the - shouldn't be doing
that."
Eariv College. Like Cliff, Tim also attended California State University at
Long Beach, as an undergraduate from 1982 to 1987. Tim moved to Long Beach to
attend the California State University branch campus in 1982, to major in art. "I
didn't know that Long Beach had a large gay and lesbian community when I chose
to go to school there. I can remember driving down Broadway with a friend of mine
from high school, and there were just all of these gay men, on the sidewalk and
walking places. Unless it's built up more in my memory, I think maybe post-AIDS it
isn't as prominent or visible or something. I mean, it still is, but it just seemed this
insane amount of guys. I don't know whether that was the point I was in my life and
experiences, or lack of experiences, or whether it was really [true] "
Tim attempted to reach out to the gay community, both on and off campus.
His experiences were less than successful. "I called the gay and lesbian center, to
see where the places to go in Long Beach would be if you were under twenty-one. I
started college when I was eighteen. There didn't seem to be any, and he said
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something about the parking lot across from Ripples [a long-established gay bar in
Long Beach]. Finally he asked me to come in or something, but I didn't do that. I
felt like I was coming off as some really troubled person or something, [that] they
were going to do some kind of psychological assistance with or whatever. I just
didn't want to do that."
Tim lived in campus housing for one year. He met - and successfully
pursued - a long-term boyfriend on campus, whom he lived with in the residence
halls. Despite this, Tim deemed the overall climate in the residence system hostile.
'That was not good. I moved up here, and it was still kind of a situation where I
didn't really know anybody and had to meet people. So, I met this one guy who was
very obviously gay, and then we became friends. He was a little on the effeminate
side, which I think is why I chose to approach him or become friends with him. We
became boyfriends after that. We ended up sharing a dorm room together. There
was a lot of harassment and things like that, by the second semester, because we
were always together. I know that it's not [a typical experience]; sharing a dorm
room with my boyfriend in 1982 seems very [atypical]. "
Tim's finding personal companionship was both evident and aggravating to
his neighbors. "I think I felt it was just common knowledge. There was no way that
people couldn't know that we were the dorm fags or homos or whatever. There's no
way that the people in charge could not know that, I don't think. We had stuff stuck
on the door, [and received] harassing phone calls."
In one instance, the harassment turned violent. "We lived on the second
floor. This one time I went down to get a screwdriver or hammer from the R.A. at the
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desk; there was a pool table and a tv set, and there were people around the pool
table. There was one guy who was scary; you look at somebody's eyes and you
can just tell. He used to stare us down in the dining hall. He was one of the people
[at the pool table]. There were two doors [from the second floor]; one of them was
open and one of them was closed and locked. I felt that the easier one to go
through was the one that was open; it was a little further away, but I wouldn't have
to take out my key. So I [went] through that door, and he just hit me upside my head
really hard, to where my ears rang.
" I just went up to the room; I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't the kind of person
who felt like I could fight this guy or take that on. So he did that, and I just walked
up. I probably should have reported it to - well, I mean, I definitely should have
reported it to somebody. But there wasn't any discussion about somebody being
gay or gay and lesbian issues [at CSU-Long Beach]. Probably I just figured if
something could be done about it, or if somebody was going to step in, or there was
that option, then that would have been brought to my attention."
Later College. That incident was a turning point for Tim: his boyfriend and
he moved off campus at the end of the term. "There was no way I was going back.
I would have moved back to San Diego or done something else before I went back
into the dorms. I don't think I thought that was an option; it never even crossed my
mind, as something I would do or that somebody could do. It was really unpleasant
on a lot of different levels: the whole harassment thing, feeling unsafe, living there
[in] the whole culture of “dorm party, get drunk all the time, vomit in the urinal thing;”
rolling beer bottles down the hallway. It wasn't good. "
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Tim Intended to continue living with his boyfriend, sharing an apartment.
'That was the original plan, but we got in a fight when we were looking for the
apartment. Then we moved separately, but we still ended up back together, but with
separate places. I really liked that year. I felt like I was really busy with classes, this
part-time job, and this relationship that I was still in, that that was all I did. I think we
pretty much spent every night together, alternating from apartment to apartment. I
would be hanging out with him, or painting or drawing or doing some work for my
classes. There was this straight couple we would hang out with. Weekends, we'd
probably go out dancing. I met a lot of people who are still friends of mine now, and
it had a feeling of not really like family, but a close group of people. When he
moved away to go to another school, that was really difficult for me. Everything was
kind of based around him and connected to him. With school and work, and then
not being that outgoing of a person, I felt like my whole social life was non-existent"
Apart from the living conditions, finding companionship fostered better social
interaction and college affiliation for Tim. "I guess I felt like the relationship with my
boyfriend made me feel connected [to college life] in some way. In the Art
Department, it wasn't a problem or an issue. I think I did a couple of paintings where
that [homosexuality] was part of the painting or part of the subject matter, so I didn't
feel like that was a big issue there." Campus socializing with other non
heterosexuals was less beneficial. "I did try to [join] the gay and lesbian student
union, or whatever it was called. The first year, when I was trying to meet people or
figure stuff out, I went to that a couple of times. I found that really cliquish and not
welcoming. I think I went maybe twice and didn't go back, because it was very
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insular. They talked about [only] the business; I think that my intention in going was
to meet people and start to be part of some kind of group. I didn't know enough
about the politics of the school or what they were trying to do. They weren't very
welcoming."
Tim's experiences and relationship with his boyfriend were important both to
his scholastic experience and his interpersonal development. "[Our relationship]
didn't feel like it was anything that needed to be named, in some sort of special and
different way. We were constantly around each other. Sharing the dorm room, it
was like all the mutual free time, we were together. Because of that, it didn't really
seem like it needed to be named."
Gene
Adolescence. Gene grew up in Korea, immigrating to the U.S. in the 1980s.
His formative years were spent in Ohio. " I could clearly [understand] I was gay when
I was in fifth grade. I was watching a soap opera, and there were two lesbian
characters going to commit suicide because of [their] homosexuality. I asked my
sister, who was in ninth grade, and she said, 'Its same sex loving each other, and
it's bad.' That was the first time I learned the term, and learned that the term is
associated with something bad. Before then, I didn't know what that term meant; it
didn't have any meaning to me. I automatically thought. Oh, that's me. I didn't say
it, because she said it was bad.
'The first time I ever used the term to describe myself... I was a high school
junior. I was described by others with that term many times, but when I finally said
that I am [gay] was when I was trying to get Ohio State University [gay] student
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union group phone number from the operator. I called this youth hotline. I used to
live in Westerville, Ohio, which is a small town; when I looked in the Yellow Pages,
there was no listing for gay hotline' or gay community hotline,' just student hotline.
So I called all the community services hotlines, and I got stuck with suicidal hotline.
They asked me why I called this line, and I said, I want to know the gay hotline
number.' 'Are you suicidal?' I pretended I was, to get this number I said, 'I feel bad
being gay, and I need to talk to somebody who's gay.' And they gave me the
number for the Ohio State student gay group."
Gene attended meetings at Ohio State University, but found the cultural
climate less than inviting. "I had high hopes that I would make friends [by going to
gay student groups], that I could finally sit together in the cafeteria and talk about my
issues. But at Ohio State University, I couldn't even say anything, because I couldn't
speak English that well. Because of that, I felt like I was rejected. " Gene continued
to search for a non-heterosexual community within which he could feel comfortable,
eventually trying gay and lesbian student organizations at another university. "I had
to go to Cleveland - it was only a few hours' driving - to Case Western Reserve. I
couldn't fit in [at Case Western], so I went to the Cleveland gay community center.
There was one black guy, one Hispanic guy, and all the others were white people.
They made fun of my accent. I didn't go there; never again. So I tried to find
friends through not so healthy channels: gay bars and sex clubs.
When I went there, I didn't find anyone my own age. Those friendships
didn't become close, except for few people who just wanted a sexual thing going on
temporarily. I messed [around] with some strange guy, who looked like a leftover
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from the 60s. But he suggested I move to a big city, that this [my inability to make
gay friends] might have something to do with race. So I went to New York and I
realized that there are a lot more people who are not like mainstream, white
Protestants, and I felt a lot more accepted there, walking around the street seeing all
kinds of races and all kinds of people. And in the gay community, too; they weren't
shocked by me walking into a gay community center. "
Eariv College. Gene earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at
Columbia University, which he attended from 1990 through 1996, majoring in
sociology. " I was semi-closeted the first year [at Columbia], but toward the
beginning of second year, I was almost out. The first year, I tried to fit in. When
you're a freshman in college, you still have a high school mentality, where there's a
clique in your mind. You don't want to be labeled as outcast or nerd or unwanted,
versus cheerleaders and football players and popular kids. After freshman year,
they get into this stage [of] Who am I? Why am I living? What am I going to do to
change the world for the better? I think that really brought me to break down these
labels from high school."
Gene viewed his sexual orientation as progressing from non-open to open.
"Near the end of second year, I was completely out. In my third year, I worked at the
health services. My director was working on a Ph.D. dissertation. Do gay and
lesbian students drink more and take more drugs than straight students?' I was his
research assistant, trying to get his surveys done, and I had to go to all the gay
student groups - there are so many gay student groups at Columbia. That really
gave me, involuntarily, a public exposure on my sexual orientation, because I had to
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put a lot of flyers around campus, saying i'm looking for someone who's willing to fill
out this survey and do this interview. This was very difficult, because not many
people would come to do the surveys to begin with; at the same time, they have to
advertise that they're gay. But it was fun. I had to go to a Columbia dance, which
was a major event; we actually let [people] in for free if they filled out the surveys. I
had to be the usher, so I couldn't be closeted.
"Once a month, there was a big Columbia dance. Columbia gay dances are
major events in New York City. It's not just a little, tiny campus event because it's
affiliated with actual night club promoters. So all of the Chelsea and Christopher
Street people change their clothes and come all the way up to Columbia, which is
quite far away from downtown. It's a big event, and a great place to meet younger-
or at the time, around my age - people. You know, clean-cut."
In New York City, Gene finally found non-heterosexual communities with
whom he could feel comfortable. "I had a close lesbian friend who worked on the
survey at the health center office, and my roommate was also gay. He was working
on his graduate program. He became a professor at NYU. He's openly gay, [but]
was coming out at the time. I had a straight friend, but somehow I lost touch with
straight friends, the straight scene, so to speak. If we'd bump into to each other in
the school cafeteria and stuff, we'd sit together and talk, but I don't think we'd be
buddy-buddy friends. I had so much work to do, a work-study job, manage my
personal things, so my social time was really limited, and I could not separate that
between gay friends and straight friends. I had to combine everything into one, so
gay friends seemed like the most practical way of utilizing my limited social hours for
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the maximum capacity. It was not like I did not want to be their friend, or they didn't
want to be my friends, but it had a lot to do with the time constraints and the energy
level.”
Later College. Gene’s primary socialization changed from on-campus to off-
campus activities, reflecting his changing self-concepts of sexuality, social
responsibility and race. ”1 think I met a lot of people through community events, [but]
not so much on campus. I met most of my friends through political meetings. I was
involved in radical groups like Queer Nation and ACT-UP Caucus - I didn't get
involved in main ACT-UP, but little caucus meetings. I was also involved in Asian
groups, gay and non-gay Asian groups. When you go in these meetings, you see
so many different people, but after organizing these meetings, usually the same
people... so you get to know them pretty well. Once you get accepted into the circle,
you make friends, like chains of networks, so you don't feel like you have to go out
to the campus to make gay friends. I deliberately chose to go to gay Asian-only
groups not only to empower myself as a gay man but also to empower myself as a
different-race person. I'm using ethnicity and race as kind of interchangeable terms
here, so I guess you have to change that if you have to use it in some politically
correct term paper."
Gene’s association with others who identified as queer did not alter his
experiences and sensibilities beyond the gay type. Indeed, he became, after a brief
foray into student governance, involved in local gay community politics, just as
earlier gay students did. " I was vice-president of the class first and second year, so
that was the most I got involved in mainstream politics. But I got involved in a lot of
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[gay-identified] political things. There was a photography student lesbian who
wanted to have an exhibit of gay and lesbian people kissing each other, so I
participated in organizing that. There were a lot of fund-raising parties and rallies.
There were death threat messages left on the [answering machine] of one of the gay
groups, and they were trying to have a protest; it never came about, because half of
us thought we should have a protest and some people thought we should just hand
out roses for the people to be aware that we re not evil. Those were such dumb
arguments we had! I just remember how stupid it was.
" I was not a radical. I was more involved in community work, outside of the
campus, rather than on campus, because campus was so much like a cookie house,
little children's stuff for me. I was really heavily involved in major community groups.
Campus was more like an obligated thing for me, because I had to go to those
things because of my work-study job. I think that had something to do with the
maturity level."
Gene's social life revolved around Asian friends in the New York City night
life. "I went to places where I felt more accepted, rather than these $20 or $30
[entrance fees per night] major night clubs, which a few thousand people can go in
there and do all kinds of stuff that is sinful, I guess. A lot of these [people at]
nightclubs do a lot of drugs, and it's an almost open thing for them to have an
ecstasy room and a cocaine room. At the time, it was cool. Not that I did any drugs,
but it was cool. I mean, I'm from Westerville, Ohio; this was euphoria or paradise
for me. It was sinful and euphoric for me, because I guess I learned, when I was a
kid, that that is what the Sodom and Gomorrah looks like. Yet it's so free that you
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push the boundary to the limitless point to where it's okay to be the way you want to
be.
Again, Gene conceptualized his college experience as a fairly linear
progression toward self-acceptance of his non-heterosexual orientation. "At the
beginning of my freshman year, being gay was something I had to hide, a
disadvantage that I should definitely hide in order to succeed. When I changed my
perspective on sexual orientation, it became a not-so-proud identity that I could not
hide yet that I had to somehow minimize as much as possible, to be ambitious and
to succeed. And then, after I got involved in all these groups, not the campus
groups but the community groups, I learned of the injustice and the discriminations,
and they make you think about unfair situations and [feel] anger, and then you really
feel that you have to do something about it. Then it becomes your major issue.
"In this country, I say race is most visible and easy to be discriminated [by].
But if I go back to Korea, all of a sudden race issues are gone and I become the gay
person. So I guess, being a multiple minority in this country, you always wonder
why. For example, in my high school, sophomore year. Fourth of July, I was driving
back from the football field after watching fireworks. Guys came to my window and
broke the window. Now; class issue, race issue, or sexual orientation issue? I'm a
new comer immigrant; if I were Irish, British, Australian, would this have happened
to me? Maybe, because I was different, new. Or is it race, because I didn't look
right; I looked like somebody completely different? Or is it because I act feminine or
I was not dating girls? I couldn't figure out. But the more I live here, I feel that if I
had to statistically count the numbers of incidents where I felt I was discriminated
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I was not dating girts? I couldn't figure out. But tlie more I live here, I feel that if I
had to statistically count the numbers of incidents where I felt I was discriminated
[against], I would say it was [because of] race."
Post College. In his junior year. Gene chose "to have a non-paying
internship at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. I went
to my home country, where I was bom, Korea, and started a gay movement there. I
did that right after college, and that’s the most memorable event that I did for a
social issue. In 1993,1 organized the first Korean gay and lesbian human rights
group. At that time, there was only one, but now they have between fifty and
seventy all over the nations. I went there and tried to start the first visible gay pride
march in Korea. We thought we would be lucky if thirty people showed up; actually,
three hundred people showed up." He later retumed to Columbia, to eam a master's
degree in American Studies, specializing in gay and lesbian studies.
Queer
Queer collegians, like their homosexual and gay peers, envisioned their lives
in opposition to heterosexuals'. But whereas homosexuals saw themselves as
differing from straight people only in terms of their sexual activity (which was viewed
as a private matter), queer students positioned their differences publicly; this
differentiated their queer identity from homosexual and gay. Their sexuality was
seen less as a variation of the norm and more as an agitator to the notions of
normality. Where gay students strove to fit into the accepted campus formats and
components of student govemment, organizations and politics, queer students were
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more likely to buck the system, as well as to challenge the acceptance of those
norms through actions and appearances. The stories of three queer collegians
demonstrate how varied — yet ideologically similar — queer college life could be.
Jimmy
Adolescence. Jimmy's experience conveyed the heart of a queer identity;
the inversion of what one's society depicts or promotes as normal, with what society
conscripts as abnormal. “From 1959 until 1970 I lived in Woodstock, Illinois - what I
guess you might consider my home town' - an "All American City " in the mid-sixties.
It is sixty-five miles northwest of Chicago, and less than twenty miles from the
Wisconsin border - a rural Midwestern town which considered itself a cultured
place.”
Like many of his gay and homosexual counterparts, Jimmy recognized his
sexual desires at an early age. "I knew I was gay at [age] ten - consistently aroused
by men for as far back as I can remember. I can remember thinking to myself in a
dark attic space I used to hide in as a child, that I wanted to love both men and
women, that I felt like I was part of both, and wanted to see the world from both
sides. I also dressed in drag a lot (through my early teens, much to my parents'
chagrin). At fourteen or fifteen I began having safe sex with men (at first a few years
older than I - old enough to have a car where we could go for long drives and beat
each other off), but it wasn't until I was fifteen that I had my first romantic peer
encounter (sex) in a Chicago hotel room.”
Unlike many of the homosexual and gay students, Jimmy had non
heterosexual role models whom he felt provided a positive - if somewhat physical -
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influence. "In Woodstock, I was surrounded by wonderful gay role models (though
none but two were 'out' politically at the time), including my family doctor (who used
to pay me $5 to let him suck my cock, and later - when I refused to take cash - he
introduced me to Chicago artists, other gay men, and occasionally by accident,
members of the football team that I already knew), my school bus driver (a local cop
who lived down the street, but was into S&M, so I steered clear of him), my church
choir director (who was scared to death and needed lots of coaxing before
consenting to a consummation of our shared pleasures when I was fifteen), my
elementary PE teacher (a BOs-something dyke that I later discovered was a lover of
another lesbian friend), my high school art teacher (who used to rub his dick into my
elbow as I tried to draw during class - he wasn't my type, so we sustained a queer
friendship with lots of word play and campy behavior), as well as gay-friendly high
school teachers (sociology, drama, English lit) who made a safe space for me to
come out to my school mates, and who supported my work in war resistance efforts.
"My parents owned the only twenty-four hour/day restaurant (a truck stop) in
five counties, and I worked there from age eleven to sixteen. It was also the haunt
for both gay and lesbian communities in this sleepy Midwestern town, and they all
welcomed me into their rituals of behavior, mannerisms and dialects. It was
definitely a queer childhood."
Early College. Moving to college provided Jimmy with more avenues for non
heterosexual experiences. Like the gay students of the 1960s and 70s, Jimmy's
campus experience was influenced by the counter-culture movements. "In 1970, I
enrolled as an undergraduate fine arts major at Arkansas State University, in
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Jonesboro, Arkansas. In 1970-72 I lived on campus. My first roommate was the
freshman class president, and my second, a black political activist.
"I moved out of the dorms the next year. By this time, the war was waning,
and we had successfully dismantled the University's mandatory ROTC [Reserve
Officer Training Corps] policies. I'd made my impact on the state, successfully
guiding a dozen conscientious objectors, each a first in their counties - including a
landmark case, the first non-religious 0 .0 . in Arkansas. I threw myself into drug
counterculture as resident counselor at Huntington House, a drug abuse (but now
defunct) social service agency.
"From 1970 to 1976,1 very consistently (and usually adamantly) identified as
a gay man.” That identification, however, did not align Jimmy with other non
heterosexual students on campus. "I watched other gay people fleeing from me! I
was so outrageously out as a freshman in college that most of the local gay
community actively avoided me for guilt by association. There were a few brave
souls who allowed their queemess to me (though there was only one who would be
seen with me outside the safety of the Art Department halls). With my Betty Grable
hairdo (though sometimes I did Carmen Miranda, replete with fruit and bobbles
inserted in carefully coifed curls), gold lame tank tops and elephant bells that looked
like some prom queen's formal, it was hard to miss me on campus. I didn't have to
go out looking - I was a walking billboard for queerness.
"Fortunately, my second cousin was the dean of the liberal arts school, and I
managed to get away with a lot of disruptive stuff without getting kicked out. In the
South, or at least in my family, blood kin are supported, regardless of their
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eccentricities. [The cousin] always referred to my outrageousness as youthful folly'
or 'youthful indiscretion,' noting, when seeing me on campus for the first time (in
drag), 'You must be Peggy's boy; you look just like her. "
"Dressing up" was but one manner in which Jimmy juxtaposed his identity
against the heterosexual norms he perceived. Jimmy’s flagrant consternation of the
ideas of how males - both heterosexual and homosexual - should behave
continued off campus as well, but not always to the extent with which he felt
comfortable on campus. "At least a third of the weekends I'd go home, catching a
ride with one of the eight or so students in my class who lived within fifteen miles or
so of my mother. Out of respect. I'd tone down my act somewhat when at home:
donning a short-haired wig for family pictures (at my mother’s insistence) and
removing my nose ring when visiting Grandma.
Sex played an important function in Jimmy’s collegiate experiences and the
understandings and sensibilities he had of his identity. "After my first year at ASU,
I'd well established my reputation, and as fate would have it, I began to receive late-
night calls from guys - not with drug problems, but the kind of problems that could
be solved lying down (among other positions). One of these was a call from a man
who I'd later spend the balance of the next two years with at ASU. Johnny was a
bisexual black activist several years older than I was. Actually his phone call that
night began. I've got a problem... (long pause)... My dick is so big no one can do a
thing with it.' My heartbeat quickened. I tittered. And, of course, I said, 'Come on
down, and we'll see what we can do to help you.' A few weeks later, we began our
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eighteen months as a couple (though the size of his cock was really uncomfortable
for me to handle, no matter what orifice I tried to shove it in - and indeed, I tried all
of them repeatedly).
"Anyway, Johnny was a man that all of the white folks were fearful of (he was
six-foot four-inches, with a gold star inlaid into a front tooth that had been knocked
out in a skirmish during a black student's integration protest during his high school
senior year), so not even the football jocks would cross us as we walked hand in
hand to the dining hall. Of course this relationship further distanced me from the few
racist faggots that had revealed themselves to me, so that simplified my life greatly -
no one would have me but him.”
Campus contacts formed Jimmy’s social network during his undergraduate
years. "As my relationship with Johnny distanced in 1972-73 (I had major
hemorrhoid problems by this point, and he had other jaws to dislocate anyway), I
found myself falling for one, and then a second and a third, older man. The first two
were art department alumni and local residents that I met during their visits with the
professors. Each evolved into a series of multi-night stands that didn't go any
further than that - though I desperately wanted them to.”
By his senior year, Jimmy's social circles extended from campus, into town
and beyond. "That summer introduced me to the bar scene in Memphis (which is
only an hour or so from Jonesboro), and there I met a couple of hair dressers from
Jonesboro. These were the local guys who eventually acknowledged they would
have nothing to do with me my first couple of years at ASU because they didn't want
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to be outed. I eventually started hanging out with the drag queens in Memphis,
driving in with the hair dresser clan on most every other weekend.”
Later College. After branching out to off-campus communities, Jimmy’s
world was again curtailed primarily to campus contexts, but in graduate school. " I
graduated with a B.F.A. in Fine Arts in May of 1974. In 1974,1 enrolled at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale, as an unclassified graduate students the School of
Fine Arts. After five weeks in an apartment three blocks from campus, I met my
future lover (Douglas, who died in 1988). I moved in with him the following week.
On occasion, I would go to the local gay bar three blocks from our home, to the
disco across the street (where gay, bi and straight students danced), or to Devil's
Kitchen and Little Grassy Lakes (where 70s counterculture and gay students nude
sunbathed and played). I also spent time in my garden, which became a space for
performance art works and social entertaining for the gay and dance communities.”
Sexuality continued to be an influence on Jimmy’s personal and social
identity and sensibilities. "Despite our experimentation with 'open' relationships,
Douglas and I remained fairly monogamous for almost three years. We were clearly
a 'couple' as far as other students and the faculty were concerned. We were always
invited to social events as a couple; we were both very active in Gay Rights
activities. .. We made it to all the big marches, conferences, etc.; and we did our
best to queer it up wherever we were. Of course there were a few distractions from
my monogamy. I'm a real modem dance groupie, so I always felt it a personal
responsibility to fuck any visiting performer who came on campus for master classes
- that is, if they wanted to reciprocate.”
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The concepts of men and de were evident in Jimmy’s queer sensibility: on
the one hand, he publicly challenged prevailing presumptions of sexuality, while on
the other, he in many ways accepted the values personally. "There were only three
or four interludes outside of our marriage (and I really did consider my life with
Douglas to be that - writing all of my siblings and parents to announce our
commitment, bringing him home for Christmas and all other holidays, having mother-
in-law tensions, kissing in front of our folks (but not at Grandma's). My mom's family
all loved him. "
Jimmy and Douglas found other non-heterosexuals who also displayed a
very public queer non-heterosexual image that challenged the heterosexual norms
of the Southern Illinois campus. "At Carbondale, half the dance department and a
quarter of the music department must have been gay. The head of the dance
department was an outrageously queer S&M body builder, and he loved to socialize,
so there was a group of a dozen or so of us who would hang out together nude sun
bathing at his farm or at Devil's Kitchen. I had lots of lesbian girlfriends, too,
including one whom I consider my closest friend and was at one time married to my
best male friend of all times, Teddy, who died of AIDS six years ago. Ted was the
first gay man I didn't seek to suck, but just had to have as a friend. He was part of
my coming to terms with my objectification of men as fuck objects. While I never
dismissed my interest in pleasure, I did learn, with him, that a gay man could be a
friend as well. "
A queer sensibility that challenged the ideas of gender and sexual
conscriptions also infused Jimmy's scholastic and artistic work. "The subject of most
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of the art works I created in both undergraduate and graduate school had to do with
gay issues and/or personal/political identity. My first design project was a sixteen
foot by three foot by sixteen inch pink triangle sited between my dorm, the art
department and the post office - a work destroyed after it's third day of exhibition,
reportedly by members of the football team, at the instruction of their coach. I also
organized the first gay artists exhibit at SlU in 1975, and produced a series of site-
specific dance works dealing with issues of gender and sexuality. In one piece I
danced on 2,000 wet pots in a yellow 40s prom dress with my lover Douglas
(wearing his black leotard) in a busy campus hallway at noon. This got me in a bit of
hot water, but the faculty backed me, regardless of my inattentiveness to safety
issues and University protocol."
Jimmy's sensibility - the meanings he made from his experiences and
feelings - was queer, despite the fact that the term and concept for queer were not
labeled as such until at least a decade later. This identity put Jimmy in conflict with
both the heterosexual and the non-heterosexuals students and identities. "I believe
that my outward queemess during my undergraduate years was a real turn-off to
most men and especially those in the closet. Drag queens and I got along famously,
but I'd have to travel to Memphis to hand out with them and few wanted to go to
some cow-town college environment to play. The bi guys were clearly threatened,
for being with me was clearly a confirmation of their own queer tendencies, though a
few did banter and camp with me if no one else was around to see (including two of
the faculty - neither of whom I was particularly attracted to). There were a few guys
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that I thought were likely gay, though when confronted with my curiosity, they'd
always deny or claim they were deferring any gay commitments at the time."
Pozzo
Adolescence. Pozzo* grew up in San Diego and could attribute feelings of
difference for others to his sexual orientation; like most of the other respondents, he
knew clearly at a very young age of his affectional and physical attractions to other
males. "I always knew, since I was maybe four years old, that I was attracted to
other boys. But I guess being gay, at the time [entering college], was a big question
mark." In high school, however, the attraction to other males did not foster a non
heterosexual identity. "In ninth grade, I was in this really boring world geography
class. I had this crush on this boy who was in seventh grade. I'm sure he must have
been gay, too. I was in this boring class on a dreary, rainy day, with my head down
on my desk, daydreaming and realizing, God, I'm in love with this boy. i'm gay. it's
true. But I didn't act on that impulse. I wasn't really good friends with that boy."
That relationship played out in "masturbation, masturbatory fantasies. That
was all. There wasn't a contradiction [in Pozzo’s mind]. As long as I wasn't sexually
active, I guess it didn't mean as much. I was still going to try to function
heterosexually; at least give it a shot. I tried to date a girl. She was really pretty;
she was really nice, really smart. I thought if I could fake it with anybody, it would be
with her. I just thought I'd repress it all my life. I was very disciplined. I was a very
good student. I thought I'd stick that right under the rug and not deal with that at all.
Then I ended up having sex when I was eighteen. "
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Plans of repression were dispelled then. " I had sex for the first time with a
man the summer before leaving [for college]. It was so intense. I was seduced by
someone I had known from my youth orchestra, seduced in the sweetest, innocent
way. We started kissing, and I didn't even realize what we were doing. Suddenly, I
was so overwhelmed with sexual feelings, I was trembling, my whole body was
shaking. I had no idea that I would have been capable of such passion. It was an
overwhelming experience where I felt I had lost control of everything. Suddenly I
was just one big throbbing penis."
Pozzo had considered his sexual orientation prior to matriculating;
"Absolutely. This was the first time I had been away from home, and after the first
week of school, I remember coming home from orientation feeling overwhelmed by
the number of issues I had to deal with all of a sudden: my family's breakup, being
away from home for the first time, knowing that I really was gay and probably
couldn't deny that much any longer because I had had sex with a man and it was a
very passionate experience. It was one of those issues that I had to deal with kind
of right away, but didn't know how to deal with."
Earlv College. Pozzo attended Swarthmore between 1984 and 1988, where
he majored in history. He looked forward to the cultural change between the coasts.
"It was a culture shock that I wanted. I wanted to be on the East Coast. I had this
idea then that southern California is this vapid, vacuous place with no culture, and
that the East Coast is where all the sophisticated, intellectual, cultured people are."
Despite his desire to find others with whom he could relate, his first years at
Swarthmore were lonely. "When I went to Swarthmore, I thought I'd be making all
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these great friends. It was kind of disappointing. I didn't really get intimate with
anyone until my senior year. I guess I've sort of had this pattern of friendships. My
longest lasting, most meaningful friendships have all been with women who are very
smart and accomplished in different ways. I had gay acquaintances [as opposed to
gay friends}. I had a hard time making friends... but I can't ascribe that to being
gay."
Being in a postsecondary institution - particularly the academic culture of
educated peers - helped, in Pozzo’s estimation, his ability to accept his non
heterosexual identity. "Swarthmore was this very intellectual, very well informed
place, so I had access to the view that sexual orientation is all the things that it is.
That it is a normal way of being. There was a very popular class, the introductory
psychology class, and if you looked up homosexuality in that textbook [they used],
there's the question, 'What makes people gay?' Well, another legitimate question is
'What makes people not gay?' There was this very intelligent, informed discussion
of sexual orientation, putting it into a historical context, mentioning that there are
other cultures that have not rejected homosexuality the way modem European
cultures do. I was getting access to the right information on human sexuality, so I
felt more legitimate about being gay.”
Information about non-heterosexual issues did not ensure a lack of
harassment or discrimination, but it did provide a basis of understanding and
solidarity with some heterosexual students, who informed Pozzo's thinking about his
sexuality. "Once, apparently there was some incident where a security guard had
been insensitive to a gay student. A bunch of people from the student council took
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to wearing arm bands, to show their solidarity with gay students. I thought, Well,
there are straight people doing it, so It must be safe. That was before I was out."
As with other respondents, Pozzo viewed his identity formation as a process
or series of stages of self-identification, apart from sexual action(s) or identification
as non-heterosexual by others. "At Swarthmore, there were people who knew I was
gay. Like my mom knew I was gay all along. I sort of knew that she knew, but it
wasn't talked about. There were other friends who picked up on it. I was trying to
lose my virginity with a woman, so during my freshman year there was a sophomore
woman - like all Swarthmore students, very smart, very charming - not terribly
pretty, and I thought, Mmm, I could easily lose my virginity with her. And I was right.
She was eager to have sex with me, too, but I kind of blew her off. We were
supposed to get together, but I didn't return her phone calls. I think that was kind of
a turning point, in a way. Later on I met her for lunch and I talked to her, told her, I
think I owe you an apology.' Because I'd led her on that we were going to get
together, and then I blew her off. I felt bad about it, because I hurt her feelings. I
realized at that point that I can't do this, because I hurt other people, too. I can't
pretend to be straight. She kind of realized what was going on; she said, 'Oh, you'll
eventually get together with some other girl... or, maybe some other boy.' You know,
wink wink. I just sort of smiled, and I didn't refute what she said. That was one
instance where I acknowledged gayness to someone without coming out in general.
"There were a couple of other female friends I had that picked up on the fact
that I was gay. The woman I wanted to sleep with but didn't, the woman I was
supposed to date but didn't, and a couple of other people who were out and who
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were cool and popular. These people by realizing I was gay and not turning on me,
not making an issue out of it, sort of made me realize there are reasonable people.
It sort of made it easier fo r me to come out, these little realizations along the way.”
Later College. As mentioned earlier, Pozzo's parents divorced that summer
before he entered college, which created difficult relations between Pozzo and his
family; in addition to his growing understanding of his sexual feelings and self-
identity, other topics of conversation seemed strained or verboten. "Finally things
came to a head the summer between my junior and senior years. I was twenty
years old. I was living with my dad, whom I was not getting along with very well. I
was feeling more confident about being a gay person, but I Just needed to make my
parents, especially my father, aware that sexual orientation is all the things that I
think it is now: a normal way of being, a normal variation of human sexual
orientation. My dad went in to speak with her on the phone. He wanted to talk
about it with her before I spoke with her, and then I spoke to her some days later.
We talked for a little while, and then she said, 'Well, you know your dad called me
and you probably know what it's about.' I said yes. She said, 'You know, Pozzo, I
always knew ' I said. Yeah, I kind of thought you did.'
"So after I came out to my dad that summer - which was not a great
experience; it was a rather ugly scene - 1 was out with a vengeance.” The queer
identity Pozzo fashioned was almost a complete turn-around from his previous,
closeted identity; he proclaimed his non-heterosexuality both verbally and through
probing the boundaries of identity representation. “My senior year, everybody knew
I was gay. I started wearing eyeliner. I was this pretty boy, and I thought this was a
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time to experiment with these kind of things." Before he came out to peers and his
family, "I guess being gay meant I was just really, really hungry for signs and
symbols of legitimacy. Senior year, forget it; I [had] tons of legitimacy. I’m armed,
and anyone tnes to tell me that anything's wrong with being gay, they're going to get
an earful. Now, it's the same way."
Giving an earful is a response that differentiates queer-type from gay-type
students. While gay students might organize speakers bureaus or other educational
outreach efforts, queer activities were often more personal and more
confrontational. As Pozzo became more public in telling others his identity, he came
to deploy it as an instrument to disrupt the norms and expectations of his
heterosexual peers.
Like many of the men in this study, Pozzo had less than fond memories of
his experiences with non-heterosexual student campus organizations. His
recollections showed a queer sensibility concerning gay- and homosexual-type
students, juxtaposing his identity against homo- as well as heterosexual norms.
"Until my senior year, the gay/lesbian/bisexual/questioning student union consisted
of a group of about five men. They were all very, very queeny and flamboyant. I
thought, actually, they weren't so bad. The other gay students who didn't want to
come out [disliked the group's members], because they didn't want to be associated
with such flamboyance. I also remained in the closet partly because of that, but
when they graduated, suddenly a lot of people came out of the closet. A lot of those
people were angry with the people who had just graduated, because they thought
they had sort of poisoned the environment for us. Which I thought was a little bit
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unfair. When they graduated, I went to a meeting and suddenly there were twenty
students there. That was at the beginning of my senior year, then I got busy with my
senior stuff, my honors exams and stuff, and so I didn't keep up with it."
Post-College. Immediately after graduation, Pozzo deployed his identity
through queer activism and politics. "When I graduated, I joined ACT-UP [AIDS
Coalition To Unleash Power]. The political atmosphere at Swarthmore was very left
of center. So ACT-UP's policies didn't strike me as so terribly radical. This was
during the Reagan years; Reagan's response to the AIDS crisis was retarded. It
was a really hard thing to get him to understand this was a serious health problem.
Things like that really fueled our anger, and so it made sense, when the University of
Pennsylvania invited Ronald Reagan to speak as part of their 250th anniversary
celebration, to stand outside and block traffic. In fact, we saw a lot of faculty
members walking into that event giving us the thumbs up. [Later] we stormed the
office of the president of U Penn and pounded on his door. We were told he wasn't
there, but we pounded until he gave us audience and listened to us excoriate him for
having invited such a person."
Pozzo's final semesters in college were full of change, both in his personal
identity and in the identities of those with whom he associated. "There were all
these people that came out all of a sudden." Sex became, along with political
activity based on identity, more important to Pozzo. " I had sex only twice my entire
career at Swarthmore, and both guys [graduated] with highest honors, but neither of
them was a very satisfying lover. I love smart men, but, god, I had other
opportunities! I just remember this beautiful boy with this shock of light brown curly
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hair. And It would have been great! Instead, I slept with... this other guy who had a
crush on me all four years. [He] was sweet and was charming, and who turned out
to be straight. Or at least he married to a woman. I guess there are a few genuine
bisexuals. And [sex with this one] wasn't great!" Apparently, identity based on
sexuality was more obviously fluid, in Pozzo's estimation, rather than fixedly
determined by sexual activity.
Rad
Adolescence. Rad grew up in a small town in central Idaho, population 800,
"Very rural, tourist oriented. Very redneck. Very religious; we had about ten
churches. It was not openly homophobic, but it just was something that didn't exist
to those people. There was no talk of it, no one saw it. So I had nothing to look [to],
no strings to grab onto. It was a goal to get to the big city, one of the big reasons
why I decided to come to school in Los Angeles. " In 1995, he moved to attend the
University of Southern California; by that time, he had acknowledged his non
heterosexuality.
"I came out to myself my sophomore year in high school, in 1993. I
remember sitting on my bed, crying, saying, 'You're gay.' And then telling my stuffed
animals. I wasn't out to anyone in high school, but I had a boyfriend. Toward the
end of my senior year, I met a guy through some friends up at University of Idaho. I
saw him maybe once or twice a month, so it was kind of more writing letters or
calling. It was far enough away where I was able to have - it was a good
relationship. He taught me a lot. He was very caring. We're still in touch. "
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Unlike most of the respondents in this study, Rad began the process of
telling others of his non-heterosexual identity prior to leaving for college. "By the
time I left Idaho, I'd come out to maybe four of my friends. And my high school
English teacher she was the first adult I came out to. Somewhere between Idaho
and Los Angeles - it was, like, a three day road trip with my dad - 1 made the
decision that once I was here, by myself, I would be out to everyone. I just refused
to let myself go through what I went through there. It was the hardest promise i've
ever kept.”
Earlv College. Rad completed his undergraduate course work at USC in
1999, after attending for four years. Deciding to deploy his sexual identity not only
to accept his non-heterosexuality but to tell others in public settings - was not a
major issue for Rad. "It wasn't an issue where it bombarded me all at once; it
wasn't really an issue at all until about a week into school. The GLBA [Gay, Lesbian
and Bisexual Alliance, a student organization at USC] was throwing a welcome
barbecue. It took every ounce of courage that I had to walk over to the barbecue
and introduce myself. The people I met that first day are some of my closest friends
today. It was the best decision I could have made and the hardest one to execute.
"I remember walking across campus, telling myself. You can turn around;
you don't have to do this. But for some reason my body just kept going, and before I
knew it I had stepped into the auditorium and there was no going back. It was a
perfect platform for me to get involved and be active on campus. I guess I had it
lucky in the sense that I didn't have to worry about people I [knew] being here and
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finding out, because I still wasn't out to my parents and family. It was a step for me
to be out here on campus first '
While at USC, Rad manifested his queer identity through his personal style
("I had really funky colored hair and [body] piercings "), his journalism, and his
campus activities. He majored in public relations and minored in sculpture. Early in
his college education, soon after he stepped into the auditorium, he decided to
declare his sexual identity to his parents. "About a month after I'd moved [to Los
Angeles], on my eighteenth birthday, I sent both of my parents letters. They were
divorced. The letters explained everything. I feel much more articulate when I write,
so I explained it.
"My mother called me back within a week and said, I did suspect it.' I didn't
hear from my dad for over a month. That was the most heart-wrenching month of
my life. When he finally called me, he was crying and said he didn't know how to
deal with it. Basically, he didn't want to talk about it. [But] I [said] we were going to
talk about it. He didn't like that very much. For the few months after I came out to
him, it wasn't fighting. It was just arguing. Any time I'd mention anything I was doing
- helping out with National Coming Out week or doing stuff on campus - he would
change the subject, just blatantly ignore me. It got frustrating. I went home for
Christmas, and that was the first time I'd seen him. They both lived in the same
small town, so that's good or bad. We had a huge fight; he called me all sorts of
names and basically told me he didn't want a gay son. He'd already remarried and
had two step-children.
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"We haven't really spoken to each other since. That was four years ago,
almost. It's funny, because the rest of his family has no problems with it. I tried as
much as I knew how. Like, I sent him, the same as my mom, articles and PFLAG
[Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians] stuff and all that. He would just send it
back to me. So other than that, there's been no contact from them, minimum
contact from my step-brother and step-sister. That's because they don't want their
children to be gay, as I've been told. That's the most unpleasant aspect I've had of
coming out, losing that part of my life, but it was one of the sacrifices I was ready to
make and I had to make, I guess, because I wanted to be out to my parents "
Rad deployed his identity by being open about his sexual identity in classes,
both to students and faculty. He viewed his sexuality and sexual identity as central
to his learning activities. "Not in the beginning. It wasn't something that I even
thought about until someone raised the issue with me. I think it was my composition
class, first semester. I had been politically active in high school, but Just in
main[stream] politics. I was getting more [involved] on the gay activism front, and it
just occurred to me that my teaching assistant was talking about marriage or
something and it was just completely assumed that we were all straight. It didn't
dawn on me right away, either; I guess because in high school you so rarely get on
any topics like that in the first place. It really hit me as bizarre. That's when I started
raising my hand. I would ask, well what about gay or lesbian relationships? A few
times it was met with resistance, but more so by the other students than by the
professors or teaching assistants. But I've always been out in classes after that.
Sometimes it's been an issue, but sometimes it hasn't been. All my professors have
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been supportive. Either I had it lucky, or USC's just good like that... or maybe I was
in informed, liberal classes."
In addition. Rad was open about his sexuality in on-campus work
environments, including as a resident assistant during his sophomore year. "I had
great bosses on campus. One of them's a good friend of mine now. They've always
been supportive. I'd wear my little pink beads or whatever, and they'd be cool."
The decision to come out to himself and others prompted Rad to become
involved in gay activities on campus, which was not easy during his freshman year.
"I was very involved in the gay group on campus, the newspaper, the mentoring
program through the counseling center, trying to work full-time between two jobs,
taking a full load of classes. The first year I was involved, gay life on campus was...
not visible, I think. There was National Coming Out Week, and that was the week
that it was okay for the gay group on campus to be visible and do things. Other than
that, I don't remember ever seeing or being a part of anything that was public or
offering visibility for the gay community. It was supported, as much as I think it could
be, by the administration. It was okay to do National Coming Out Week. They let us
hang a big rainbow flag. But other than that... we never asked for anything more,
but I think we would have run into problems if we had.”
Part of Rad’s queer sensibility was reflected in his desire for visibility, as well
as the aspiration to work with other student constituencies for programming and
campus change. "Compared to the way things are now, I think [the gay student
organization has] changed, not dramatically, but I think for the better. They plan
more non-Coming Out Week events. They get support from places I don't think we
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ever thought of getting support from, or even asking, like other student groups.
Support in terms of financial support, like co-programming, and also support in
attending events and stuff. At the things I went to last spring - a Pride Week they
decided to have - 1 was amazed at the amount of support from other student
groups. We were always pushing for that. When I was more active, my freshman
and sophomore years, we would go to the black student assembly and the Hispanic
students' functions. So I guess it's finally coming about, more equality in the student
groups."
The activities Rad participated in also changed over the years, reflecting his
increasing - and later decreasing - involvement in the queer campus community.
"My freshman year I was volunteering, doing whatever they wanted me to do. I'd go
hang flyers in the dorms or whatever. My sophomore year, I was on the board. I
don't remember what my position was. You start becoming friends with the people
who were in charge. We were all friends, and we were all on the board. It was more
about programming; I had more of a hand in National Coming Out Week. I was
doing research on what other schools were doing. I guess it was a drawback being
in L.A., because I had some other ideas that you just can't pull off in a town like L A.
As a group we thought of doing more all-school stuff, with different universities,
which is really a good idea, but I don't think it can be effectively carried out [in Los
Angeles]. People would always thank us for inviting them, but then they'd never
show up. Maybe that's because, would you rather go to USC or West Hollywood?
"My sophomore year was the first Gen-Q [Generation Queer] retreat, the
leadership retreat [sponsored by USC's Division of Student Affairs]. I participated in
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that, and then my junior year I helped plan it. That got me more able to think of
moving off campus, being involved. I was starting to question where does
leadership go, where can you take queer activism o ff campus? We'd go to
conferences " Socializing would also be "[pjrimarily through GLBA, going to rap
groups. People would have parties."
While Rad displayed queer sensibilities, he also embraced some "traditional”
gay notions of campus involvement. " I spent my sophomore year as an resident
assistant. I made it a goal of mine to be very visible. My freshman year, I knew at
least three or four R.A.s who were out and open to their residents, other R.A.s and
on campus, and active in GLBA. Those were the people I looked up to the most. I
wanted to emulate them, and that's what I did. I ended up being the only out gay
R.A. that year. I had a big rainbow flag hanging from my campus window. It was
hard; the dilemma I didn't expect was what to tell my residents. We had our first
floor meeting, and I told them. I'm gay, and I'm active in these groups on campus ' I
made it more of an example of what they could do to be active on campus.” Unlike
Tim, the gay student whose first year live-in experience at California State University
- Long Beach was degrading. Rad " had no verbal abuse, nothing that I had to put
up with my freshman year of living in the dorms. I wanted to set an example of
being a positive, out role model, and I think I did that."
Later College. After two years of living, socializing and volunteering on
campus. Rad began to desire non-campus experiences and relationships. "I think I
was Just randomly dating people, who ended up being these seventeen- and
eighteen-year-olds from campus, whom I was getting really disgusted with. I used to
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write the gay column in the newspaper, a weekly column in the DT [Daily Trojan,
USC’s student newspaper]. I wrote it for a few years. I got these kids just randomly
e-mailing me; 'Oh my god, can I meet you?' So we'd go out, and I'd just get sucked
into these things.
"My junior year was a time I was trying to move my life away from school. I
had begun making some friends who were not at USC. Mainly from my job. working
off campus [at a music store near West Hollywood]. We'd meet up and go out on
the weekends. We'd go to clubs. And some of them were gay and some were
straight; we'd go to gay clubs, we'd go to straight clubs in Hollywood. It was fun. I
also had a large group of friends who lived way out in the Santa Clarita area [about
fifty miles from USC], from my first boyfriend here on campus. After moving here I
got involved in GLBA, and then I got involved with him. We were together over a
year and a half. I got a car, right before my junior year. That's how I got a job off
campus."
The allure of non-campus experiences was a dual-edged sword for Rad:
while he could find more people whose experiences matched his own, conversely
the values and attitudes of many of those whom he met were incompatible with
Rad's ideology. "You just get such a rush. I remember the first time I went to West
Hollywood, the first time they took me to a club. I was just in awe, and I wanted to
go out at least five times a week. It was just amazing that such a culture existed; I
had no clue. All I had seen was being active" in queer activities, not gay people
socializing.
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Rad found many of Los Angeles' preeminent non-heterosexual social
settings intimidating. The predominately gay L.A. community of West Hollywood
"was scary. There was some sense of relief, in the sense that there were plenty of
other gay people out there, which I think had mellowed because I had met everyone
here before I was taken over to West Hollywood and exposed to that. I had a group
of gay people I had been around with, so I knew there were other gay people out
there. It was hard because - 1 don't want to say I didn't fit in, but I didn't see myself
represented there at all. I was always the one with funky-colored hair; I was always
the one with piercings. Those were extreme things at the time." The gay lifestyle of
West Hollywood in the 1990s "seemed so based on drugs, alcohol, sex, what you
look like; it was almost scary. I remember for a while that's what I thought I had to
look forward to. I thought growing up and graduating college meant I moved to
West Hollywood and go to Micky's [a gay dance bar on Santa Monica Boulevard]
every night.
"And we did [go out frequently], because it was comfortable. There was still
that sense of being around [gay] people in such a big atmosphere. It turned into a
love/hate relationship. I realized I loved going there to feel safe and comfortable
because I was around so many other gay people, but then when you start to realize
how everyone bases everything on what you look like and how separated it is. I
don't think I realized at the time; I was dancing with my friends, and you don't realize
you're being judged so much at the time. Then it comes to a point when you're able
to stand back and say. My god, I never want to be like that. ”
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This sense of difference inspired Rad to adopt more unconventional
approaches to self-representation, more queer deployments of identity. " I think it
was just fuel for being more extreme; more piercings, more colored hair. I guess, in
a sick way, to make myself stand out more when I would go out. It was also that I
was never able to do that back home; no one was here to tell me no. We weren't
drinking or anything; we'd go dancing, sit at the Abbey [a West Hollywood coffee
house], hang out. I grew to hate it. There was a whole year when, unless I just had
to, I wouldn't go to West Hollywood. "
It was in West Hollywood that Rad met his initial collegiate partner. "I met my
first boyfriend [at USC] about two months after I moved here. Randomly, I was out
with a friend of mine, at a club. She's like, 'Oh, this is my friend Michael; he goes to
USC, too.' We just started talking, and we really hit it off. We were together for a
year and a half. It was amazing, [but] it came to a really bad end. We were living
together in the dorm. We broke up when I was an R.A.. He wouldn't leave, and I
had to get my supervisor to kick him out. I look back on him, and my boyfriend in
high school, and I learned more about myself in those two relationships than
anything.
"In my first relationship, in high school, [sex] was important, because it was
the first sexual relationship I'd had with a man. (I never have had sexual relationship
with women.) It was there, in both of them; it was a part of the relationships. It
wasn't a main factor in either of those relationships. It was like an added bonus."
Rad's recent college experiences provide him with a more immediate sense
of what being queer in college means. "I think more than anything, it meant being
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active. That’s the only exposure I had before I came to college. I had gone my
senior year in high school to the Gay Pride parade in Boise. I had stayed far away
on a comer to watch it. I don't remember what everyone else sees on the news; I
don't remember the leather daddies. I remember seeing all the active groups: the
Stonewall Democrats, the AIDS Foundation. That's what I had in my mind, coming
here, and that's what I set out to do, to be active. I think that included being visible.
Once I got more active in GLBA, I had a very I dont care, in your face type attitude.
I could care less whether anyone knew I was gay or not. I still have that, but it's
calmed down a bit. It was less identity forming and more just trying to be out there. "
Reflections on Gay and Queer Collegians
Men who identified as gay during their collegiate years displayed a number of
similarities. Some of their stories echoed those of closeted and homosexual
students, particularly the Importance of sex and sexuality in assessing their
understandings of their senses and experiences. Another familiar theme throughout
the gay narratives was the relationship(s) of their identities to the concepts of
“normal” and heterosexuality. Key differences, though, set gay students apart from
homosexual students, not the least of which was that gay students perceived that
they differed from their fellow non-heterosexuals.
Gay students actively deployed a more visible self-image in social settings;
they announced, or admitted, their difference to strangers as well as friends, either
through conversation or confrontation. Whereas homosexual students
conceptualized their sexuality as a “private” matter, gay students just as frequently
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understood their identity as a social one, delimited by the concepts of identity that
were undergoing extensive changes during the 1960s and 1970s. Gay students
sought roles and activities on campus equitable to those of heterosexual students.
Gay collegians discussed their sexuality with others; indeed, they had - and
admitted to having - sex with a number of people with whom they had more than
simply a sexual relationship.
The men and de of gay student life also differed, because the concepts
converged more for gay students than for homosexual and closeted collegians. On
the one hand, gay students wanted inclusion in the aspects of campus life they
viewed other students as being active in; on the other, the collegians wanted
acceptance from those others of the differences in their sexuality. In this sense, the
two hands seemed to be shaking in a sign of peace; the aspirations of the men and
de of these students were not only compatible, they were the same goals.
Queer students did not particularly choose to follow their gay peers in these
ambitions, nor into the avenues of institutional governance and programming.
Queer sensibilities would deem such activities incompatible with their understanding
of a queer identity: apart from both heterosexual and non-heterosexual identities,
their very existence challenged and confounded the notions of normality. Not only
was heterosexuality seen as a concept that conscripted those who were not
heterosexual to subservient and/or deviant roles on the margins of society, any
action or deployment of identity (the praxis of one’s senses and sensibilities) that did
not confront this binary schism was viewed as insufficient.
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W hile gay students struggled for Inclusion into heterosexual contexts, queers
grappled with maintaining a sense of affiliation with other non-heterosexuals. The
men and de of queer students were much more adversarial. While on the one hand,
queer students, too, conceived of their identities in opposition to heterosexuality, on
the other hand queers did not perceive gay or homosexual identities as any less
confining (nor less conforming) than heterosexuality. Attempting acceptance of
identity through inclusion in traditional, accepted avenues of campus life would be a
collusion with the heterosexual norms that foster the view of non-heterosexual
identities as abhorrent deviations.
Instead of joining those causes, often queer students flaunted their defiance
of the normative rules. As Pozzo and Jimmy did, queer collegians questioned the
boundaries of gender through cross-dressing and use of makeup to alter their
(masculine) physical appearances. More than announce, either calmly or
confrontationally, their differences from heterosexuals, queer students often created
events (kiss-ins or promenades) or utilized other physical manifestations of
distinction (differently colored hair, body piercings) to represent publicly and clearly
the differences. In doing so, they disrupted the places, times and manners of how
sexuality (and gender) were considered in public - on campus events, in artistic
endeavors, and even in institutional practices and policies. Queer students tended
to view their sexuality as fluid: their queer sexuality, while defining them in
opposition to heterosexuality, did not relegate them to the other half of the binary
construct o f sexuality any more than one identity of necessity precluded sexual
activities with someone because of their gender.
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As with homosexual and closeted types, neither student identity development
theories nor gay identity development theories convey the complexities and
verisimilitude of non-heterosexual experiences and senses. Neither did those
theories reflect the sensibilities that queer and gay students had of their roles and
activities on campus, let alone their identities.
The gay and queer identity types complicate the notions of non-heterosexual
students far more than the previous two types (homosexual and closeted), in part
because gay and queer students viewed their lives in relation not only to the norms
of heterosexuality (as did the previous two types) but also against homosexual and
closeted types. As more collegians began identifying as gay or queer, and as they
engaged in campus activism, activities and scholastic endeavors, the notions of
what non-heterosexuality was (and was not) changed, as the students and identities
considered marginal became more prominent on campus.
By the early 1970s, as the narratives depicted, concepts of how to be non
heterosexual on college campuses were no longer conscripted to definitions
delimited by comparisons to heterosexuality. The final two identity types of this
theory, “normal” and parallel, complicate the distinctions between heterosexual and
non-heterosexual students even further. The narratives of students in those
classifications comprise the next chapter.
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Chapter Six
Beyond Textbook Definitions:
“Normai” and Parallel Students
In the previous two chapters, I have represented identity themes prevalent in
existing gay development theories; homosexual and closeted, gay and queer. In
addition, two more ways non-heterosexual male students identify in college are
evident from the dissertation interviews: by considering themselves “just like
everyone else” - “normal” - and by viewing their lives as having parallel
components. In this chapter, first “normal” and then parallel narrators’ stories are
presented. These categories move even further away from the binary master
categories of “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” blurring the lines of demarcation
while conversely corroborating those classifications as well. This paradox is
evidence of the diversity in collegiate non-heterosexual identification, which is
lacking in the identity development theories currently existing for students and gay
men.
"Normal"
For some students, collegiate life, like that of earlier education, was
dominated by peer pressure to conform, to be "just like all the other guys." Not to be
so conscripted one to a limited role in campus life: an effeminate gay; "catty,
backstabbing, bitchiness;" a weak queer. In the words of an undergraduate in the
1970s:
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Homosexual did not equal normal - and I wanted more than
anything to be normal - regular - one of the guys. Being gay or
homosexual back then was still filled with the negative stereotypes
of the limp-wristed. effeminate, lisping hairdresser. I wasn't that,
so I decided I couldn't be homosexual or gay... My homosexuality
back then was just about sex, nothing more.
Sexuality for "normar type students, at least in terms of a social identity, was
neatly divorced from sexual activity. One could have sexual thoughts about other
males, even engage in sexual activity with them (which many "normal " guys did,
frequently), but such actions did not necessarily have any bearing upon one's
identity. An 1980s undergraduate from the east coast summarized the experience:
I never really considered [my sexuality]. I mean I remember having
sexual thoughts about men as far back as eighth grade. And in
high school they were there constantly. But I just never considered
being gay. I think the main reason for this (besides my natural
inclination to suppress it) was because I literally did not know one
gay person. Or, you know what I mean, anyone identifying himself
as gay. I mean growing up I thought maybe, just maybe Liberace
and Jim Neighbors (as so many said) were gay. And I didn't
identify with them AT ALL. Nor did I want to. .. It was just an insult
really.
These young men could not fathom an identity as anything other than that of their
friends and peers. To return to identity's Greek roots, to be the "same as," their self-
concepts were easily more like those they discerned around them, rather than
images of gay, homosexual or queer men they saw portrayed in media (if they found
any images at all). The experiences of three men depicted how this concept of self-
identity framed the collegiate activities and sensibilities for "normal" guys. Instead of
finding (or creating) a meaning of their homo-sexual behavior based upon difference
from heterosexual-identifying peers, "normal" students viewed their sexual actions
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as having no bearing upon how they self-identified, nor upon their social, academic
or extracurricular activities.
Ralph
Adolescence. Ralph grew up in Waco, Texas, during the Depression of the
1930s. Although he and his friends might engage in "playful fooling around," he did
not seriously think about what his activities meant beyond the immediate enjoyment
he felt. "We never discussed sex. Walking home from school when I was in the
ninth grade, there were four of us walking along. Two of the boys in the group had
older brothers who had become 4-F and were not allowed to go into the service.
One guy said, 'Well you know why my brother and Joe's brother didn't get into the
service, don't you?' I said, 'No, I don't know.' It's just a little three-letter word.'
Three letter word?' 'G-A-Y?' And my friend and I said, G-A-Y.' It meant absolutely
nothing to me. But then he told us what it was, and we snickered, of course, ninth
graders snickering along there on the sidewalk. But that was something I had never
even heard of, but I had been involved with some people, here and there, but I just
figured that was something I'd outgrow. That was what we were told. I never
outgrew it. It got worse!”
The labels did not appear to Ralph to focus on sexual activity as much as it
did social behaviors. 'W e didn't know the word gay, and the word gueerwas
bandied around a little bit. But sissy... well, nobody wanted to be a sissy. But I
masturbated constantly, with the neighborhood kids. We all did It. But I didn't do it
with my friends in school. I didn't feel that [term] matched [my activity]. The only
time I could do it with somebody I knew was when we were In the bed, at night, after
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the lights were out. I wanted to be the perfect [Christian] example, and I felt [homo
sex] took me away from that. Yet some of the people that I really respected and
liked, I knew that they were doing that, but not with me.
"I didn't think that [gay, or homosexual] was a definition of me, but it was just
all the boys were doing it. All the boys weren't doing it, but all the boys were doing it
in my mind. And the guys that I ran around with primarily, we never had any sexual
contact. I would sleep over at their houses, and [only] two of them, we fooled
around when we slept together. But I go back home now, and all my friends I was
with from junior high school, high school and college are all gay. And I didn't know it
then. We never talked about it."
Eariv College. Ralph enrolled at Baylor University in 1944, but was soon
called to military service in World War II. "I had to fill out [draft forms, with questions
of homosexual tendencies']; everyone did. I put none. I wasn't lying. I didn't think
I was a homosexual. My sexual understanding was so infantile. All I knew was that
I loved to masturbate, I loved to look at guys, I loved to touch guys, and I did not
want to touch a girl. Period. Even when I was dating them.
"My definitions about sex at that time were so meager that, to me, sex was a
man and a woman. I did not relate that - I knew that what I was doing was fun, but I
just figured that it would all change... I have known, and I knew all my life, that I was
different all of my life. I never even tried to make love to a girl, even when I was
becoming engaged. This was after I was a junior in college. I would kiss and hug
my girlfriend. I had lots of girlfriends. I would hug them and kiss them, but to think
of trying to touch their breasts, oh! Or to try to touch their private parts! I was
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married thirty-four years, and I never looked at [my wife's private parts], not one
time! I dated my wife for over two years, and I never considered trying to have sex
with her.... [After we were married] we had lots of sex, but I was never interested in
having sex with any other girl. I didn't always [think about men while having sex with
my wife], but I sometimes did. I never had a dream about having sex with a girl.
Any time I dreamed of sex, I was having sex with men."
After his stint in the service, Ralph returned in 1946 to Waco, and went on to
complete his degree in history and education in 1949. "I lived on campus. It was
never a requirement that we lived on campus. When I first started, I was living with
my parents. When I was in the service, they moved out, so when I came back I
moved into the dorms. There were lots of houses in the radius of the campus, so
[later] I lived one block south of the campus, in a house where fourteen of us guys
lived in one house. I went to school before the War, and almost no one had a car.
"Baylor was a rich person's school; I was a Gl living on the Gi Bill. All of the
guys living in the house where I lived were ex-Gls. We didn't do much... [because]
we had a limited amount of money. We would sit around and talk, or hop in the car
and go out to the Circle, to the Elite Cafe, and have the smallest thing we could
afford, because they had this delicious house dressing that they kept on the table.
They would give us crackers, and we'd eat that house dressing and crackers, and
buy ourselves coffee or hot chocolate or whatever, and maybe a grilled cheese
sandwich. We must have eaten a thousand dollars worth of that house dressing.
They stopped putting it on the table.
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"Most of us didn't have cars. I finished in 1949, and in 1949 there were still
not a lot of people who owned their own cars. We usually had one or two people,
out of that fourteen [housemates] who had access to a car. We'd get in the car and
drive out to the big lake outside of Waco, or out to the rivers in the warm weather to
go swimming at night. But we never went swimming nude; the only time you went
swimming nude was in swimming class!
"I can remember, when I was a freshman in college. At Baylor, you [swam]
nude. And there was this guy in my class who kept going down and grabbing my
dick. I was afraid for him to do that, because I knew I would get an erection. He
didn't care; he had a great big old cock, and he let his get firm. But nobody [else]
did that, and I didn't want to do that. I had to distance myself from that guy, because
he constantly bothered me. I stayed away from him as much as I could. I was very
active in the church. So was he, but he was willing to do these things. So I took
swimming when I was a freshman. I took it again when I was a senior, because I
just liked to go swimming with all those naked guys. You had to line up along this
wall. All those nude guys, I did a lot of checking, visual checking. Loved every
minute of it.”
Later College. Although Ralph recognized the social approbation of homo
affection and -sexuality, he did not internalize that sense into his sensibility about
who he was. At the same time, neither did he externalize his sense of sexuality into
a public identity. "I never had any feelings like that [guilt over sexual activity] at all.
My feelings were, anything that was beautiful, I loved it, and I didn't give a damn
what anyone thought about it. [But] I didn't want to get caught at all, because it
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would just be too much. What I would do was to sneak around and do things. I
would sneak in the bathroom and play around under the stalls, you know. In the
library, [there were] those big study tables. We'd sit and put our feet in the other
person's crotch, under the table. I had several different guys that we would always
sit across from each other, so we could play footsie under the table. They were
guys in my classes. Some of them were in the religious groups I was in. But we
never talked about it.
" I had a roommate, later on. Before we became roommates, he told me, I
had to move out of that room, with that guy that I was with, because he kept
bothering me in the night. He just kept bothering me and bothering me in the night.'
So we rented a room in this house a block off campus. We had a double bed, and
we slept together. The first night, he started playing around. And we played around
every night, but he and I never said one word to each other in the daylight or when
we were talking. We never, ever mentioned that we had touched each other. It was
so secret. We were [pretending to be] asleep. We were two people, both gullible
enough to convince ourselves that we were asleep and the other person was
asleep. But I knew he wasn't asleep, and he knew I wasn't asleep. I don't
remember just how far we progressed, but it was often that we did the playing
around. I was always a little ashamed of it, to the point that I started making the bed
to where there was a definite fold in the quilts and things, for my side of the bed.
But I learned how to just push that fold away at night ... I was convicted in my heart
as a Christian that I shouldn't be doing this, and we had had several boys kicked out
of Baylor when it was found out that they were gay. My French teacher had been in
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class one day, and the next day, [he] wasn't there. Most of us just didn't know what
happened, except for this group of snickerers who knew he'd been caught and just
let go immediately "
But the draconian responses of the Baptist school did not completely deter
the sex or queer transgressions upon heterosexual normative cultural institutions.
"They had a womanless wedding. A lot of the Baylor students got involved; this
was when I was teaching, 1952 probably. They were having a wedding: two guys,
all men. Some were dressed like women, some were dressed like men. They were
having a lark. This is before cross-dressing was popular ... And the police caught
them. They caught all of these guys - some of them were students, and some of
them were ministerial students from Fort Worth who had come down. The Waco
News Tribune reported all of this.”
Still, Ralph believed he, like everyone else he knew, should marry a woman.
"My college experiences definitely lead me into the idea that I was going to have a
family and that I was going to stay married all of my life and all that, and have
children (which I did; I had five). But the thing of sex, although it was very
prominent in my life, never figured in my plans. I never planned for the sexual part
of my life; I just figured that would come naturally. We were never informed of the
great homosexual figures of the past; that could have meant so much to us.
"I wish that I had known enough to know how to have gone into a gay
relationship and stay there. I do not want to say I should have done it, because I
have five wonderful kids and six wonderful grandkids. But I would not have had
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those if I had had the freedom and the encouragement by some role models to put
myself into a gay relationship. "
Chris
Adolescence. Chris grew up in the suburbs surrounding Chicago during the
1970s and 80s. Throughout those years he felt a difference from his peers, but did
not term it as a fundamental incongruity. Neither did he view his homo-sexual
activity as deviant; his first sexual encounter was at age thirteen. "Summer after my
eighth grade year. Totally consensual. It was with an older man. too; it wasn't kid
stuff. Totally consensual." But this activity, in his mind, did not correspond to the
label of queer that his school peers called him; that labeling, he believed,
corresponded to gender-related qualitites, like disinterest in sports and small body
size, rather than to sexual activities.
Eariv College. In 1987, he enrolled in the University of Illinois, which he
attended for four years, majoring in the teaching of French. At U of I, he became a
member of two campus communities: the formal greek-letter system and an informal
cadre of men who have sex with men. "I came from an all-boy Catholic high school.
There’s a certain camaraderie, in going to a 30,000 person university [through]
joining a fraternity... to make it smaller, and get the group of friends I'd always
lacked. Originally my intent was to be part of the beautiful' crowd. I had come into
my own after high school. Other people had told me I was very attractive, and I
noticed that the attractive men on campus were involved in fraternities.
"At U of I, [greek life] is a major, big thing: it's the largest fraternity [system]
in the country. I was going to join the Pikes, which was the looks house; I had
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gotten a bid from them, except I was scared for a couple of reasons to join them.
One, the financial situation: they were a very expensive house to join. You were
going to have buy a lot of clothes, and to keep up the role of Pike was going to be
very expensive. Two, I had heard that they had done some pretty hefty things
during hazing. I really wasn't sure I was able to keep up my end of the bargain, to
be a part of this good looking house. At the same time, I was looking at Psi Upsilon,
which, since everyone has their labels for houses, was a rich, preppy boy house for
boys who could not get into Pikes. There I could be a very good looking guy, as
opposed to an average guy. So which was one better for me? Psi Upsilon wanted
me, so I knew that their hazing was not going to be as difficult.” As it turned out,
“Hazing involved a lot of homoerotic things, and I was not sure how I was going to
react to that stuff.... And nothing was really expected of me, except for being a
good-looking, well dressed guy on campus.”
Chris viewed both attending college and pledging the fraternity as
opportunities to recreate his self-image. " I very much liked the sense of community
[in the greek system]. I was leaving a lot of bad stuff from high school behind; this
was my chance to get that group-of-guys friendship that I never had. Within the
fraternity, my closest five or six friends were also gay but had not called themselves
that yet. There we were able to enjoy our gay friendship in a straight atmosphere,
as long as we played the part correctly. Here were a bunch of guys who were very
friendly with me, yet at the same time they were almost forced to be friendly with me
because of the brotherhood thing.
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There was still a camaraderie there which I had never had on a male level in
high school. That sense of community was very important to me, but at the same
time I would walk around campus with my letters on and knew that the other people
were looking at me as hot fraternity guy.’ I had never had that before, so I was able
to milk that for all it was worth. In high school I was the school queer; the other
guys were very astute at figuring out what I liked, even though I had a girlfriend and
things like that. I didn't have to deal with a lot of that in college, because I had a
safety net of my gay friends who did not know they were gay, either."
Despite not talking about homosexuality, he did experience it. "I first started
off, in college, [finding sex] in bookstores, because that was my experience in high
school. There were two bookstores in Champaign, two very good ones. And then
learning the bathroom system; the undergrad bathroom was the meeting point for
all of that. I just kind of happened upon that one time at the library. And then
reading the bathroom walls, figuring out where everyone else went. There was a
whole system and a mechanic to the whole thing; where to go to meet someone,
where to then go to have sex with that person, where the hot guys hung out, where
the non-hot guys hung out. So you knew which bathroom to go to; you would just
follow the notes. There was a place in the Union that was only busy at certain times;
there was a place in the Master's library. But pretty much bookstores and
bathrooms."
Chris applied the same standards to both greek life and tea room sex. "[The
bathrooms] were the whole system; that's where we [fraternity men] all went. The
funny thing is, it was a title thing as well. Just like a girl dating a Beta at school was
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considered really cool, if you were able to do a Beta in the bathrooms you were a .
very cool bathroom guy. There was a pattern to this. You'd start off in the
undeigrad and see who was in the undergrad bathroom. There were eight stalls.
And you'd figure out who was down there, who was good, who wasn't. Then you'd
meet clandestinely in the master's bathroom and have sex with people there. There
were people that I'd have sex with more than once; there was never a schedule to
it, but more than once. There were some guys that I only saw once and never saw
[there] again. But I would see them later [elsewhere on campus] on with their
fraternity letters on.
"I was bragging to myself. You have to remember, I grew up with a lack of
self-esteem. Here was my first chance. Instead of going to bookstores, like I did in
high school, seeing what I termed perhaps the physically grossest people - not
necessarily doing them, but seeing them - here was my first chance to see very
good-looking guys with very good-looking bodies, who I would think were straight,
dropping their pants for me to suck them off. So it was bragging rights to me, and
made me feel better about myself, because even though I was only a Psi U, but as
one of the hottest Psi U's I was able to get a Pike or a Beta.
“A lot of times it was a game. I enjoyed the bathroom scene; I enjoyed the
bookstores. There was a game, there was a chase, and it was intellectually
interesting to me as well as being sexually fun. There was a sense of excitement
when I left the fraternity to go to the library: Who's going to be out that night?
Who's going to be in there tonight? Who am I going to be able to nab? Who's going
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to show up there that I don't expect? There was definitely excitement in the whole
thing."
Continuing his approach to these two components of his life as normal and
not mutually exclusive, Chris applied the same standards of interest, appeal and
status to both his dating of women and his sex with men. "It was important for
people to know I was greek. At U of I, there was a definite pecking order, and to be
greek there. .. My goal was to get other fraternity guys. That was my element of
fun. And really, that game and that community of bathroom people became my
group. I mean, we never spoke, of course, but I at least knew that there were other
people out there who were young, attractive and hot, who also liked doing the same
things I did."
Chris made a distinction between sexual behavior and self-identity. He had a
private life from his greek peers but engaged in very public homo-sex. That homo
sex empowered Chris. "Did I get my self-esteem from the wrong places? I don't
know, but I definitely got something there. And it made me feel very good about
myself when I was able to nail a hottie there. Sex in college finally made me
understand I was an attractive person.
"I get kind of bothered nowadays when I hear about bathroom raids. For a
lot of people, that's their first chance feeling comfortable. As sick and as backwards
as that sounds, for some people that's their way to express themselves and to find
out what this whole thing is about. And that the phase they think they're going
through is not a phase. It was definitely a transition [for me]. There I learned the
rules, how to pick up someone, what to say and what not to say, how to act and how
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not to act in order to get sex or to get someone interested in me. it made it all that
much easier when I started doing the whole gay bar scene in Chicago, to learn how
to hit on men in Chicago."
Later College. Chris' social life had these two distinct components, but he
found neither realty at odds with the other. "I was greek, so I spent a lot of time at
the fraternity, a lot of time at the greek bars. I turned myself straight [in those
contexts]. But at the same time, [he continued] the sexual activity which had gone
on all through high school and college. I was able to live two separate lives. I did
not term the second life anything; I was not gay, but I did gay things. So the
behavior was gay, [but] not necessarily the essence. How did I manage it internally?
I in some ways disassociated. I had my regular life and my sex life, which was all
gay at the time, because my girlfriend lived two hours north, in Chicago. There was
no conflict within me at all. I knew where to go to have sex, I knew where to get it, it
was very easy. And then I went back living my regular life; go back to do
homework, live in the house, or whatnot. Plus, all my friends in the fraternity, I didn't
know it at the time, [but] were gay as well. So there was really no stigma associated
with being gay, because we were all gay inside. That subject was never talked
about, but at the same time, it was an underlying theme.
"A typical week night would be doing school stuff all day, then having dinner
together with the fraternity. We always had dinner together. And then it was off to
the library, to do homework. I rarely stayed in the fraternity, because it was too loud
there to study. So I went to the library, and the library was also the main place
where I would go to have sex. So, I'd get some homework done, see who was
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around to play with, and then come home about 10:30 or 11:00. That was on a
homework night. On a non-homework night, sitting at home, watching tv with the
guys. Pretty normal."
Another aspect of his life that was "pretty normal" was his romantic
involvement and engagement to a young woman in Chicago. He considered the
relationship serious. "As far as I know, fit had] everything that a straight relationship
would have. A true and honest one. We were. .. You're going to kind of get into
some Clinton-esque definitions of sex. Did I have sexual intercourse with her? No.
Did we do everything up to that point? Yes. She was two years older then me, so
she lived on her own. I slept over at her place a lot, and we slept together. She'd
come visit the fraternity, we'd sleep together. We had a common group of friends
that we did not meet at college. As far as I knew, it was normal. I just knew where I
could go to find gay sex when I needed it, in Chicago. I got pretty good to find out
where to go to get it.”
Chris’ sensibilities did not change to incorporate meanings of his sexual
experiences. He did not self-identify as anything other than "straight" or "normal"
for many years. "It wasn't until after college. I didn't think that an emotional
relationship with a man was possible; I figured that it was all sexual. So if I was
going to go for an emotional relationship, I was going to have to do that with a
woman. For me, the age that I started having sex and the amount of sex that I had,
caused me to believe that [for] men it was only a sexual thing.” His understandings
did not change "until after I had graduated, the first year [after, when], my best friend
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came o u t And that caused a rift between my girlfriend and me, and got me out of
that relationship” [with her].
"I think the college experience was the first time [circumstances] were set up
perfectly for me, to live my gay life as I wanted to live it then. Again, gay was purely
sexual to me. And it set up the perfect place, where there were 30,000 people
gathered in one spot, with high stress levels, right out of high school, with a lot of
drives going on in them that they haven't figured out (although we all try to come
across as undergrads who know what's up), mixed in with grad students who knew
how to - some would say exploit, some would say enjoy - and it was just a perfect
situation for me to find the type of sex I enjoyed at the time, without feeling any
guilt.”
Post College. In 1999, Chris was teaching at Arizona State University,
working to complete a doctoral degree in French. "When I have gay students come
out to me, I often tell them that it would probably be a good idea to go to a college
and not live at home; there's just so much independence and freedom to enjoy, you
can take the time to discover what is going on with you, both in your head and
sexually. .. It helps you break down your own barriers and your own constructs of
what it means to be gay.”
Reflecting back to his own undergraduate experience, Chris valued it highly.
"College was a lot of fun. There's a lot of people who are jealous of my college
experiences, because I had so much sex in college, and the type of sex and the
type of guy I had sex with. U of I definitely enabled that, definitely allowed that to
happen. "
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Greg
Early College. The late 1980s were also the years that Greg was an
undergraduate. Like Chris, Greg grew up outside of Chicago. He first enrolled in a
community college in the metro suburbs, eaming an associate degree before
transferring to Eastern Illinois University in 1988. Unlike Chris. Greg did not engage
in homo-sex on campus.
"I would hang out with my friends, in the residence halls, which is where I
primarily lived. A lot of my friends were involved with residence hall governance.
We also hung out primarily at one bar. That was all at Eastern. When I was at
community college, it was basically just an extension of my friends from high school,
the ones who didn't go away to college. At the same time, I was working full-time
and going to school. So, there wasn't a lot of time for socializing.”
Neither Greg's senses nor his experiences were non-heterosexual when he
arrived at Eastern; consequently, his sensibilities were heterosexual as well. "When
you're straight, you normally don't have terminology about your sexual identity; you
just kind of associate that you're just like everyone else. I thought of myself exactly
like everybody else. I hadn't had sex with anybody. I was still a virgin, all the way
through college.”
On-campus living provided Greg both new opportunities for relating to others
and changes in how he viewed himself. "In my residence hall, I held vice-president
and president offices. And then in the entire university residence system, I held the
treasurer position. I made some of the best friends of my life there [in residence hall
governance]. People were not there because they necessarily wanted to be, but
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because somebody came by and said, 'We really need somebody to go to this
meeting; will you go?' And you say, 'Who else is going?' And you drag a friend
with you, to go with you to this. And it's only within that group of people, these
people that just went because they were dragged there, that they elect and bring to
the top amongst themselves - not amongst the entire student body, but just
amongst themselves - that they make the leaders. There are people who were
involved in high school politics - the popular, the pretty people - who went on to the
student body governance things in college. Residence hall governance and student
governance at my university were opposite ends of the spectrum. We didn't like
them, and they thought we were a bunch of geeks. Which we were, but we had a
great time.
'The best part of college were the two semesters I was treasurer of the entire
residence hall system of Eastern Illinois University. I was not the president of the
organization, but I believe that I was probably the most highly regarded member of
the executive board. I made more money for the organization than it had ever
made. I organized their finances probably better than they ever had. It was a
position that I absolutely loved. And I had the greatest time in the world. I was
busier than I ever was."
Later College. By the end of him time at Eastern Illinois, Greg's conceptions
about his sexuality, and his normality, had changed. "I knew. .. I was gay in my
head. I knew what my fantasies were. I mean, I had purchased through the mail
gay pornography. I knew that I was attracted to men. The [men] I was in college
with I was very attracted to. It was difficult being in a situation where there were
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people around you whom you were attracted to, [when] you definitely had these
feelings. And being too afraid to do anything about it.” Or to be around others who
might do something about it. “I had a gay roommate at one time, whom I
disassociated myself from, extremely.”
Unlike Chris, Greg did not clue into the clandestine homo-sex culture;
further, he was too frightened to pursue gay campus activities. "I didn't know where
to go to find anything gay in college. I had contacted the social worker on campus,
to find out if there were any gay and lesbian support groups, but it scared me out of
my mind to go. So, it was mostly fear of what others would think; parents, friends.
But at the same time, I did try. It was very difficult for me, but I would come home, at
my parents' house, and talk to gay people online.
"I did start [cruising and having homo-sexual encounters in] the park and the
forest preserves stuff, like, the summer before my last year. I look at it as kind of a
rite of passage and as something kind of something transitionary. The few times i've
gone back to see what it's like now, after I've been in a relationship and stuff like
that, it's been like. Oh, this was so stupid. But what I would consider my first sexual
experience was after college. I consider the first time I had sex to be the first time I
was in bed with a man. [The prior activity was] jerking off. I mean, it was all - I was
so scared. It was just kind of situations I found myself in. The first time I feel that I
had sex with somebody was the first time there was kissing, and there was actual
passion and I was really enjoying it. The other times were just kind of circumstances
I found myself in; there wasn't much else there besides just orgasm.
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"For me, once I found the sex part, it all made sense. Finding the sex part
and finding that there actually were gay bars and places that I could go to and stuff
like that all happened at the same time. So it was like. Oh, my god! Making
associations with other people who were gay and realizing how much that we were
alike. And not just the fact that we liked sex with other men, but so many other
things as well. Once I made all those realizations, it was like, Okay, this is it forme.
But it was all the people who had known me at that point, that it was very, very
difficult for me to come out to."
Greg viewed his time at Eastern Illinois as important and beneficial. "I loved
my college experience. But I'm still jealous about the sexual part of it [of others who
had sex during college]. Because I had no sex in college."
Reflections on “Noitnai” Collegians
Ralph, Chris and Greg, although they attended different institutions at
different times, each recalled experiences and senses of being "just like everyone
else;” their homo-sexual activity did not change their sensibilities of how their
sexuality related to their concepts of self. Clearly, although they have since
identified as non-heterosexual, during their collegiate years these men would not
have responded to an self-concept as anything but “normal.” Nonval, as Greg
pointed out, is an unconsidered position, a concept so self-evident that to even
question its qualities is to call into question one's own normality. Each of these men
made it clear that the terminology, the concepts, of non-heterosexuality were
available; but in each case, the markers of identification were not necessarily sexual
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activity, but social roles ascribed and decried by heterosexual peers. Despite the
homo-affections, even in disregard of the sexuality they exhibited, these collegians
considered themselves (as well as their experiences and emotions) "normal, " "just
like everybody else."
Indeed, in some respects, they were anything but abnormal: Ralph dated
women and eventually married while in college; Chris applied the same standards to
his heterosexual dating as he did his homosexual tricking; and Greg reveled in and
developed in traditional campus student development activities. None of them had
friends or acquaintances who openly identified as non-heterosexual while in college;
neither did they join gay student organizations or causes.
The concepts of men and de were not evident in the sensibilities or
experiences of these students, for “normal" collegians integrated their non
heterosexual de experiences into a sensibility that included such actions without an
identification of difference from the men of their cultures. None of the “normal”
students were particularly troubled by feelings of duplicity or hypocrisy, reflecting no
conflict between men and de. Their actions were woven into the daily (or nightly)
patterns of their lives, often integrating homo-situations (checking out nude
swimmers, having sex in the library bathrooms) alongside non-homo-situations
(attending swim class, studying in the library). In the cultural contexts of their
campuses, they were not considered (openly considered, at least) as anything but
"normal," because they neither incorporated their sexual activities and senses into a
non-heterosexual sense of self nor deployed their sexual or affectional activities
publicly. Nevertheless, the experiences of these “normal” students would probably
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not be classified as such by student development theorists or practioners: neither
would their experiences fit within the existing models of homosexual development.
The existing theories o f development do not reflect the senses these students had
of their lives, nor the sensibilities they formed about their identity.
Parallelism
In contrast to the integration of homo-sexual activities into their sensibilities
and concurrent lack of consideration of meaning of those acts to one's self-concept
experienced by the "normal" students, other male collegians keenly felt the
disjuncture of the homo- and the hetero-experiences. For these men, who
exemplified the parallel type, the undergraduate years were a combination of
distinctly different sets of cultures, acquaintances and behaviors. By day (usually,
but not always so, though), these collegians attended class, worked on or off
campus, spent time with friends from school or participated in home or family life.
But by night (usually, but not always confined to those hours), they engaged in
different behaviors: they lived a "shadow existence, " cruising bars, parks or other
sexualized spaces, looking for male sexual partners; they took great pains to
ensure their anonymity (at least as far as beyond those sexualized settings). Unlike
Chris" sensibility, these men did not think of their lives as normal nor see their
behavior mirrored in their peers; unlike Greg, they considered their sexual activity as
sex, and not simply fooling around or reaching an orgasm; unlike Ralph, these men
did not cohabit with the other men they have sex with. These parallel collegians
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ensured that the two social milieus they are maneuvering in never converge. In the
words on one student from the late 1940s, "I felt I was leading two lives. "
Dennis
Eariv College. Dennis attended two undergraduate institutions in
Pennsylvania in the late 1960s and early 1970s: first Westchester State College
outside of Philadelphia and later Duquesne University, a Catholic institution in
Pittsburgh. He found the transition to postsecondary life quite liberating. "I never
dated girls after high school. I didn't have to play that game anymore. I was gay.
O f course, the word when I was there was queer, and I knew I was queer. I knew I
was different. I knew I wanted to be with men. But I didn't think I could tell anyone.
I hid it. I didn't act out on it on campus. Not until I sort of accidentally ran into
someone else like me did another person know.”
Dennis had perceived for several years that his sexual desires differed from
those of his peers. " I was twelve the first time [I made connection between myself
and the word queer]. I was twelve the first time I has sex with a man. I liked it, but it
was a ‘bad’ thing. I was told it was a bad thing, but I knew that I liked it. I had bad
feelings about it as well, when I wasn't acting on it. I liked the acting out on it. But
when I was alone in my own head, in my own room, I would look in the mirror and
think, 'Well, queers are dirty old men. You're not old, and....' So I had very
confused feelings about it, which don't do a lot for your self esteem, but I did like the
acting out of it, and I did seek it, in spite of my feelings that it was bad.'”
Dennis’ search was not on campus, however. "Socially [in college], I would
hang out with a crowd, so I wouldn't be attached with any particular person. During
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the week, I would study my head off. I was a music m ajor not only did you have to
take all the subjects everybody else was taking, you had a major instrument to
practice, a minor instrument to practice, and an elective instrument to practice. So
there were three hours a day of practicing. Unless you're a music major, people
don't understand; they're really quite busy. I didn't have time during the week to do
anything socially.
"But predominately on weekends I had my own little private life. When I went
to school in Philly, on Friday after class I would get on the bus, go into 69th Street
Station, get on the El, and go into the city. And [I] would cruise the train station to
find some old man to spend the weekend with. Now, when I say old man, I was
seventeen, he was probably thirty, you know? I'd find some older business guy on
the way home from work, [who would] pick me up in men's room in the train station.
And I'd spend the weekend with him.
"That was sort of my weekend routine. When I was back home in Pittsburgh,
I was real secure, and I would go to the gay bars. I was underage, but the weekend
would come and I'd be in the gay bars, dancing my fool little head off.
'Thank God I was dedicated during the week, because I didn't get any
[homework] done. There were basically at least two and a half days a week that I
wasn't putting in the practice time other music majors were. And they're probably
now playing in a symphony somewhere, because they were putting in the time. I did
[want to practice more], but that got in the way of my personal life. Lots of things,
through my life in my younger years, lots of achievements that I may have made or
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would have liked to have made, I didn't [do], because they took time away from what
I saw as my personal life, or my sexual life. And It came first.”
Dennis did not share his knowledge of his weekends with his friends or
peers. "No one [in classes] knew I was a gay man. I think everyone suspected. I
don't think I was fooling a lot of people. I was quite thin, quite cute, and quite
effeminate. My saving grace in high school was that I played football quite well, so I
didn't get teased like the other ones did. [In] college, I think people were really past
the teasing stuff about that. They just thought that I was a music major; it was okay
to be effeminate. Not that all music majors were, but it was okay, if you were a
music major. If I had been a PE major, they might have killed me. I think a lot of
people suspected, but I was not out, and no one knew. I did not share these
feelings with anyone except the strangers I would meet and get to know, off campus
and in the city. "
Dennis never kept in touch with the men with whom he would spend his
weekends. "Oh no, that was off limits. There's a man I think about to this day. I
would love to be able to find him. He was just the nicest person, and I would have
no idea of where to start. But no, I kept in touch with none of them, but I got to know
them very well. I would seek them repeatedly. I remember this guy who worked for
Scott Paper Company. He was just this big, beautiful man. He used to take me to
this wonderful place that overlooked the Delaware River. We'd put a blanket out
and fuck in the daylight. It was a secluded place, this place he had found for us. He
was just really romantic with me, this young kid. I was frightened of commitment; I
just knew I liked the sex. Yet I wanted the continuation of seeing someone. I was
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frightened of the commitment, because commitment meant people would know,
because we'd be together. But there were lots of people I wish today that I would
have kept in touch with, because they were wonderful people. And then there were
some weirdos along the way.
'The men I would meet or be attracted to or would have these 'non
relationship relationships' with were always older, because I thought I could learn
from them. There was some bit of father figure in that. It was never people my own
age, never. Even once I met other people on campus who were gay, there was
nothing sexual about that. Sexuality was expressed with older men. Older men
were outside of my way of life. Even if I ran into a younger man outside of that, that
was too close to my real life.
Later College. By the time Dennis moved back to Pittsburgh and transferred
to Duquesne, he began to "be gay" on campus. But, as before, his idea of being
gay was exclusively sexual and directed toward older men. " I actively pursued a
professor. He was my music theory teacher. I would start by putting a star next to
his name on every one of my papers. He would ask me what this meant, and I told
him I thought he was the most handsome man I'd ever seen. He actually took me
out for a drink and explained to me why nothing could happen, because I was a
student of his. He might have been queer, but he was ethical. It was obvious to me
he was a gay man. .. He never denied he was gay; he never admitted he was gay;
the word gay never came up. It wasn't used toward me, either. It was just two
people.”
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Like Chris, Dennis was aware of the subcultural tea room activities of non
heterosexual men on campus. "The first chair flute for the Pittsburgh Symphony
taught flute. It was nothing to be in the men's room and have [him] looking through
the cracks between the Johns, to see who was in the toilets, cruising. So you knew
that was going on, it was just never talked about. That's where gay people met
other gay people. Straight men aren't meeting women in the bathroom; that's
where gay men met other gay men. Especially when they weren't out enough to
know where the bars were. That's why they meet in bathrooms, parks, bus stations,
train stations.
"I think another reason that leads to that underground behavior is because
you view your sexuality, your gay-ness, as just your sexuality. You'll still hear a gay
man today say. It's no one's business what I do in my bedroom.' Being gay is so
much more than my sexuality, just like being straight is so much more than your
sexuality. But I think in those days, at that age, I thought being gay was about
sucking dick. That was what being gay was, with another man. And it wasn't about
being a whole person who happens to be gay. So of course, the activity only
revolved around sex "
Evaluating his college years after thirty years, Dennis makes a distinction
between his identity now and his identity then. "I would say I was gay, but
differently than I use that word today. Gay, meaning my sexuality, ruled my every
movement, thought and interaction with people. I was either trying to flaunt it to
those I wanted to know, or to hide it from those I didn't. But not like I would say
today gay, meaning a whole complete person who is gay. Most academic situations
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I would try to hide it. That was a conscious effort. But the minute I got away from
that, in my own time, I was using it to my best ability to get what I wanted: sex. I
was very preoccupied with sex. Fora gay man I was cute; in the straight world, I
wasn't. Girls weren't falling all over me. I wasn't real manly; I wasn't masculine. I
didn't fit in there at all; I never fit in there. I was thin, effeminate; but I was cute in
the gay world.
"When I think back on my college years, I would just like to relive them all, all
those years, because there was so much that was so wonderful, yet I didn't
appreciate it because I was so caught up with my sexuality. It clouded and ruled so
much that I missed out on so much else. If I could have been open and free about
who I was, I could have enjoyed other things more. I feel like I really missed a lot
because I was so preoccupied with that and had to hide that, as opposed to just be
who I was, to walk through campus and enjoy campus the way other people did. "
Alec
Adolescence. Alec* attended public universities in the Midwest for
undergraduate and graduate work during the 1970s. His separation of his sexuality,
his sexual identity, from his "everyday " life started well before he left home for
college. "I thought about my sexuality from early on. When I was a freshman in
high school, we moved from the city into the suburbs. I did high school... about
twenty-five miles from Chicago. I had an awareness of being attracted to men from
the time I was very young, about eight or nine years old, I guess. When I was ten
years old, I started taking the bus and going [to] downtown Chicago by myself. I
can't imagine ever letting my kids do that at age ten, and I certainly know my parents
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didn't let my sisters do that. I'm the oldest of seven. But... I had freedom to get on
the bus at age ten and go downtown Chicago and spend the day or spend the
afternoon or the evening.
"On one of those several trips I would take downtown, I discovered
pornography. It was male pornography I was interested in. That was back in the
mid-60s, and physique magazines were all the rage. There were kiosks on the
comers, where they would sell newspapers and magazines, and there was a
particular one where I noticed on the very, very top shelf there were these physique
magazines for a dollar. It took me probably weeks or months - 1 don't have a good
recollection - to get up the nerve to ask to buy one of those. I'll never forget the
response. The man did sell it to me; then he yelled at me to get away.
"I knew that was probably something I couldn't take home. I thought that a
place probably where I could take it and have privacy would be in a public restroom.
As Jo Anne Worley used to say, WRONG! And so, it was probably age ten or
eleven or so that I discovered that public bathrooms are not all that private. It would
take many years for me to explore that in a more physical, personal way, but I had
knowledge very early on that stuff was going on in those bathrooms."
Such comprehension influenced what Alec did and how he behaved. "My life
in high school, and for a good chunk of my life, became separated into sort of
parallel lives. I had a life where I was the honor student, the valedictorian, eaming
all A s, the good boy,' the kid that never got into trouble, the kid that all the aunts
and uncles loved and adored. And I had another life, where I was being a bad boy.
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Where I was masturbating in bathrooms, where I was buying pornography, where I
was discovering a way to be sexual that was outside of the expectations of the
family I grew up in.
‘The messages back in the 60s were still very anti-gay, they were very pro-
family. That's not the right language; that's language of the 90s that I'm putting
back to that. There wasn't even an awareness that I could live a healthy life as a
gay person. Gay meant just sick, perverted... 'those people. "
Alec did not think that the duality he felt in his life would change when he
went to college. 'The parallelism continued. When I got to college, I had, since I
was older, I had access to more ways of discovering what homosexuality was - and
I'm using that word because that's the word that would have operated in my mind at
the time. Prior to that time, when I was in high school, I couldn't go to the bars, I
couldn't go to the movie houses, I couldn't go to the bookstores. I didn't know that a
lot of that even existed, at the time. So my only way to understand homosexuality
was through the medical language (I was deviant, I was a freak) or the language
around hermaphroditism. I didn't have a way of knowing at that time that that was
not all one big solid clump of stuff that got thrown into me. I just assumed it was all
part of one package; being a hermaphrodite meant being a homosexual, meant
hating your body, meant sex in the bathrooms. It was all together."
Eariv College. Alec viewed his matriculation as an occasion to redefine and
redeploy his concept of self-identity; however, he rarely availed himself of the
possibilities. When I got to college, the opportunities to explore homosexuality in a
different way came available. I could go to a gay bar. Now, that wasn't something
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that I was doing on the up and up; it was still a very closeted activity. But I did. I
had, when I was a sophomore In college, a friend who was openly gay. I was
playing around the edges. I was having all of this kind of bathroom sex, but it was
not coming into the rest of my life. Here I had this friend who is gay, who is making
no small attempt to put the make on me, and I'm this coy little seventeen-, eighteen-
old boy who is not ready to declare, but really excited about dancing around the
edges.
“It was about that time also that I started throwing out the possibility of using
the word homosexuality to identify myself. I remember that it was when I was
seventeen or eighteen, I was really angry and frustrated, and I wrote a vengeful
letter to my mother and father.
" I did not think that toilet sex was normal. Today, I don't think of toilet sex as
not normal, but I also don't engage in it very often. There are lots of ways for me to
experience today what it is to be gay, that I didn't have a clue existed before. I
never back then in college or high school thought that my sexual activities in public
restrooms was normal. I classified myself... as just sick. I don't want to leave the
impression that I was very, very sexually active at that time; I was not. I was
frequenting public bathrooms often and masturbating, sometimes knowing I was
being watched, sometimes not being watched, and having a magazine of male
models. In high school, it was probably a handful of occasions when I let somebody
give me a blowjob. I did not have the courage or the inclination to correspond. Plus,
I was chicken [very young]; that's what people wanted. In college, it was much the
same. The first two years of my undergraduate degree, I only went home with
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somebody from a bar one time. And that somebody turned out to be a close friend
of the friend that I told you about earlier.
Then, in my little parallel life, where I was out whoring in bars (except not
being very successful about it), I met this guy and wound up going to his dorm room.
Now that was an unusual experience for me: there was no urinal in that room. It
was the first time that I experienced body to body... instead of a hole in the wall.
While it was titillating, while it was exciting, while it was a step in a different direction,
I was really, really scared. I was scared that somebody would have seen me, either
walking out of the bar, walking down the street with him, or coming out of his room. I
was just terrified. Then, the next day, my friend said, "So, you went home with so-
and-so." I had no clue [that they were friends]. I was horrified. I retreated into my
shame. I simply didn't have at my disposal a way of thinking positively about that.”
Later College. Alec’s experience in a study abroad program was pivotal to
his understanding of his identity, and how his identity was subject to quite literal
social punishment for deviating from the norm. "It wasn't probably until I was
nineteen and living in Madrid when I really started to experience a gay identity. Still
with a very small group, with very select individuals who knew that was going on;
there were a handful, and I trusted them. I don't think at nineteen and twenty there
was much distinction [between the concepts of gay and homosexual\. The word
[gay] was out, was being used; that was probably four or five years after Stonewall.
It was certainly there, but the words were synonymous; I wouldn't have been able to
tell you the difference. That might not have been true for other people who were
using the word, but for me that was true.”
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In Madrid, Alec began to feel differently about his sexuality. "What I felt was
that I was a long way from home, and they weren't watching me as closely, whoever
they were: my family, my friends. .. They' were everybody. I felt the pressure to
conform was so strong; it was coming from everywhere. I felt that in Spain, I could
play with finding out more about this male-male sex thing. I learned for the first time
about street cruising, and boy, did I like it. I think there was simply a moment when I
allowed myself to look back at somebody. I can't remember how I knew, that first
time somebody cruised me on the street. I had more [sex] in Spain, deliciously
more. I was having public bathroom sex; I was going home with people; some of
the people I met in bathrooms I went home with. It just seemed so much more
available. I remember also there being a sudden romance in sex. I don't mean like
romance in the typical way. My associations with sex had been dirty, dark, poorly lit,
bad smells. I didn't have good associations with sex. [But in Madrid] the bathrooms
were not scuzzy. When I would go home with people, it was sex in a house. There
was color; there were three dimensions; there was light. It was really very different,
and I remember all of sudden kind of enlightened by what sex could be. I liked it.
" I started getting excited about creating this identity, and then I got arrested
in a gay bar in Madrid, for being there. Franco was still alive. Spain was ruled by a
fascist dictator. I had been to that bar several times. The bartender (Rafael was his
name) was, oh, so tasty. That was the year of Cabaret, Liza's Cabaret. Maybe this
time. I'll be lucky.' It had just come out, and I had seen it already probably two or
three times, dubbed in Spanish. I identified with that movie like no other movie.
Well, the Wizard ofOz. I know that's really facile, but it's true: Judy and Liza for me
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have been serious icons. So, I'm In this little gay bar, somebody turns on the
jukebox, and it starts playing ‘Cabaret.’ I think. It's my moment. So I go into this lip-
sync thing in the middle of the bar.”
When he was acting out in the bar in Madrid, Alec was not on stage, but was
in an open space in the bar, with men circling him; the area was fairly well lit. "It
was not a spotlight, but it was definitely my moment. It was an odd sort of moment,
because [before] I didn't ever feel sexually like I could be the center of attention. I
was wearing yellow, tight hip-huggers, bell-bottom hip-huggers, with this really tight
little t-shirt, doing Liza. And doing her rather dramatically. Minutes after that was
over, I thought it was time for me to go home, and I went to get my coat. I was
stopped at the door, and that's when we were all taken to the commissary
downtown. Spent the whole night there. The rumors that were going on were
anything from imprisonment to being deported. I really thought I was up the creek.
"Sometime during that evening I was called before a panel of five, six people,
[in] a rather large room with one long table. They're all sitting there, and I'm standing
in front of them. They're going through this inquiry. My Spanish at that time was
already quite good; I had studied about seven years by that time. I pretended not to
understand quite as much as I actually did, and my accent got a whole lot worse
than it was. I thought it would be better for me. I was aware that there was a game
going on. The line of question was to elicit did I know what was going on in that bar.
I said I was there for a drink, I was having a good time, and it seemed like people
were having a good time; I didn't know why they were asking me these questions, I
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didn't know why I was there. At one point, someone referred to me as 'the good
boy,' and I said, 'Yes, I am a good boy '
"By morning I was let go and I was free to be on my way. But it was one of
those critical moments that was a very strong message: it would not be good to live
that way: it would not be good for me to choose a life where I was going to be
arrested or I was going to be shamed. So I was sort of scared away from this
incipient revelation of what it might be to be proud as a gay person. I went back to
my underground kinds of feelings. I stopped going to the bars, I stopped cruising, I
stopped doing the bathroom things for a couple of weeks. But you can't keep a
good queen down; I was back on the streets in a very short time. But my spirit was
broken. If you could look at the parallel lines of the two lives I had created, they
were kind of converging, and then all of sudden, nope, that didn't work.
'The year after I got back from Spain, I met the woman who was going to be
my wife, and we got married. I did what everybody expected I would do. The fist six
years I was married, gayness was something that existed only in my head; my
fantasies were all gay. The tensions in my life were gay. I might be riding the El in
Chicago, and be conscious of attempting to sit next to an attractive man. Sex for me
in those years - sex that was not with my wife - would be feeling the pressure of a
man's leg, pushing up against mine in the El. Now, that stuff can make you crazy.
Finally, one day, I walked into an adult bookstore, and I got a blow job. Sex for the
next eight or nine years was back to this parallel stuff of husband/father/provider/sex
partner on the one hand, and then on the other hand adult bookstores/rest areas.
They had to be places that were dark because I was really afraid of being identified.
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"My personal experience, while not unique, was different from a lot of gay
men in that I chose for a very long time - I would not probably have used the word
choice during all of that - the decision to live these parallel lives. It wasn't until my
mid-thirties when a real change of self-notion started to take effect. I have felt that
the ordinary experience... fo r resolution o f gay identity happens during
undergraduate years, and so I felt like it was necessary for me to move beyond the
college years to allow a piece of my story where that got resolved for me, but it didn't
happen until fifteen years later. I had a convergence [of the parallel lives] in my
thirties; I had an approach in my late teens. "
Pete
Eariv College. Pete* first enrolled in a community college in a Mid-Atlantic
state in 1978. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Maryland. He
found his life at Maryland "very socially active: I wanted to move away from home. I
knew someone, a relative of the family’s, who was in this fraternity. He would invite
me to parties at the fraternity. I looked at all the fraternities in the area, I decided I
wanted that one over all the others, so I pledged that fraternity in the spring. I lived
in the fraternity house my second semester at University of Maryland. The fall is
when I ran for office in my fraternity: corresponding secretary.
“Once you joined a fraternity - at least, this is how it was at University of
Maryland - you had to participate in everything. You were busy all the time. Every
night of the week there was something to do, and there were very few study breaks,
very few opportunities to study. You never did that. But there was a minimum grade
point average which you had to have to be pledge, which I think was a 2.0, so I
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know I did better than that my first semester.
"Things changed as I got older, but initially I did everything in the fraternity
house. I slept in the fraternity house; we had parties in the fraternity house; I hung
out in other people's rooms in the fraternity house. We would go to sororities that
had parties. I didn't hang out in the sororities, but Monday nights were the nights
you could have dinner at somebody else's house. I knew some women who were in
the sororities, so I would go there and have dinner with them.
" I knew that I was gay long before I joined the fraternity. The fraternity was a
vehicle for me to get out of my parents' house, because I was living at home. At the
time, there was a movie called Animal House. My best friend, a heterosexual friend,
saw that movie seven times. He really, really liked that movie. He was one of my
straight circle of friends who didn't go to the University [of Maryland]; he went to
Catholic University. I would hang out with him at CU all the time, and he knew I was
gay. He always wanted someone to go to the movie with him, so I saw it with him
more than once. That movie peaked my interest in fraternities. I knew this brother-
in-law of my brother he and I were friends, he would invite me to the parties, and I
thought it was really neat.”
Fraternity living brought a sense of male camaraderie to Pete’s collegiate
sensibility, as well as a sense of belonging. "You could be around all these guys. It
was an immediate social mechanism. There were other fraternities that were sort of
jock fraternities,' and f didn't think I would fit in that. There were other fraternities
that were drug fraternities,' and I certainly didn't fit into that. And there were other
fraternities that were geeky fraternities,' and I didn't fit in there. This one was just
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extremely average; they were average people. No one was overly masculine.
There were other houses that were considered looks' houses.”
Pete, like Alec, kept his homo-socialization separate from his campus
activities. " I definitely knew I was gay, and I was having relationships with other
men. But I did not do that my first semester in the fraternity. I was incredibly busy
with the pledge masters; you were constantly busy. You had something to do every
night, or every other night. You were up so late in the evenings that you would go to
class, and if the class were early, you'd spend the afternoon sleeping, to catch up.
The first semester I was completely immersed in the fraternity.”
Soon, however, Pete scheduled non-campus, homosexual ventures. "It was
in the second and third semesters that I was there that I started to go downtown to
Washington, DC, and take more liberties. I would occasionally not spend the night
at home, in the fraternity, and people would notice. They would say, 'Where were
you last night?' Or You didn't come home last night.' Especially my roommate. I
would say, I was out with some friends ' Since I was a local, from Maryland, I had a
lot of friends in the suburbs of Maryland that I went to high school with or that I was
in Scouts with. The people in the fraternity knew that, because I would occasionally
invite them over, or they would come over. So they were another circle I hung out
with. I would say, I was out with them; I was in Bethesda; I spent the night at their
house, 'cause we were out partying.' Which was a reasonable thing to say, because
that was a common practice.
"But in the middle of the week, when it was so obvious, like if it was a
Wednesday or a Thursday night [that] you didn't spend the night, that was unlikely.
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So I would concentrate on doing It only on Friday/Saturday. In that case, I would say
I spent the night at my parents' house. And sometimes I really did spend the night at
my parents' house, because I would go home on the weekends occasionally.
Sometimes some of my friends - my gay friends, when I started making gay friends
— would call my parents' house or the fraternity house. And there was a club in
Washington, D.C., called The Frat House. And it was one of the very few places I
would go to. It was the place to go at the time. So they would call my parents, and
my father would say, 'Where do you know Pete from?' And they'd reply, 'From The
Frat House.' And that's something I did at the time, to sort of conceal the fact that I
was gay [from my parents].”
Pete took more measures to keep his two social identities from converging.
"As I started to migrate from being in the fraternity to being more gay and out, I did
meet other gay people [from the fraternities] in the bars. And that was very
intriguing. You were almost part of a further, secret society amongst the fraternities,
because you knew someone in this house who was gay, you knew someone in
another. There was this very interesting sort of dynamic that occurred because of
that. You almost reveled in it; you relished that experience. It was a further thing
that you had that was sort of secret.
"At the time [in the eariy-1980s], people who were straight did not go to gay
bars. If you were in a gay bar, you were gay; and if you were in a fraternity, you
had a vested interest in keeping it [being gay] secret. So you maybe recognize
them, or you would have a conversation about it, and that was pretty much it.
Unless you were attracted to the person, and then you might have a relationship
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with them. You would [say something to others], especially if you had a University of
Maryland shirt on. That was a vehicle for conversation with someone: Oh, you go
to Maryland?' And then it was, 'Are you in a fraternity house? Does anybody in your
house know you're gay? Who else in your house is gay? Do you know of any other
fraternity people who are gay?' You would measure the extent to which people in
the house knew, because you didn't know the culture of the houses. You might
have an idea about the cultures of the houses, but you would only know your own
culture very well. People always had curiosity of another house.”
Later College. Such secrets fit nicely into Pete's understanding of - and
maneuvering w ithin- both worlds. It was apparent to him, on some levels, that even
the straight world of his fraternity had underpinnings of homo-affectional and -sexual
elements. "I really loved that attention [in the house]. The whole fraternity system
was a great vehicle for having a relationship with another guy that was reciprocal -
but not sexually. It was very caring and nurturing without being physical. That was
an attractive thing about it. Well, during the initiation period, it was extremely
physical. Hell Night was very, very physical: lots of touching and bizarre behavior.
But after that was over, it was understood - I don't know how, but it was understood
that was not the way it was. It was only that event where the physical-ness took
place. It wasn't sexual; it was physical.
“There was no sex, per se, but there was a lot of touching and hugging and
even kissing (but not lips kissing; kissing like on the neck or something like that).
That occurred at the culmination of Hell Night. But the thing that was attractive to
me was that that was always in the back of my mind. When that occurs, it reveals
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something very significant about the persons engaging in that behavior. That was
always in the back of your mind, that these people will do this or engage in this
behavior."
Despite Pete's attraction to and enjoyment of fraternity life, within a year he
had begun to move away from a social life based, on campus and in the g reek
system, and toward one based in Dupont Circle, a section of D C. popular with gay
men in the 1980s and 1990s. "I used the word migrating. I was totally immersed in
the fraternity system at Maryland. I participated in everything during Greek Week; I
went to all the parties. That was my first and second semesters. I was an officer,
and I took that responsibility seriously. We went on retreats. Then I started going
downtown and to the bars and stuff, and I decided that was a better life for me,
personally. I just think that [gay socialization] was more of who I was. I was having
sex, and I decided I was done with the fratemity scene. I didn't want to have that
experience my whole undergraduate life. I didn't want to do that anymore;
essentially, I saw something I wanted to do more. And that was to be downtown and
experience the gay life fully, to be in the clubs, to dance, meeting and making a new
network of people, local D C. people. The two groups, I knew, couldn't mix; I
couldn't bring my gay friends I was meeting in the clubs to meet the people in the
fratemity house, nor the other way around. On top of that, I needed a place to call
my own; physical space. And I was sharing it in the fratemity house. No one had a
room of his own, and I certainly couldn't bring another guy there. Although I did
once; it was very scary.
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"So I moved out of the house into an efficiency-type apartment in
Washington, in the basement of somebody's house, with my own private entrance. I
loved that. I had ultimate freedom, which I had never had before. I had my own car.
I distanced myself physically from the fraternity and moved closer to the gay scene.
That was probably my junior year."
As Pete's involvement in D.C.’s gay circles increased, his activity on campus
- particularly with his fraternity - decreased. " I would go to the fraternity meetings
once a week; you had to go to Monday meeting. I did that faithfully the first
semester, and then it was in the second semester I went every other week. The
third semester I would go once a month. And then I stopped going completely,
without saying anything to anybody, in my senior year. I didn't even say goodbye. I
just slowly severed that relationship. At that point I didn't care at all about the
relationships I had established there; I had slowly separated. It was a slow and
progressive thing, but there was nothing unkind. It was not problematic; there was
no disturbance that made that happen. It was just a progressive thing. .. If you
didn't attend the events, people would call you a ghost. The term was designed to
make you appear, I think, more often; so it was not derogatory, it was more
persuasive, I think. I didn't care that I was a ghost. I just decided that I was going to
be a ghost and never came back again."
Post College. After graduation, Pete moved back to College Park, living in a
group house with other gays and lesbians. " I moved away, then I decided that being
gay and being out on campus was a great experience. Then I got involved [in
campus-based non-heterosexual activities] as a graduate student. I felt at the time.
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as a masters student, I had more freedom to do that. I was older, I knew a little bit
more. I didn't know anyone else in the fraternity who was there any longer.
Everyone who was a senior to me was graduated and gone, as had the freshmen
and sophomore. So I was back to my own institution as a masters student, and I
could do what I wanted to. I became a member of the lesbian and gay student. I did
the rap groups for a while, but then I realized I didn't have anything to rap about; the
rap groups for me were just another way of meeting people. Then I helped to
organize some of the parties; the house that I lived in was the house to have a party
in, if you were a member of the gay group. The president of the organization lived
there, and a lot of gay people lived in that huge house."
But as an undergraduate student, being gay was a distinctly different
experience from what Pete would later find in graduate school. As an
undergraduate, being non-heterosexual and a college student "meant living a secret
life. I thought it was exciting and dangerous. I also thought it was exhilarating, and
at the same time disappointing. At the time, there were many people who were not
out. It's not like today. Even today, I know people are oppressed, but it's not to the
same extent. So if you really liked someone, there was always the threat that they
were not going to come fully out or were not going to want to continue the
relationship."
Andre
Early College. In 1983, nineteen-year-old Andre enrolled in Bradley
University, a small school in Peoria, Illinois, about three hours from his hometown of
Chicago. He stayed at Bradley to complete a masters work in college student
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development. "I hung out in the residence halls. Being from Chicago. I didn't know
anyone, really, at Bradley. I came there with no family, no friends there. I choose
Bradley sight-unseen, so I really made a decision to set some roots down in the
residence halls, 'cause that's where I lived, that's where my R.A. lived. My resident
advisor was very warm and welcoming. And I need that, for not only was Bradley
three hours away, it was predominantly white, it was a private school, and there
were very few African-American folk visible. Not to say I had to gravitate to African-
American people, but having come from Chicago, and the south side of Chicago,
where Black folk were everywhere, now I went to an environment that was very
different. It wasn't necessarily scary or threatening; it was just very different."
The size of both the institution and the city were comforting to Andre, at least
at first. "Bradley was a small enough school that people cared about me. People
knew my name. Peoria was about 124,000 people; the school was about 9,000,
including the graduate school. It had a small-town feel to it without necessarily being
out in the boondocks. I needed that place, at that time of my life."
His freshman year, Andre was "a young gay man who wasn't even conscious
of his gayness completely.... I knew something was wrong, sinful, though I may not
have used those words, particularly that year. I think the term sinful would have
come into play more my senior year, because I joined a student group. Inter-varsity
Christian Fellowship, a faction of which went to a very heavily Pentecostal church,
where that terminology and sentiment was very heavy. But my self-identity was one
of wrong: I have to be a very good boy. I've got to be the best at everything I
possibly set my hands onto. My ethics and my morals must be above reproach,
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because if anyone were to find out I was ttiis different person, ttiis - 1 wouldn't even
say gay, because I didn't even use the word, I hadn't acknowledged \t-ifl were ttiis
different, wrong person, tfien at least I would have all o f these good things to fall
back on.
'That sent me Into being an extremely co-dependent, moderate neurotic type
of person who got overly involved in everything. After my first year, I joined the
residence hall staff, I became an assistant resident advisor. Throughout my college
career I got involved in student government, I was on the president's visioning
committee working with faculty and staff. I was in good with the campus police
because of some of my work. I was a stickler for the rules as a residence hall staff
member. I was caring but very demanding of the staff that I eventually started to
supenrise. I was a benevolent despot, in a lot of ways. And all that was to extol
those values that I so desperately wanted to have, to protect myself from anybody
ever questioning my sexuality and finding out how wrong I was.
"There were some benefits to that. I tapped into an almost infinite source of
energy. That type of fear, that type of cloaking, was like a nuclear furnace, because
if I were to try to be that way now, I would be a dried up husk. I don't have those
motivations anymore, to be the best, so that no one will ever question me. I don't
have that energy where I must keep going. I'm not that compulsive anymore."
Despite the increased drive and motivation to achieve, Andre's "secret”
caused him discomfort when he interacted with heterosexual peers. "Conversations,
particularly when in a group of other men they were talking about dating, about
having sex - or wanting to have sex, 'cause most of them never had any sex with
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these women. But having sex with women, joining the fraternity, going to sorority
formais - 1 wasn't talking like that. That wasn't on my mind; that never crossed my
mind. What also helped me realize the difference was that I felt somewhat fearful
letting people know that I hadn't had those experiences. You have to realize, I did
not date in high school. The only date I had in high school was my senior prom. If I
were hearing myself say this and did not know myself. I'd say. Well, didn't you deal
with that in high school? Well, to some degree, but [in high school] I didn't live with
these people twenty-four/seven.... Also, I wasn't as athletic as some of the boys
there, and though that doesn't necessarily relate to sexual orientation, it let me know
I was different.”
Andre recognized this difference was due to his sense of sexuality. "If I had
to label my identity as a gay identity or a queer identity, [those times were when] I
began to touch upon some of those emotions. I became aware, ever so slowly, that
I was sexually attracted to some of the men I was hanging out with. Maybe in a
cursory way; those were not the words in my mind, but now I'd say. Oh, he's cute.
But it was a pre-verbal type of knowing; it was more like a warm feeling of
difference around this person I was gravitating towards. Another concern of mine
[during these conversations] would be not to say anything. Don't say anything; just
let the conversation happen.
"There was a sense of quiet panic. I knew those were not my experiences,
not my concerns, not my urges; those were not on my agenda. It was a survival
thing. Don't let on to these people that you've not had these experiences, that these
are not your concerns. Just let it go. At best. Just let it go quietly. If they approach
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you, just simply laugh it off, blow it off. if it was something that I could easily say that
was immoral or wrong, sometimes I used that as a defensive tactic: Oh, I don't think
thafs right; you should wait until you're married.''
Later College. Andre could not always maintain the separation, however; at
one point, his role as a straight campus student administrator came into direct
conflict with his burgeoning sensibility of his sexuality. "There was, towards the end
[of my time at Bradley], when I was a graduate student, a young man who wanted to
start a gay group. This is one of the times I regret the most. He was a really young
guy, I think a freshman. He put out a call, you know, real grass roots type of thing,
and these students came together, very secretive. They had a fledgling little
budding of a group. My response was Oh, my God. Part of me was like, Wow, they
did that. Second part of me was Well, what's going to happen to them? Third
thought was I cannot be associated with this group."
The student eventually brought Andre into conflict with an underground
lavender railroad for runaway non-heterosexual youth, operating in Peoria. "As life
would have it, this young man became a resident in one of my residence halls. He
actually was being harassed through some folks either on campus or off campus,
and he was housing runaways, gay and lesbian youth from the community who were
running away from abusive homes or abusive situations. I had to cooperate with the
sheriff and campus police to go in and try to talk with him, try to have him explain
who were these people living here, why were they living in our residence halls. Part
of me of calls it cowardly, part of me calls it my only desperate way, but I met with
him with all these huge honking police officers who were very uncomfortable with the
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situation. He was an eighteen-year-old with these sixteen-, fifteen-year-olds in his
room. I was the one doing the talking. And all I wanted to do was make sure they
didn't get hurt, that no one did anything to them, but I could not for the life of me
come out and say. I'm gay, or I'll look out for you, or I'll help you find resources.”
Andre’s conflicted impulse was to "take care of them, but you can't let anyone know
you're gay. You couldn’t give them that extra reassurance of Hey, I understand.
"If you could imagine, they're all sitting on the floor, because [the student]
had removed his bed. Three of them [the student and two minors] were huddled like
little puppies. The scene is very vivid in my mind. [In the end] I helped them not be
evicted not right that moment. I gave them several days; I would come back to
double check to make sure they were no longer living there. He had to promise that
he would not do this again, and he had to return his furniture. I protected him from
any type of criminal charges by telling the police that I would handle it, be the judicial
official and pass it on to my bosses. The student stayed for some time, but I don't
think he graduated from Bradley. I think, partly, he was out, but in some ways he
was in some not sure, not savvy, not sophisticated yet, and still dealing with regular
developmental concerns [in addition] to homophobia and not having a support
system. It was bad enough, sometimes. Just being a student, and he was dealing
with all these other issues."
Most times, however, Andre was able to maintain distance - both personal
and psychological - between his campus life and his non-heterosexual feelings and
experiences. " I never, for the eight years I was there [Peoria], thought about going
to a gay club. I was in that much of a state of panic. That was almost unthinkable.
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would almost make [me] III. But, did I ever go to adult bookstores and have
anonymous sex? Yes. Was this adult bookstore close to, or at least nearby, these
gay clubs? Yes. But that presentation, that disclosure, that I would go into a club
and say Ta-da! I'm gay, - or that's the way at least I thought it was then - was
unthinkable. But it shows you the power of your sexual needs and desires, and find
some type of sexual outlet. That's when I started to visit [the bookstores]. We only
got paid once a month. And so, I got my money, the first day, I would go.”
Andre recalled his sensibilities concerning his sexuality in those days. "I'm
paid, I got money, I need to do this, this is the only time I'll be able to do it. I would
literally repress and shut off any of that moral talk about it being wrong. I would
disconnect it, and I would go. I would sometimes try to defuse it by saying, I won't
do it ever again. Those stupid promises. I'm going to do it this time, but I'll stop. Or
I'd simply cut it off and not think about it. But after a night at the club or at the
bookstore, having sex or whatever, I would have my walk of shame. There was
deep psychic pain and shame: Oh my God, I did it. This was so dirty and wrong.
Walking those two mile back up [the hill], I would try to figure out a way how I would
never do this again. Or try to do it financially and go. My God, I can't afford to do
this. When you're at the bookstore you can obviously buy pornographic material
and stuff like that, and sometimes I wouldn't have sex but I'd pick up some stuff, pick
up some magazines. And that would be my sexual outlet, as opposed to meeting up
with a guy or whatever. I'd bring that home, read it, look at it, and then after a few
days, rip it all up and throw it away.
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"You have to realize the risk I was taking, or at least the way I perceived the
risk. I was very well known on campus, very well liked ... So I had to leave at night,
10:00 or 11:30. Make sure that when all the party goers left (because most of the
students all left in groups) I would leave, and take an unknown route. I would walk,
literally, two miles, all the way from the top of the Bradley hill to downtown Peoria.
And aftenwards I had to walk back up. Oh please, the things I did! And late, late,
late at night or early in the morning, 'cause you’d just stay there. I'd stay basically all
night. I would leave the bookstore - I Just remembered the name of it, it was
Swingers' World — I would leave there probably about 4:00 or 5:00 [in the morning].
I would try to get back before the sun really got up and before anybody saw me.
There were some students who had jobs at supermarkets and stuff like that, who'd
be up and around. So you're like. Oh my God, I got to get in before people see me
come in.
"I never had sex with anyone from campus. I would have known if they
worked on campus. My people were totally non-Bradley people. They were
townspeople, several business folk, one of whom supervised one of my staff people
who had a co-op job [in town]. I would know regulars by face, who I enjoyed or who
to stay away from. .. You get to know some of those folks; I did, at least. After I
became a bit more of a risk-taker, I invited one or two back to my apartment. [At the
time] I was a hall director; I was on the ground floor of a residence hall, and all the
traffic went by [my apartment]. Sometimes I just wouldn't even know why I even did
it. They would ask, 'Well, can we go to your place?' I'd say, 'Well, I have a whole
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apartment; come on back ' I still had to come Into the lobby, like everyone else, and
then go from there. I would organize it so that I would go into the least visible
entrance to the building.
"I remember one situation that happened there; I just ask for an ultimate
forgiveness. Here was another young man, also from Chicago, working out there [in
Peoria]. He was a tradesman. I invited him back to my apartment. We had sex. It
was fun; it was good; it was tender; it was very cool. And then afterwards we
dressed, and as he was about to leave he then turned to me in the doorway and
said, 'Could I come back and see you again?' And without any connection to my
heart, I said, 'No.' And he go clearly the message; 'No.' I never saw that man
again. Inside of my heart, my recollection - and I don't think I've sugar-coated this
or romanticized this - he was truly another gay soul wanting to reach out, touch and
connect, and stay connected. In my fear and cowardice... I said, No.' Having since
come out - and I came out in 1991-92 - that has plagued me. I just go, My God, if
things had been different. If I could have just said yes ' I enjoyed him; it wasn't like
I was being condescending or anything. He needed something and I desperately
needed something. I needed to have a connection. Even if it was only two weeks,
who cares? It would have been nice. To me, that's where homophobia, homo
hatred, that kind of stuff, came out so clearly, so starkly with me. I feel so horrible
about that. To this day, I hate that I have ever done that.”
Such an example demonstrated the extent to which Andre’s parallel lives
influenced his behavior and sensibilities in both. Being a visible minority on a small
campus in a medium-sized city also impacted his experiences. "Because of the
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secrecy of that type of place [the bookstores], the anonymity, the very rapidity, the
lack of commitments, I did a lot of stuff. I led this secret, shadow life. There's a
greater chance that someone will know you, in some o f these smaller environments,
particularly in these college towns. There’s so many chances that you can interact
with someone in public.”
Despite Andre's growing connection to "regulars " in the Peoria homo-sexual
sites, he still conceptualized his identity as separate (although not entirely equal)
parts of "good boy " very connected to his campus community and "dirty" gay person
hiding from society. "Did I still feel it was wrong? Yes. It was just these bubbles of
time and space where I would suspend all that stuff in experience and enjoy those
sexual things. Then the bubble would collapse, and all those moral things would
come rushing back on me. Then I would feel very guilty. And then, if I made those
promises or tore up those magazines, then I'd go through this time of just being a
straight arrow. Realize, I only got paid once a month so I only got to go once a
month. So I had the rest of the month to redeem myself. "
Reflections on Parallel Lives
Redemption, atonement for past transgressions, half-hearted promises to
one's self not to do that again are common themes among the collegians who lead
parallel lives. Like their "normal" counterparts, they feel they should be normal - or
at least, not be non-heterosexual. Depending upon the individual and his
circumstances, this could be play a very important part in the daily actions of one's
life (as it did in Andre's and Alec's) or a less significant part if the man
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compartmentalizes the cultures and/or aspects of his life (as Dennis and Pete did).
For most of these men, being a non-heterosexual man (be that called gay, queer or
homosexua!) was not something that was a part of campus life; it was an aspect of
off-campus life. When the two worlds intersected, as it did when Pete or Andre
would rarely bring someone back to campus, the student would feel uncomfortable
in both student/straight and citizen/sexual roles; as Pete said, "The two worlds, I
knew, couldn't mix." This discomfort fostered in these men barriers between not
only the two cultures but also their emotions and the people they knew in each
culture. Pete felt he could not nurture his growing gay friendships while maintaining
his fraternity membership, so he in effect deactivated; Alec had a gay friend to
whom he could not be open and honest; Dennis did not keep in contact with or
become emotionally attached to the men he saw on the weekends (even when he
would seek them out again), in part because it would interfere with his collegiate
responsibilities; and Andre would not see the young man from Chicago again for
similar fears/reasons.
For these collegians, Mendelsohn’s (1999) concept is quite evident: the men
of their lives (the non-heterosexual culture in which they were raised and
participated in) was in direct conflict with the de of their lives (the homo-sexual
aspects of their identity that were compartmentalized and separate from their
"regular^ experiences and senses). While Mendelsohn’s idea might be pronounced
in the experiences of parallel students, student identity and gay identity development
theories are not: these students would appear to be developing independently and
separately in each theory’s stages, with little or no connection to what was going on
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in the other part of the men’s lives. Again, the theories do not reflect the reality of
non-heterosexual collegiate experiences and sensibilities.
Non-Textbook Non-Heterosexuality
As we saw in the types of non-heterosexual identities displayed in the
previous chapters, the concepts of normality and dominance formed the foundation
of how students classified in the parallel and "normal” types made sense of their
experiences. The parallel students separated "good” and "bad” social settings,
creating a dichotomy between the acceptable (the norm of heterosexuality) and the
inadmissible (the deviance of non-heterosexuality). Rather than incorporating one or
the other into their self-concepts, parallel collegians respected those definitive
boundaries and traveled between both.
"Normal” students, on the other hand, had no concept of themselves as
"other” or bad; in some senses, their identity integrated all of their behaviors into a
fairly cohesive whole. The importance of being "just like everyone else,” however,
prevented the "normal” students' sensibilities from incorporating the fact that their
senses and experiences did not match the presumed (and promoted) norm of
heterosexual identity (which was based upon a lack of homo-sexual desire and/or
activity). These men were not in denial; instead, it would be more accurate to view
their collegiate identities as distinct. They clearly acknowledged - and even acted
upon - the behavioral aspects of homosexuality, considered those activities in
relation to their perceived ideas of non-heterosexual identity, and rejected the notion
that they were anything but "just like everybody else." Their sexuality had no
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bearing upon their social identity (presented to others) or personal identity (as
understood by themselves at the time).
For all intents, these students would not be thought by most educators on
campus as homosexual, gay or queer. Parallel and "normal" students would not be
found in gay student organizations, at campus dances for non-heterosexual
students, or as participants in political or social functions for campus change. To
their sensibilities, the sexual deeds did not equal the terms of non-heterosexual
identities, let alone the associations with those whom the terms might identify. Like
the closeted type, "normal" and parallel students were a hidden population,
experiencing circumstances and constructing meanings of their senses in manners
that neither student identity development theories or gay identity development
theories address.
In the chapters of Section II, I provided twenty-one narrative accounts of lives
of men who attended college between 1945 and 1999. Through examining how and
why they comprehended their vicissitudes, I proposed six ways to classify non
heterosexual male college students, in order to better understand their collegiate
experiences. The following section concentrates upon the analysis and implications
from the data and the typology. In the next chapter. I place the six types (along with
one none of the study respondents exemplified) into a chronological, comparative
narrative, to provide a historical context for these developments in non-heterosexual
identity. This overview of the changes in identity for non-heterosexual male college
students over the last half of the twentieth century will continue the process of
juxtaposing normative centers with abnormal fringes.
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types (including denial, which none of the narrators presented in Section II
exhibited), in the next chapter I offer final conclusions about identity, along with
potential implications for educators and practioners who utilize understandings of
identity development theory to serve students.
The concept of "normal," both to those who choose that as nomenclature and
those who juxtapose their experiences to those considered "normal," is very
Important to the identity process for non-heterosexual males. The differences of
experience and self-understanding, however, changed overtime, and the
epistemological understanding of non-heterosexual collegians' identities expanded
to include not only relationships to heterosexuals but also to other non
heterosexuals. Chart 7.1 ("How Specific Non-Heterosexual Identity Types Viewed
Their Relation to Other Sexual Male Identity Types") summarizes the juxtapositions
of each identity type to the other (perceived) types prevalent in the time period in
which each type came to prominence. To understand the types, one must examine
the qualities and experiences that constitute the classifications, as well as how the
types formed in relation to other ideations of identity (both heterosexual and non
heterosexual). Examining the types chronologically, as each developed into
prominence, adds to one's understanding of how each type influenced the men who
exhibited those qualities and sensibilities and those men whose experiences
differed.
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Putting it Together: A Short History of
Non-Heterosexual Identities on Campus
Homosexual: 1940s to 1990s. From the 1940s through the present, men
who identified as other than heterosexual formulated and understood their sexuality
in relation, first and foremost, to heterosexuality. Walter, one of the homosexual
males from Chapter Four, believed that most people were not as he felt he was, that
they were not homosexual. Duchess (also from Chapter Four), growing up in the
Tropics, experienced attractions to other males but the concept of homosexuality
^wasn't even real.... It didn't exist.” Heterosexuality was the norm upon which the
men within the homosexual type of identity compared their own sexual desires and
experiences. The ramifications of normative heterosexuality did not stop in the
bedroom (or, as Amie Kantrowitz and Malcolm Boyd pointed out, the drive-in or the
school dance); the social mores of American collegiate culture extend into non-
sexual contexts as well. Dating of women and eventual marriage were the
presumed goals for college men. For homosexuals in the 1940s, the notion of being
abnormal was not only the medical model for depicting their feelings and desires
(cf., Bailey, 1999; Katz, 1995; Loughery, 1998; Tierney & Dilley, 1998) but also an
accurate description of their lives. When not hiding from others who were straight,
homosexual male collegians might socialize in small groups of others who identified
as homosexual; they might have sexual encounters with men who might or might
not so identify, often in public places that concealed from the public the activity
within; homosexual students (and faculty) might be expelled if heterosexuals
uncovered even their identity or that of their non-straight friends (as evident from the
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Chart 7.1
255
How Specific Non-Heterosexual identity Types
Viewed Their Relation to
Other Sexual Male Identity Types
Relational Symbols
Not Equal
Concurrent
Equitable But Not Identical
Self-Perceived as Equitable
Homosexual
Heterosexual ^ Homosexual
Period; 1940s to Late 1960s
Narrators: Walter, Duchess (Chapter 4)
Gay
Heterosexual ^ Gay = Homosexual
Period: Late 1960s to Present
Narrators: James, CIHf, Tim, Gene (Chapter 5)
Queer
Heterosexual # Queer
ill
Gay
Homosexual
Period: Late 1980s to Present
Narrators: Jimmy, Pozzo, Rad (Chapter 5)
“Normal”
Gay # Normal # Homosexual
«
Heterosexual
Period: 1940s to Present
Narrators: Ralph, Chris, Greg (Chapter 6)
Closeted
Heterosexual « Closeted # Homosexual
Period: 1940s to Present
Narrators: Bob, Sam, Rick, Juan (Chapter 4}
Parallel
(Gay » Parallel) d# (Parallel » Gay)
Period: 1940s to Present
Narrators: Dennis, Alec, Pete, Andre (Chapter 6)
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256
narratives o f Ralph, W alter and Robert, and in the works of Retzloff [1991] and
Harbeck [1997]). Homosexual identity, then, was formed in direct relation to the
sexual and social norms displayed by heterosexuals: how individuals met, forged
relationships with others, displayed their sexuality in public, and also with whom they
had sex.
Often, the relationship between homosexual and heterosexual was viewed
as opposing (as both W alter and his grandmother revealed in their conversation
about his emotional attractions). In the lives of homosexual college students,
though, the identity (along with the resultant emotions and activities) was always
private, not public; personal, not political. As Duchess' actions as late as the 1980s
showed in Chapter Four, "behaving " homosexual in public was not desired: "we
would still behave very hetero." The acts of homosexuality were viewed as distinct
from those of heterosexuality; the actions were social as well as sexual, and both
were prohibited.
Gay: 1960s to 1990s. By the late 1960s, changes in identity because of a
number of social movements (including, but not limited to, the women's movement,
the anti-war movement, the hippie movement, the "sexual revolution," and the
burgeoning gay rights movement), resulted in evolutions in how non-heterosexuals
viewed themselves and their collective actions (Allyn, 2000; Gaily, 1999).
Homosexual was no longer the type or term with which most non-heterosexual
collegians identified or called themselves. Gay identity, as outlined in Chapter Five,
was formed in relation to norms of both heterosexual and homosexual identities.
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257
Gay students viewed themselves as different from heterosexuals, but usually only in
the details of the gender of one's sexual partner.
In almost all other respects, as Tim's experiences demonstrates, gay
collegians were quite similar to their straight counterparts: working, going to classes,
"hanging out" with boyfriends, developing "a close group" of friends. Juan's
observation of gays on Oprah in the 1980s confirmed this view of similarities over
difference:
they just had everyday individuals who were teachers, lawyers,
couples. None of them drug-addicted. They were role models I
was looking for. And I thought. Finally, there is someone I can
identify with.
Despite the growing publicity of non-heterosexual individuals and lives, many gay
students often struggled "internally," quietly cautious about sharing too much of their
personal lives, particularly with non-heterosexuals.
The similarities, rather than the differences, between heterosexuals and non
heterosexuals were posited by gay students as the basis for equal treatment by
higher education institutions and administrators. No longer limiting conversations
about non-heterosexuals on campus to regulation and prohibition of non
heterosexual acts, gay students viewed themselves as a class of people, and
aligned themselves with other minority students and student groups. Indeed, the
differences believed and presented by most of these students as simply a matter of
the gender of those for whom one had sexual and affectional desires.
The role of the gay student on campus was markedly different from that of
the homosexual student. Just as the social politics of the day influenced students to
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258
express themselves as either a part, of or apart from, postsecondary educational
institutions, so too the identity politics o f the times fostered actions and events
surrounding gay students.
In choosing “gay” the young activists explicitly rejected the word
“homosexual.” It was too clinical, they concluded, reducing
homosexuality only to a physical act, reinforcing the notion that
homosexuality was only about “sex” (Clendinen & Nagouring,
1999, 31).
"Gay is good" became a rallying cry of the more political of these students
(Clendinen & Nagouring, 1993; Jay, 1999; McGarry & Wasserman, 1998; Teal,
1995); others began to incorporate their views as non-heterosexual students into
their course work (in essays and artwork) and in their extracurricular activities,
including student employment, campus dances, conferences planning political policy
and strategy Sprung, 1973), and gay student organizations.
Gav Student Organizing. Part I: 1967 to 1980. Gay students also demanded
equality in access to, participation within, and funding for student organizations and
governance, reflecting the gay ideology of equality and inclusion. These students
formed gay campus organizations in the months following 1969's Stonewall Riots;
while some disagreement and discrepancy persists about the actual dates that
specific organizations formed, most researchers (and participants) of the times
agree that the Student Homophile League, which formed at Columbia University in
1967 (Duberman, 1993b; Kaiser, 1997; Marcus, 1992; Miller, 1995).
The origins of the Student Homophile League display how the reasons for
forming and joining a gay student organization were on the one hand political and on
the other very personal. Bob Martin was a freshman at Columbia University in 1967.
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259
After his roommates at the university forced him to leave their suite, fo r hanging
“sexy pictures of men on his walls” (Allyn, 2000,152), Martin decided to study the
history of homosexuality in America. His scholastic work there, along with the
general social collegiate climate of change, enabled him, under the pseudonym
Stephen Donaldson, to organize other students into a collective designed to reform
the institution - and society. As he wrote in a letter to the editor of the New York
Times in 1967, “it must be evident that the contemporary fear of possible
implications of close emotional relationships between persons of the same sex is
itself unhealthy and even paranoid” (Donaldson, 1967).
Although the Student Homophile League was met with letters of outraged
protest to the University and in the local press. The handful of courageous students
[about a dozen, in Kaiser's (1997) estimation] who signed up as members
proceeded with their work of education and counseling” (Duberman, 1993b, 172).
Among their first acts was to issue “a thirteen-point declaration of principles which
asserted the fundamental human right' of every homosexual 'to develop and
achieve his full potential and dignity as a human being'” (Kaiser, 1997, 146). Some
of the programming of the Student Homophile League, and the campus
organizations that came after them, included coordinating “rap” sessions, organizing
general discussion groups, advocating for courses on homosexuality and gay life,
conducting “zaps” (jamming of phone lines and offices of offensive persons or
organizations), hosting speakers, joining other student activists to protest
institutional actions, lobbying local and campus governments to end discriminatory
practices and policies, and sponsoring social events (Bailey, 1999; Duberman,
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260
1993b; Lichtwarxit, 1992a, 1992b; Marcus, 1992). First and foremost, the original
student organizations were concerned with protecting the rights of individuals to
engage privately (albeit sometimes privately public) activities.
Other chapters of the Student Homophile League, as well as campus-based
chapters of the Gay Liberation Front political organization, formed on campuses
“from Berkeley to Harvard" (Marcus, 1992, 172). Among the first were University of
California at Berkeley, the University of Oregon, Yale University, the University of
Kansas, the University of Southern California, Pennsylvania State University and
New York University (Dilley, 2000; Kaufman, 1973; Reinhold, 1971; Walters,
1972). While the first openly gay man to run for student body president at Princeton
lost the 1977 election (“Princeton Students Vote," 1977), at other times in the
decade undergraduate students elected openly gay candidates to similar positions
at the University of Minnesota and at Michigan State University in East Lansing
(“Gay Student Body President Elected,” 1978).
Starting in the 1970s, Individual non-heterosexual students who were open
about their sexual identity (or in the process of deploying their sexual identity more
publicly) also became members of student government bodies. Randy Shilts, who
would later rise to prominence reporting on gay life and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s,
was a member of the Gay People's Alliance at the University of Oregon and
participated in student government there:
...I was elected to a five-member student committee that gave out
over a million dollars of students’ incidental fees to the campus
student organizations. Then I was elected chairman of the
committee. My slogan was “Come Out For Shilts." It was
obviously a gay thing. Straight people didn't get it.
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261
When I was elected committee chairman, I became the number-
two person in the student government after the student-body
president. Because of my position I was able to give money to the
Gay People's Alliance, which was the first time it got money from
the student government. Then we did things like have a gay pride
program with speakers. We also put on the first gay dance at the
University of Oregon, a gay-straight sock hop. It was all sixties
music and Motown. W e allowed straight people - you know, we
were very liberal (Marcus, 1992, 230).
Members of the gay student organization at the University of Kansas were also
elected to similar positions in the Student Senate (Lichtwardt, 1992b). The social
roles and postsecondary experiences of those students were a far cry from students
like Walter and Bob, who were afraid of expulsion and/or denigration if their
identities as non-heterosexuals were known (or worse actions if their activities were
revealed).
Litigations for Leoitimacv: 1970s to 1980s. Moreover, gay students
challenged the authority of the institutions in many instances, struggling for the
recognition of rights speech and assembly on campus (Harbeck, 1995; Kaplan,
1990; Teal, 1995; Walters, 1973). Whereas homosexual students believed
sexuality was a private concern, gay students asserted more visible and political
roles on campuses - as non-heterosexuals. Their ability - indeed, their rights to do
so - came through a series of legal battles throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Students engaged in sit-ins and other protests to challenge university policies
prohibiting their rights to free speech and assembly (i.e., “100 in N.Y.U. Sit-In
Charge Bias Against Homosexuals,” 1970; “400 In Gay' Protest Dispersed By
Police,” 1970). As early as 1968, the Student Homophile League at Columbia was
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262
challenging the institutional (and institutionalizing) practices of members of the
psychiatric and medical establishment;
When the medical school staffed a panel discussion on
homosexuality with a group of “experts” known (except for the
Kinsey Institute's Paul Gebhad) to regard it as a pathological
adjustment, SHL representatives invaded the meeting and publicly
demanded that in the future the decision of homosexuality be
placed “in its proper setting as a sociological problem of deeply
entrenched prejudices and discrimination against a minority group”
(Duberman, 1993b, 172).
Gay students organized more openly, to challenge the institutional
oppressions they experienced (Bailey, 1999; Dilley, 2000; Jay, 1999). If gay
students came out into public more, so too public were the institutional control efforts
against them. Institutions responded by attempting to deny or severely delimit social
and political activities by non-heterosexuals on campuses. While the expulsions
and (most) of the entrapment exercises ended in the late 1960s, the institutional
regulation of students because of their sexuality did not.
After legal decisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s regarding student
organization recognition for other types of student activist groups were upheld to
guarantee the rights of non-heterosexual student organizations to exist and to
assemble on campuses, gay students began to petition for institutional recognition.
Many cases were contested or denied, and consequently also ended in litigation.
A clear line of decisions emerged, based upon prior case law concerning the
rights of students to assemble and speak freely. The illegality of homosexual acts in
individual states was often considered and debated - and frequently rejected by
campus administrators - in the establishment of the rights of non-heterosexual
student organizations.
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263
On September 5,1970, the chancellor of the University of Kansas, E.
Laurence Chalmers, Jr., stated a position representative of the judgment of most
administrators of the day;
Formal recognition of a proposed student organization confers only
one significant advantage. A recognized student group may
submit requests for funds to the Student Senate. Since we are not
persuaded that student activity funds should be allocated either to
support or to oppose the sexual proclivities of students, particularly
when they might lead to violation of state law, the University of
Kansas declines to formally recognize the Lawrence Gay
Liberation Front (K. U. News Bureau, 1970).
The organization hired William M. Kunstier, one of the attorneys who represented
the Chicago Seven, to represent them, along with five faculty members, a graduate
student assistant and three other students individually, in a suite against Chalmers,
and the Kansas Board of Regents. Kunstier, however, was barred to appear before
U.S. District Court Judge George Templar, because of Kunsteris notorious
reputation. The student leaders of KU disagreed with the chancellor's decision; by
September of 1971, the Student Senate had approved allocating $600 to the
organization, to aide the organization in its court costs against the University;
Chalmers instructed his vice-chancellor to disapprove the expenditure and return the
legislation to the Senate.
Templar ruled, on February 12, 1972, against GLF and ordered its to pay
court costs for the defendants. Two days after the district court ruling in 1972, the
leaders of the student government began proceedings to change the University of
Kansas' classification of campus and community organizations, to avoid the
problems presented by that case by distinguishing between “recognizing” (and thus
sanctioning the organization and allowing opportunity for funding) and “registering”
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264
any group that met basic requirements (particularly yearly contact information for
persons in charge). The Lawrence GLF appealed Templar's ruling, and, in light of
other case law established after the decision (particularly Gay Activists Alliance v.
Board of Regents o f the University of Oklahoma, 1981) and the changes in
organization recognition at the University, the appeal was upheld.
A number of other legal cases in the 1970s highlight the actions of
postsecondary institutions to regulate gay students and gay students’ abilities to
coalesce around policy issues that affected their rights and identities. Institutions
denied non-heterosexual students access to campus resources and privileges
granted to other students and student organizations on the basis of religious beliefs
of heterosexual students of the institution, issues of moral education, potential
illegality of actions of individual members of gay organizations, and reflection of
such recognition upon the reputation of the institution (cf.. Gay Student Organization
of the University of New Hampshire v. Bonner, 1974; Gay Alliance o f Students v.
Matthews, 1976; Student Coalition for Gay Rights v. Austin Peay State University,
1979). Colleges and universities attempted this line of arguments in their decisions
to limit association of non-heterosexual students, despite continuing rulings of the
courts that such actions were discriminatory and unconstitutional.
A case from the University of Missouri reflects how the concept of non
heterosexual identity changed, and resulted in reforms to campus environments that
affected the experiences and sensibilities of non-heterosexual students. In 1976,
the University of Missouri denied recognition to the student organization Gay Lib;
the University allowed the students to appeal and to provide evidence that it
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265
presented no imminent danger, including a revised mission statement. The
institution still decided to deny recognition, utilizing Missouri’s law classifying sodomy
as a felonious criminal activity. Gay Lib filed a civil suit (Gay Lib v. University of
Missouri, 1977), claiming infringement upon their rights of free association and equal
protection, which was eventually supported by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
As the University would finally be instructed by the appellate court, ‘denial of
recognition impermissibly penalized the group’s [Gay Activists Alliance] because of
their status rather than their conduct” (Kaplan, 1990, 323). In other words, the
courts ruled that these students were being discriminated against because of their
collective and individual identity, rather than specific illegal activity.
After winning rights of assembly in courts, gay student organizations then
attempted to secure funding for their social and campus activities on a parity with
other student organizations. Usually this was met with resistence from institutional
leaders and administrators, and also resulted in a number o f legal cases brought by
gay students. These students affected institutional structures for interacting with
non-heterosexuals as well: as early as 1971, postsecondary institutions began to
respond by forming administrative units to work with non-heterosexual students,
including the Lesbian-Gay Male Programs Office at the University of Michigan in
1971 (Zemsky, 1996, 208).
Gay Student Organizing. Part II: 1970s to 1990s. The efforts of gay
students to create campus institutions for themselves is impressive: before 1969
there were no official student organizations for non-heterosexual students on U.S.
college campuses, but by 1996 there were over 2000 (Gose, 1996). Not all non
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266
heterosexuals enjoyed all the aspects of the new visibility: homosexual-type
students did not thrive in gay organizations, as Duchess’ experience highlighted.
This pattern, of the earlier classifications of students not fitting into the social and
political goals and efforts of later non-heterosexual students repeated, as the queer
narrators' interactions with gay groups (and gay students interaction, or non
interaction, with queer groups) conveyed.
Gay dances were focal points of non-heterosexual socialization on college
campuses in the 1970s and 1980s, providing opportunities for promotion of the
college groups and for challenging heterosexual norms of propriety, dress, and
gender. These opportunities to establish a public identity with others who also
identified as gay was a major innovation of gay students; the dances of the 1970s
and early 1980s were important social events attended by both students and non
students. As Lichtwardt (1992a, 1992b) remembered, several hundred people
would attend dances at the University of Kansas Union Ballroom,
including many from Kansas City who would normally have been at
the bars. A DJ with a huge light and sound system was at one end
of the room, booming out disco music (yes, it was that era).
Crowded tables were set up all around the sides, and beer was
being sold from a booth. People were dressed in everything from
street clothes to gender-fuck. The hallway outside the Ballroom
was jammed with people trying to get some fresh air and other just
strutting around, showing themselves off. People we talked to had
come in from Manhattan, Wichita, Topeka, and even Omaha for
this dance Going to the Lawrence dances became a regular
event after that. I don't remember ever seeing them advertised -
somehow the Mall grapevine always knew when they were....
None of us in Kansas City knew much about the gay organization
at KU except that it was a student group that held the dances to
raise money. Because I knew of GSOK's existence through the
dances, however, one of the first things I did when I became a KU
student... was try to look them up (Lichtwardt, 1992a, 1).
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267
Such events, and experiences of students (or would-be students) were
common at institutions where gay students had organized (Jay, 1999: Kantrowitz,
1977). Lichtwardt and her peers forty miles away from campus might not have seen
the advertising, but KU's gay students did advertise their successful dances.
Parades were also organized by gay students, not so much as protests but as
appropriations of dominant forms of self-expressions of collective identity; gay
students continued to host parades through the end of the twentieth century.
While these activities on the surface might not seem quite as political as civil
rights marches or free-speech rallies, one must, as James encouraged in Chapter
Four, remember the influential motto of the women's movement: the personal is
political " College students in the homosexual type (or viewed as such by other,
gay-identified males) might take part of some of these social activities, but such
activities alone did not foster a gay identity. By creating public events and
organizations for non-heterosexuals to meet and that were also publicly identified as
such, gay students changed the paradigm of what was considered "normal" on
college campuses, by providing open spaces in which non-heterosexual men
socialize and identify. Such institutionalizing of gay identities (particularly as
depicted through activities and students on college campuses) helped by the early
1980s, to foster less marginalized ideas for non-heterosexuals about how to live
their lives; the college experience was different for a non-heterosexual student who
matriculated in those times, for
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268
a young man who had grown up with distinct images of a gay
culture that would provide him with an identifiable place in America,
a place where aberrance was normalcy, where the intimacies of
personal life were not at war with the impulse toward public
ambition (Browning, 1993, 6).
Queer 1970s to 1990s. If the personal were political to gay students, then
the public was political to those who identified as queer, as presented in Chapter
Six. Indeed, for queer students, the personal became not only political but also
publicized and problematized. As early as the 1970s, Jimmy's appropriation of
public space on campus for his performance and physical art, along with his styling
himself his freshman year in drag, most definitely charged common spaces and
institutions with the personal (and with personality). Similarly, Rad's 1990s non
conformist dress - including alteration of his physical body, his hair and piercings -
were part of his desire "to be active" and visible in his (sexual) difference, including
in his vocally questioning of the non-inclusion of gay and lesbian topics in courses;
Rad's involvement in campus publications, writing a column that dealt squarely with
his sexuality unapologetically and as important to understand his world view, is also
Indicative of queer students using existing public forums to challenge the
presumption of heterosexuality (in this case, "objective" reporting institutionalized
through the campus newspaper).
Queer events are fairly easy to identify, as they were often promoted and
presented as such. Browning (1993) of queer "shop-ins,” of young activists traveling
to suburban San Francisco to publicly be identified, en masse, as queer, to flaunt
their abnormality in a prime site of American cultural and social reproduction - the
shopping mall. The queers viewed their actions as "queer visibility’ expeditions.
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269
walking hand In hand into stores, shopping a lot. buying a little, and engaging in
exaggerated mimicry of the straights who surround them” (Browning. 1993, 33).
Such actions would invert the normal space or event, by publicizing the abnormal(s)
engaging in normative behaviors.
Students at the University of Kansas participated in promenades through
campus and other public campus events in the 1990s to deploy their queemess on
campus. In one campus kiss-in. several dozen men and women joined hands in a
circle at noon in the center of campus, on Wescoe Beach, where students
traditionally ate lunch and passed the time between classes. They held hands,
made a large circle, and then kissed the person to the right, then to the left; some
kept on kissing for several minutes, with different partners of the same gender
(Solon, 1992).
Queer students utilized many of the same tactics as those of gays in the
1970s. but instead of simply promoting non-heterosexual visibility, queer acts were
crafted to invert public and private space, and to highlight the power differentials
embedded within the norm of heterosexuality. In the 1970s. the Columbia Student
Homophile League's demand to view the “proper setting [of homosexuality] as a
sociological problem of deeply entrenched prejudice and discrimination against a
minority group” (Duberman, 1993b, 172) was a gay viewpoint, a gay sensibility; the
meaning understood through a queer sensibility would view the sociological problem
in terms of power and control, and as resting with straight people (who dominate)
rather than the non-straights (who are subjugated by heterosexuals). Rather than
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270
blame the victims or appease the perpetrators of the discrimination, queer students
would argue for an even great political change, more akin to revolutionary rather
than integrational reform.
The dichotomy between reform and refutation mirrored the differences
between gay students and queer students. Whereas a gay activist in the 1970s
could proclaim, “If we wanted to, we could boycott Bloomingdale's and that store
would be closed in two weeks” (quoted in Clendinen & Nagoumey, 1999, 30), such
actions rarely occurred. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer activists were not
only boycotting stores but shutting down stock exchanges and Catholic masses
(Clendinen & Nagoumey, 1999; Signorile, 1993). And, instead of protesting the
media for presenting unflattering and/or biased representations of gay life, queer
students utilized the fourth estate not only to challenge the norms of American
society but also to question to the very presumption of “the norm,” as Rad attempted
to do through his column in the campus newspaper.
A rallying cry of queers was “Queer liberation, not gay assimilation”
(Thompson, 1994, 369; Witt, Thomas & Marcus, 1995, 394). Promenades, kiss-ins
and mall-ins were viewed as tools of liberation (echoing the sentiments of the early
gay [primarily non-student] activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s). One
particular historical element of the late 1980s and early 1990s is the rise (and
subsequent fall) of institutional committees to investigate non-heterosexual concerns
on campuses (Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Concerns Study Committee, 1993;
Neiberding, 1989; Study Committee on the Status of Lesbian and Gay Men, 1991;
Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Concerns, 1990).
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271
While (most) queer students were challenging the legitimacy of institutional
auspices, gay students (primarily, but not exclusively) were working within
institutional channels to attempt to effect change on campuses like Rutgers, the
University of Kansas, the University of Michigan, and the University of Oregon. Gay
students in the 1980s and 1990s worked with schools to better their inclusion in
campus environments and services; queer students were political, as Pozzo's queer
collegiate (and immediate post-graduation) experience in the 80s depicts, but in a
more "traditional " sense of demonstrations and protests, combined with non
conformist notions that sexuality was comprised of more than how or with whom one
engaged in sexual activity.
Apparently, from Jimmy’s actions and intentions, queer identities were
formed - and articulated - before the terminology for the type was prevalent. This
new understanding of queer is evident even though the term had been used at other
times by heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals, to reflect generic non
heterosexuality (Chauncey, 1994); indeed, the terms gay, homosexual and queer
appeared interchangeable both in the respondents' narratives and in the
contemporaneous autobiographic accounts of other non-heterosexuals (Hemric,
1973; Marotta, 1983). For instance, although Jim, Pozzo and Rad each identified
as "gay" at the time, in their own analyses, as well as mine, their self-concepts and
activities around or involving their sexuality did not match the gay type. A gay
student would not necessarily feel impelled to "be active," to educate heterosexual
students about sexuality, or to serve other non-heterosexual students as a mentor in
a peer-mentoring program; a closeted or homosexual student would, in most
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272
instances, be unable to conceive of how to go about such activities. Both types
might, though, wish for those who could and would be out and active on campus, as
Sam and Juan vocalized.
The identities reviewed thus far have been publicized, to some degree: a
non-heterosexual presenting a non-heterosexual identity in at least some social
contexts. But these were not the only identity types on campuses in the U.S. in the
latter half of the twentieth century; four others were evident, although not usually
publicly.
Normal: 1940s to 1990s. While there is a clear, historical narrative
connecting the events and identities of gay (and even queer) college students from
the 1940s to the late 1990s, the same can not be said for all of the types. The
social changes of the 1960s, 1970s and even the 1980s did not affect how all non
heterosexual men conceptualized their identities or their sexuality. Four types of
identification remained consistent over those times, despite the revolutions.
Some non-heterosexual collegians continued to identify as "normal, " a type
that is evident in each decade covered in this study. Whereas gay identities were
formed in juxtaposition to heterosexual and homosexual identities, "normal" men
identified decidedly not as homosexual and, if anything, as just like heterosexuals.
They (usually) dated women, but they also (frequently) had sex with other men,
(often) in clandestine contexts. Their sexual activity with other males had no
relationship to their identity, nor did it preclude these men from having sexual
experiences with women. In the 1940s, Ralph could have sex with his roommate
every night, but it did not mean he was not heterosexual; indeed, he later married
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273
and had children. If "normal" collegians' social identity had any impact on their
homo sexual activity, it was to replicate the social mores (of the desirability of sexual
partners, of the notion of non-vaginal intercourse not counting as "sex") of the
dominant heterosexual society; in the 1980s Chris could feel he had earned
"bragging rights" for having tearoom sex with men from more prestigious fraternity
houses in the way he would if he were dating a sorority girl from a "good” house.
"Normal" students fit into no other type; while these men engaged in sexual activity
that would preclude their inclusion into a heterosexual identity (for obviously they
knew and experienced something about the non-heterosexual subcultures on their
campuses), they certainly did not identify as non-heterosexual (be that as gay, queer
or homosexual).
Parallel: 1940s to 1990s. If the "normal" identity type can not be classified as
either heterosexual or non-heterosexual, the parallel type can be viewed as
corresponding to both classifications. Men who continued to lead two lives, to have
concurrent and parallel identities as both straight and non-straight, also appeared
consistently across decades. Those collegians who displayed this type of identity
had concurrent (although not strictly simultaneous) identity formation in relation to
heterosexual and homosexual identities; complicating this schema, though, is the
relation that each half of the parallelism had to the other. A split between the
collegiate and sexual worlds is evident for parallel men: the individuals in the
parallel type each indicated that they avoided having sex on campus, or with
someone whom they knew from college; if it did happen and others found out about
it, as in Alec's case, the men would feel "horrible" and "ashamed."
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274
Closeted: 1940s to 1990s. Horror of being found out as someone who
experienced same-sex desires and actions, and the resulting shame, are closely
aligned to the concepts framing another non-heterosexual identity type consistent
across all decades. Men who were closeted fostered and presented an identity type
that was aligned with neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality. For these
collegians, the closet walls, formed by the conceptions of what others would say,
think or do if they found out the closeted collegians were not heterosexual, created a
barrier between who the student thought he was and what he felt others would think
he was. This barrier created a shallow (sometimes distorted) college experience for
closeted students: "My friendships have gotten very deep now. In the past my
friendships were, like, through a mask."
Living in the closet, in the words of one respondent, was "Knowing something
intellectually but not accepting it emotionally." Closeted men could neither identify
fully as heterosexual (since they knew, intellectually, they were not) nor homosexual
(since they believed, emotionally, such an identity to be wrong or prohibited). This
dichotomy was displayed in Paul's attempted seduction of a faculty member at his
school, only to report subsequently to the administration that the professor was not
heterosexual; in Bob's attempts to date women while living in a fraternity house that
gave some subliminal outlet for his homosexual emotions and desires; and in Sam's
obeying his mother's orders "not to be a homosexual," while feeling everyone in
town hated him because he "was the gay guy that shouldn't be given a chance to be
part of anything."
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275
Denial: 1940s to 1990s. Inevitably (but unintentionally), the narratives in this
project do not address a final possible type of identity: denial. Those collegians
who consistently denied their non-heterosexual feelings never addressed or
expressed a non-normative identity. Such a person (along with closeted identities)
was, conceivably, not "a part of anything, " either by choice or circumstance.
Although Paul believed he was in denial, in fact he was not, for he admitted to
himself that he had "homosexual tendencies." Denial did play some part in the
decisions of identity deployment of closeted men, as Bob’s self-analysis revealed,
but he, too, had admitted to himself (and others) that he had homo-sexual senses
and feelings.
To understand the quantités of the classification denial, one must look
beyond the respondents to this study. Andrew Holleran, the prominent novelist and
commentator of gay life, wrote eloquently about his undergraduate years at Harvard
in the mid-1960s. His depiction of the inability to perceive, let alone process, the
experiences and senses into a non-heterosexual sensibility, is telling of campus
experiences and sensibilities of collegians in denial:
While sitting in the john one day I noticed the partitions between
the stalls were sheets of limestone in which the imprints of trilobites
could be seen. I also noticed advertisements for nude wrestling
scrawled on the doors in Magic Marker. As everyone knows who
has gone to school, one can read certain things at a certain age
and just not get it: Moby Dick. King Lear. Ads for nude wrestling
on bathroom walls. Such was the force of my denial, I didn’t even
associate such things with myself. And when a hand reached
under the partition between the toilet stalls one day and stroked my
left leg, I stood up, horrified, pulled my pants on, and left. The
johns in those days sounded like Niagara Falls when flushed, and
the sound, I was sure, let the slimeball who had touched my left
calf know just what I thought about that sort of activity (Holleran,
1997, 9).
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276
Denial might, obviously, be formed by some collegians without relationship to other
identity types; again, Holleran was evocative; “Ten years after graduation from
Harvard, where I saw nothing in terms of sex, I now saw everything that way” (1997,
16-17). Collegiate men in denial could refute the possibility of being non
heterosexual, and rarely question the presumptive paradigm of heterosexuality, for
to do so would bring into question the sexual and affectional impulses they are
cognitively denying.
Reflections on Changing, Multiple Non-Heterosexual Identities
Now that all of the seven types in Chart 1.1 are explained, one can see how
the identities developed and changed, because a number of factors, including
internal sensibilities of the individuals, campus and cultural contexts of the times of
prominence of the identities, and comparison with and juxtaposition against other
non-heterosexual identities. With this knowledge, one can begin to perceive how
those identities compare to each other and to existing theories of development.
Despite their (reflective) desires for role models and opportunities for
socialization when they were in college, gay students maintained a more private
public life than a public private life, more so than would allow for such activities -
whether as a result of repressive campuses and social environments or their own
personal predilections.
To be certain, individuals who identified as gay have conducted queer
activities on campuses since the early 1970s; despite their nomenclature for self-
identifications (often “gay”), to understand their role on campus and the impact that
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277
campus activity had upon their identities in relation to heterosexuals and other non
heterosexuals. queer is the type that best comprises and classifies their
experiences. Queer identity, then, was formed in relation to the norms of
heterosexual, homosexual and gay identities. Queer is most definitely oppositional
to heterosexual, but it is also juxtaposed sometimes even crossly, as Pozzo’s
contemporary estimations of the students involved in Swathmore’s
gay/lesbian/bisexual student organization depicted, with homosexual and gay
identities.
Just as particular sexual acts alone did not connote identity, neither did
singular (or specific) social activities constrict a non-heterosexual student's self-
concept and -identification. By the early 1990s, the movement of non-heterosexual
student types into spaces and events o f other types reflected the fluidity of sexual
identities. Gay students could be involved in queer activities like ACT-UP and Queer
Nation, but in a social context rather than political; instead of joining protests, gay
collegians might associate with queer groups to meet other non-heterosexuals who
did not fit into the dominant gay paradigm. Instead of arguing, as gay students did
at the University of Kansas (among other institutions), for inclusion in Reserve
Officer Training Corps programs under institutional anti-discrimination clauses, queer
students would argue for dismantling ROTO programs. If gay students were
adamant in their belief of the similarities between gays and straights (particularly the
image of white, suburban couples), queer students coalesced around issues of
difference, both with heterosexuals and within gays; the realities of race (and
racism), gender, power and health were the rallying points of queer students (as the
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278
narratives of Jim, Pozzo and Gene conveyed in Chapter Five). These distinctions
were important and powerful to gay students who felt they did not fit into gay student
organizations.
Apart from denial, all the identity types in all decades and collegiate contexts
were formed in relation to presumed straight identity; heterosexuality was perceived
as the master category of normality. As one respondent commented,
I don’t think back then that I thought in terms of gay and straight" -
those are political terms that gained real currency in the early 1980s,
but didn't really exist back then in my lexicon. I thought then in terms
of homosexual' and normal.'
In addition, later non-heterosexual identity types were also formed in relation to
(presumed) non-straight identities. In the words of Juan,
I knew I was attracted to men. [Nevertheless], I considered myself
straight, or heterosexual, but I knew those feelings were there. I
had never acted on the feelings in high school, but I knew
subconsciously they were there.
The comparison of the margins to center, of the different to the normal -
particularly as they pertain to sexual identity - is at the core of queer theory.
Classification only by the gender of (preferred) sexual partners is insufficient to
understand non-heterosexual students. Chart 7.1 is again helpful; overtime, the
qualities and aspects of particular, non-heterosexual identities moved from the
margins to, if not the center, then at least other sides of what was considered the
norm(s).
In the 1940s and 1950s, heterosexuality was the sole standard to which
collegiate males who were not heterosexual had to compare their experiences and
ideation; this resulted in the dichotomous understanding of identity, heterosexual or
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279
homosexual. But as later homosexual students engaged in the processes
associated with identity development (as outlined in both gay identity development
theories and student development theories), two norms now existed for comparison.
For some of these students, neither identity resonated, although homosexual might
be a closer match than heterosexual. Consequently, the gay type came to represent
changes in social and interpersonal activities and awareness of these non
heterosexual males. By the 1980s, the gay identity type was regarded as another
norm with which to compare one's behaviors and emotions; the juxtaposition of
those against the existing types offered for contemporary non-heterosexual
collegians another, novel type form of self-identification: queer.
The tenants of queer theory were evident, even before the general use of
queerer the construction of queer theory. Public transgression (semi-public, prior to
the 1980s) of accepted cultural norms was evident in the womanless marriage at
Baylor in the 1950s; in the 1970s, Jimmy taxed the rules of gender and sexuality in
dressing in drag and producing performance art that questioned the normative
functions of heterosexuality. In each case of identity development, from closeted
and homosexual to queer and “normal,” individuals evaluated themselves against
what was considered, presented or observed to be “normal.” This relational context
was also apparent in the ideations of men who considered themselves and their
identities as needing to be hidden because they were not normal (the closet type),
who viewed themselves as “just like everyone else” (the “normal” type), and who
kept their “straight,”^ normal lives separate from their “gay,” clandestine lives (the
parallel type).
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280
The distinctions of the types matter, both to the individuals involved and to an
true understanding o f this far from static student population. The changes in how
non-heterosexual collegians identified, and how they deployed those identities
publicly and politically, are evident in the student organization at the University of
Kansas. In 1970, members of the University community (including students and
non-university affiliated citizens of Lawrence, Kansas) formed a local chapter of the
Gay Liberation Front. By 1971, the GLF’s efforts concentrated upon the University,
and the group became a non-sanction, officially unrecognized organization. In
1976, after winning limited recognition from the University in part through proving a
majority of student members, the GLF changed its name to Gay Services of Kansas.
In 1983, women were recognized within the name as separate yet equal, and the
organization became Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas. As the minutes of the
organization and the recollections of officers and members collaborate, from 1990
through 1992 the members of the group debated at some length upon the inclusion
of bisexuality and/or transexuality within the nomenclature; queer was also
considered, but always rejected as too confrontation and too derogatory to the
membership. Arguments against the change were overruled by 1993, when the
organization became known as Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Services of Kansas (or,
informally, “LesBeGayS”). Reflecting further change in the personal and political
self-concepts of the membership and the organization, the group again changed its
official name in 1996 to Queers & Allies. This name posits both difference from the
norm and acceptance of those who accept that difference; it is paradoxically defiant
and embracing at the same time.
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The paradox reflects a quality of the Identity types In the theory outlined In
Chart 1.1. The types of non-heterosexual male identity contain an Inherent
contradiction of Identity theories: on the one hand, the classifications convey the
essentlalism of “being different,” while concurrently showing that the difference Is
understood - and accepted or not - through the social construction of meanings and
behaviors associated with (or ascribed to) those Identity types. The college
experience for the respondents In this study cannot be truly understood without
utilizing gay Identity development theories; conversely, the non-heterosexual
identities and experiences are less meaningful, less contextualized, without
examining them through the lens of student Identity development theory. Neither set
o f theories (of the marginal nor the typical Identity), by Itself, conveys or explains
these lives; the theories did not keep pace with non-heterosexual collegians’
changing Identities - their senses, experiences and sensibilities.
As the critical lens of understanding Identity moved to center upon the
margins, so too did the margins come Into focus. As those margins were examined
and comprehended, they, too, became norms, creating an on-goIng, expanding
process of Identity formation. In the last chapter, I offer final (but formative, rather
than summatlve) conclusions about Identity, and potential Implications for educators
and practloners who utilize understandings of Identity development theory to serve
students.
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282
Chapter Eight
On the Fluidity of Identity
Of Research and Researchers
I heard once, in a graduate class, that those of us who conduct research do
so to answer questions about our selves, to try to solve problems that confront our
personal lives as well as confound our professional analysis. Certainly, in my mind, I
now see a clear route from the boy who tried to figure out who he was by consulting
first an encyclopedia and later scores of research and theory into the lives of those
who were not straight to the sometimes queer, always gay man who conducted this
study. The research, too, is closely related to the boy, slightly older, sitting in the
winter moonlight of the Florida Keys, asking questions of a stranger, comparing and
contrasting emotions, experiences, excitements.
In this project that was, ultimately, about the fluidity of identity, I am uncertain
what to make of my own life, my own story. From this vantage point, four years after
first proposing this work, I realize I am that same person I was twenty years ago; but
college — the experiences and senses that influenced my sensibilities - changed me
and how I view myself. I am now a professional questioner; some might say I am a
professional queer. I discovered ways to be both in college.
Out as I might feel (and/or be), like the narrators in this study, my identity
shifts, depending upon the contexts. As Mendelsohn stated, “Since I grew up gay,
I'm used to imposture, to sculpting false identities for myself, when necessary, out of
the silences that are other people’s assumptions” (1999,107). I was considered by
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283
those who knew me as an undergraduate in Oklahoma as “gay” and social. Friends
in graduate school in Kansas, by the end of my time there, would probably say I was
“queer” and political. I wonder what colleagues consider me now: some days,
despite what I study, I neither feel very gay nor very queer (particularly since my
energy and time now go into scholarship and teaching, not all of which directly
relates to things queer). My self-concept always modulates; indeed, my sensibility
is somewhat shifty, depending upon the contexts and my sense of the contexts.
The person I am - in the context of the present - is both the same as before
and different; the same as (some) others yet different; the opposite of others, yet
the same. To utilize the theoretical constructs from Chapter Two, on the one hand,
I am not heterosexual (and thus different); on the other, I am a student (and in many
respects, no different at all from other students). No classification, no typology, will
ever eliminate this paradox of developing as non-heterosexual (as a simultaneous
center of a norm and a margin of another) while also developing as a student (itself
centered and marginalized). I do not judge this inability to be precise when
examining or conveying identity to be a liability. Instead, I view it as a queer job,
both accepting and challenging the product of my efforts. I also perceive the
typology I offered in this study as a method for further conversations and
understandings about what happens when we identify, when we become “the same”
while at the same time uniquely the other. As such, it is a beginning, rather than the
end, of appreciating the lives of non-heterosexual male college students, “of trying to
make sense of life as lived” (Clandinen & Connelly, 2000, 78).
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284
Such an appreciation starts with an understanding of what those lives are
like, of the phenomena and beliefs that individuals make sense. To do so in this
project, I employed a comparative/contrast approach to analyze the respondents'
conversations with me. First I compared the experiences, senses and sensibilities
the men conveyed to the other narratives; I subsequently grouped the respondents
based upon their similarities. I compared those arrangements with the existing
theories of identity development covered in Chapter Two. From that consideration I
developed the identity typology for non-heterosexual college males (Chart 1.1).
I chose to explain the theory through exemplary narratives for each type (as
presented in Section II and contextualized in Chapter 7). By providing multiple,
extensive examples for each category, I strove to illustrate the richness of
experience, sense and sensibility of the individuals who participated in this study
and who manifest the types. Although I designed the textual representation of the
interviews in a formalist fashion, the research activities were truly grounded in
narrative inquiry, to research non-heterosexual male collegiate experience “as
expressed in lived and told stories” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, 40) rather than in
theory.
As the narratives displayed, non-heterosexual collegians viewed themselves
and their educational experiences as different from heterosexual students'; as the
typology summarizes, patterns of understanding those experiences and lives are
evident. Table 1.1 depicts commonalities of collegiate experience (although
certainly does not represent the entirety of possible experiences) of non
heterosexual men in each of the types.
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285
Dealing with the topic of identity for a particular population of students unified
by their self-identities (their senses, experiences and sensibilities), I looked at what I
problematically called “non-heterosexuals.” I chose that term deliberately, to reflect
a wide variety of identities that were formed in juxtaposition to heterosexuality, and
with some reservation, reflecting my hesitancy to use a contra-positive term to label
someone by what he is not. Among the outcomes of this project is the beginnings of
a mapping of the various sensibilities and identities this campus population has
displayed and deployed over the past fifty-five years; these identities were
contextually based, fluid rather than fixed, formative rather than summative.
It stands to reason that if multiple non-heterosexual identities exist, if those
identities are adopted, understood and situated differently in contrasting contexts,
then the identities of heterosexual students are also varied, fluid and contextual,
rather than monolithic (both as understood by the men in this project and as often
portrayed in student identity development models). A logical extension of this work
would, I hope, make use of the term “non-heterosexual” even more problematic,
through a continued cartography of the lives and identities of this student population;
perhaps, too, utilization of the concepts of identity I posited (senses, experiences
and sensibilities) would similarly problematize the concept of “heterosexual.”
O bservations fo r Theory and Practice
Moving from a narrative examination of the historical developments of non
heterosexual collegiate male identity of the last chapter, I now briefly address six
particular findings evident in the data (summarized in Chart 8.1). How the findings
are relevant to each type is depicted in Chart 8.2. Each of the points reflects
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286
specific influences upon non-heterosexual identity for the collegiate males in this
study, and each is rarely (if ever) addressed in either student development theories
or gay identity development theories.
Campus Environments. The constraints and the opportunities of particular
campus environments impacted non-heterosexual Identity - positively and
negatively. Men seeking other men - for sex, for companionship, for identification
with others who are like themselves - found ways to do so in every campus
community, in the 1940s, W alter knew of a "gay cruising area in a park," as well as
private social gatherings in faculty members' homes. Sam related that, in private, a
number of fellows on his campus "would try things," sexual things, with him. Chris
found sex in the library bathrooms. Cliff found inspiration through sex at the urge of
faculty members, Jim attempted to form a men's discussion group using his campus
opinion board to find others who were "like" him, while Juan found sex in his
fraternity house with someone who was both like Juan (a fraternity brother) and
different from him (they disagreed on politics, management of the house, and
company of friends).
The importance of these experiences for these men is more than just being
in a context with other adolescents who might share their inclinations (although that
certainly happened, as Chris, Sam, and many of the other respondents' stories
convey), for through the experiences, the men discovered another aspect or quality
against which to compare themselves and their identities. In Jimmy's words (from
Chapter Five), finding these relationships
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287
Chart 8.1
Summary of
Observations for Theory and Practice
Campus Environments. The constraints and the opportunities of
particular campus environments did impact non-heterosexual
identity - both positively and negatively.
Gav Student Organizations. The formation of a gay student
organization on campus provided some benefits to some non
heterosexual collegians, but simply having such an organization
was not enough to provide social and/or developmental
opportunities needed for positive identity development
Fratemitv Life. A sense of "common background and instant
rapport” that enriched interpersonal relationships — albeit usually
in non-overtly sexual ways - was a theme in the life stories of
members of greek-ietter organizations.
Sexual Activitv. Sexual activity was very important in the identity
development of non-heterosexual male college students, more so
than represented in either student identity development models or
gay identity development models.
The Goals of Being "Normal.” Being “normal” - or at least
considered by others as such - was a goal of many students who
later identified as non-heterosexual.
Emotional Attractions. While the physical act of sex with another
man might be seen as a clear sign of not being heterosexual, often
emotional attractions to other men were the first indications to
non-heterosexual men of their difference.
Media Influences. Media impacted non-heterosexual male
collegians’ views of non-heterosexual identity, and media
(particularly film and television) impacted later respondents’ self-
identity.
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Chart 8.2
Relevance of Findings to Identity Types
288
Campus Environments Student
Organizations
Fraternity
Ufe
Homosexual Felt oppressed by campus Rarely involved;
participated in social
events, if at all
If a member, usually
not out to other greek
members
Gay Challenged campus
oppression; viewed campus
as site for social inclusion
Formed student
organizations and
participated in existing
campus activities
If a member, usually
not out to other greek
memt>ers
Closeted Felt oppressed through
campus institutions
Did not join or
participate in social
activities
If a member, usually
not out to other greek
members
Queer Saw campus as site of public
disruption for contesting
social norms
Involved more in loose-
knit social action
groups, rather than
traditional or gay
student groups
Viewed as repressive,
normalizing constructs
“Normal” Campus viewed as non
politicized in public, but often
very sexual in private or
semi-public campus locales
Usually not involved in
gay student or
community
organizations, as these
students did not
identify as non
heterosexual
Memtiers of often
experienced homo-
affectional and
occasional homo
sexual experience with
other fraternity
memt)ers
Parallel Campus seen only as a
heterosexual (and homo-sex
less) environment
Usually not involved in
non-heterosexual
campus or community
organizations
If involved in greek
system, separated sex
from greek life; might
experience homo
affections for other
greek m em t>ers
Denial Did not often view or
acknowledge homo-cultural
aspects of campus
Did not participate If a member, did not
express any non
heterosexual senses
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289
Chart 8.2
Relevance of Findings to identity Types (continued)
Sex “Normality” Emotions Media
Homosexual A private matter,
even if conducted
in semi-public
places
Did not consider
themselves
normal
Did not display
emotions
publicly
Saw no role
models; viewed
representations of
homosexuality as
pathological and
deviant
Gay Viewed sex as
less a private
matter and more
as a human right
Viewed
themselves as
virtually normal,
differing only in
gender of sexual
partner and
society's
perceptions of
them
Posited and
displayed
emotions in
public, but not
usually
confrontationally
Self-identity
influenced by
increased media
representation
(both positive and
negative); used
media to posit
equality to
heterosexuals
Closeted Rarely
experienced, if at
all
Tried to appear
normal (i.e.,
heterosexual)
Felt homo
affections but
did not reveal
them to others
Felt media
representations of
non-heterosexuals
were not positive
Queer Publicly deployed
sexuality, to
demonstrate
social
stigmatization
Normality seen as
oppressive and
opposite of queer
Emotions
deployed in
public to disrupt
social norms
Used media to
challenge or invert
social norms
through publicizing
their sexuality
"Nonnal” Viewed homo-sex
as normal
activity, not as
signifying
homosexuality (or
gay or queer) as
an identity
Viewed
themselves as
normal;
experienced a
disjuncture
between homo
sexual acts and
homosexual
identity
Often no
emotions
involved in
homo-sex
relations;
emotions often
involved in
hetero-sex
relations
Viewed selves as
not non-
heterosexual,
particularly in
comparison to
media
representations of
non-heterosexuals
Parallel Homo-sex seen
as separate from
hetero-sex
Heterosexual
aspects seen as
normal,
homosexual
aspects as not
Experienced a
disjuncture
between homo
affections and
self-identity
Impacted views of
self-concept of
non-heterosexual
aspect of self
Denial Did not engage in
homo-sex
Did not view
selves as not
normal
Did not display
homo-emotions
Media impacted
lives only
negatively (“ I’m not
thatwayl
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290
was part of my coming to terms with my objectification of men as fuck objects.
While I never dismissed my interest in pleasure, I did learn... that a gay man could
be a friend as well. Clearly, from the narratives, over the last half of the twentieth
century non-heterosexual students found more opportunity for social (not
necessarily sexual) gatherings on college campuses in the United States. A number
of respondents reported being a part of - either socially or as an active member -
gay and lesbian student organizations, and historical reflections from non-members
indicated a direct, positive attitudinal and climactic impact of such groups upon
campuses.
This campus change from hidden alienation to public and political inclusion
was neither comprehensive nor smooth. Court cases upheld the rights of students
to gather for peaceful assemblies, even if campus administrators did not agree with
the political (or personal) implications of the meeting, so long as the individuals did
not advocate direct illegal activities (Harbeck, 1997; Kaplin, 1990). But such public
endeavors were not the only forms of institutional socialization affecting non
heterosexual students. In many instances, the sub-cultural, clandestine activities
engaged in by non-heterosexuals influenced how those non-heterosexuals pictured
their identities, both personally and as members of campus. Gathering large
numbers of post-adolescent males onto campuses with public “private” facilities
fostered many opportunities to explore the physical side of non-heterosexual
identities. As Chris stated in Chapter Six, about being at the University of Illinois in
the 1980s,
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291
It was just a perfect situation for me to find the type of sex I
enjoyed at the time, without feeling any guilt.... There's a lot of
people who are jealous of my college experiences, because I had
so much sex In college, and the type of sex and the type of guy I
had sex with. U of I definitely enabled that, definitely allowed that
to happen.
Secretive sex was engaged in not only by those who considered themselves
“normal;” other types participated as well, as Dennis and Alec both discussed In
Chapter Six. The main point of this observation Is that the combination of Increased
authority (of time and sexuality) and the Institutional constructs related to public
gatherings (Including libraries, student unions, fraternities) aided non-heterosexuals'
understandings of their sexuality and personal Identities.
Those Identities and concurrent activities were not without risk. Discovery of
“personal, private” activity - either In “public, private” spaces on campus or in the
privacy afforded most everyone (but not non-heterosexuals) off campus -
jeopardized the students' careers and lives. Walter's depiction of the dismissal of
two professors at the University of Illinois In the early 1950s, along with his
subsequent expulsion, displayed the reality of this situation, as well as the
Institutional view of guilt by association. Bob's requirement to track, literally,
suspected homosexuals at the University of Indiana In the early 60s is a prime
example of the control (In loco or otherwise) that colleges and universities sought
over non-heterosexuals, as Is the earlier, the negative response of the campus
psychiatrist at his religious undergraduate institution, who condemned Bob to hell,
calling him "dirty" and "awful." This discrimination was a direct form of Institutional
control of sexuality, a prevalent theme through which to understand higher education
of the times (cf., Bailey, 1999).
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292
Not all administrative responses to non-heterosexuality was negative, even in
the 1950s. Paul's school sent him to a "psychology professor who wisely wondered
aloud with me if there was anything that would point me in that direction " of being
homosexual. By the 1970s, some faculty and administrators were, if not
encouraging, at least not discouraging of the political and public expressions of non
heterosexual identity (as shown in the stories of Jimmy and Cliff). Later still, the
involvement in campus student organizations by non-heterosexuals (Duchess, Rad,
and Pozzo, for example) did facilitate some development along the precepts of
traditional student development theories and did ^cilitate relationships and
friendships.
Gay Student Organizations. Gay student organizations operating on
campus provided some benefits to some respondents, but this alone was not
enough to provide the myriad social and/or developmental opportunities needed for
positive identity development. Older respondents, having attended college before
court rulings in the 1970s allowed non-heterosexual student organizations the right
to assemble on campus, frequently mentioned their desire to have had such a group
on campus. The creation of the organizations - and the concurrent resulting
interpersonal and personal development for non-heterosexual students - provided
opportunities for growth named on traditional student development models that,
possibly, these collegians would not have had. While, as I noted earlier, non
heterosexual students involved in non-heterosexual campus organizations found
some new friends and relationships, the majority reported having, on the whole,
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293
negative experiences with the student organizations. Even study participants who
served as officers of such organizations reported these responses.
Gay student groups, by themselves, did not mitigate social stigmatization (as
Pozzo's comments reflect, either within or without of the group) for non-heterosexual
students. Indeed, Gene felt even more discrimination within the student
organizations due to his ethnicity and national origin. Tim (a gay-type student from
Chapter Five) also found the gay student organization at California State University -
Long Beach in the 1980s inhospitable: “I did try to [join] the gay and lesbian student
union. .. I found that really cliquish and not welcoming. I think I went maybe twice
and didn’t go back, because it was very insular.”
Tim's encounter with gay campus organizations pointed out a discongruity in
these organizations that many non-heterosexual men described: a conflict between
personal goals (usually for socialization) and political goals (usually for inclusion of
and equity for non-heterosexual students). Again, in Tim’s estimation.
They talked about [only] the business; I think that my interest in
going was to meet people and to start to be part of some kind of
group. I didn’t know enough about the politics of the school or
what they were trying to do.
Rad, a queer type (also from Chapter Five), on the other hand, wanted to be
active in efforts at social (political, yet still personal) change in the non-heterosexual
student activities and organization at University of Southern California. He, too,
found his time with the organization less than fulfilling; in his view, the efforts were
not as ‘Visible” or integrated with the other aspects of student life as he would have
hoped them to t)e.
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Whatever their motives for wanting to become part of the campus
organizations for non-heterosexuals, clearly the students in this study did not find
fulfillment of their needs or goals through such organizations. In this sense, their
abilities to connect socially with other non-heterosexuals was as limited as that
expressed by this student from the 1980s:
I didn't really meet any other gay people in college - 1 mean there
were other gay people I met, but it wasn't openly discussed
(besides the gossip/speculation of other dorm members), so I
didn't know they were gay. It wasn't like now, where sexuality
brings a certain common background and instant (if not lasting)
rapport.
Fraternity Life. A sense of “common background and instant rapport” that
enriched interpersonal relationships — albeit usually in non-overtly sexual ways —
was a theme in life stories of certain collegiate non-heterosexuals: members of
greek-letter fraternities. Indeed, fraternity life greatly influenced the homo-emotional
experiences of several narrators in this study. As Juan conveyed, he found during
his years at Azusa Pacific University that his fraternity brothers were a source of
companionship and friendship.
Chris also reported that being a fraternity member provided a sense of “fitting
in” on campus; Peter echoed this and added that he viewed greek-letter life as an
opportunity to be “very socially active,” a personal goal for his collegiate experience
after leaving community college. Bob’s “very accepting, very supportive” fraternity
friend helped Bob realize that the college psychiatrist's response to and judgement
of Bob’s fledgling homo-ideations was not universal; in this respect. Bob felt the
fraternity brother “saved my life.”
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Not all individuals in greek-letter organizations had positive experiences.
however. Malcom Boyd (1978), whom I classified as homosexual, was a fraternity
member. In his autobiography, Boyd wrote:
During the fraternity initiation rituals I felt especially a stranger. I
was physically attracted to the lusty young me around me, yet was
unable to reveal my feelings and emotions. .. A homosexual
person hiding my identity, I was compelled to play a constant role
in fraternity life. One day an older brother who apparently found
my behavior suspicious, and had been drinking heavily, shouted at
me, "I'm going to take your pants down, beat the shit out of your
ass, get your cock up, and see what's wrong with you. " Another
brother intervened and I was saved an ordeal and a beating.
I wonder now at the bizarre self-deceit of it all. Those fraternity
initiations were all very macho, and the participants would, for the
most part, go on in life as firmly self-convinced straights, taking
their roles in business or the professions, marrying and raising
families, frightened or downright terrorized by any suggestions of
deviance. Yet as a sexually mature gay, I can look back on those
rites that took place in the privacy of the frat house and recognize
them, under their cover of tx)isterous status assertion, for what
they were - exercises in homosexual sado-masochism and
voyeurism (Boyd, 1978, 46-48).
While these analyses of the benefits of greek life and its related social world are not
novel, they are most striking when coming from non-heterosexual men.
Interestingly, the respondents involved in non-heterosexual student
organizations often reported alienation and isolation within those groups, while those
who were memt>ers of greek-letter fraternities found camaraderie and friendship
within those organizations (albeit while not publicly acknowledging their sexuality).
This runs counter to the intuitive t)elief of the older non-heterosexuals in the study
(as well as my own) that involvement in campus organizations would create better
environments for establishing identities with non-heterosexual peers.
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Sexual A ctivity. Some activities, did, though, form significant patterns in the
development of non-heterosexual identities. Sexual activity was very important in
the developmental processes, more so than represented in student identity
development models or gay identity development models. A dichotomous
discrepancy embodied this data, which, given the nature of queer analysis, was not
all that surprising. Sex was crucial to the respondents, taoth in terms of their
understanding their orientation and in much of their collegiate lives, as Chris'
comments quoted earlier in this chapter convey. One student indicated sex "\vas
important. At the beginning, I needed to know whether I was really gay. Then, it
became an affirmation of self-worth." Some students hid from situations where they
might be physically attracted to men, while others sought it out. Others engaged in
activities with a great number of sexual partners, while others had no sexual activity
during college. A few collegians believed that their sexuality was central to their
identity, while others thought it was a "private, personal matter ' "It was not intended
to become a way of life - merely sidelines and detours. It was just something I did;
it just wasn't me."
In contrast to this view, sexual activity was viewed by most of the
respondents - particularly by those whose narratives I included as representative of
the types - as important, even if they did not identify as an "other” type (say, gay or
homosexual). Indeed, many of the respondents reported engaging in numerous
sexual encounters and activities, even in repressive environments and contexts. For
most of the respondents, sex was always available in college, if not on campus then
close by (in what surely was never intended to be classified as "town and gown "
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relationships). But whether they were running from it or toward it, sex was a
dominant concept affecting self-understanding (knowing one's self) and,
consequently, self-identity (presenting one's self).
Yes, it was important. At the beginning, I needed to know whether
I was really gay. Then, it became an affirmation of self-worth. And
as naive as I was, I thought for the longest time that this was how I
could find a relationship.
The degree of importance, however, varied. To some non-heterosexual
men, particularly those who were closeted or leading parallel lives, the impact and
importance of the sex was relegated to a non-existent role in their identity: "My
homosexuality back then was just about sex, nothing more. " Another student
classified as "normal " summarized his contemporary views of homo-sex: "In college,
being gay meant just having sex with another guy. " It certainly did not create a
sense of identity for him.
But for men in the study who do not fit into the "closeted" or "homosexual"
types, particularly those who attended college after the early 1970s, sex played a
more primal role in their daily lives and in their self-concepts of identity. Many of
them engaged in sexual activity at quite young ages; such early sexual activity has
only recently begun to be addressed by gay identity development theorists (and not
at all by student identity development theorists). Savin-Williams (1998) found that
Perhaps counterintuitively, boys who had sex with other boys
during childhood and early adolescence were not necessarily the
same boys who readily recognized the meaning of their sexual
behavior. Having sex with boys was not the same as being gay
(Savin-Williams, 1998, 56).
This is certainly the case for the students classified as "normal," but some collegians
who engaged in sex prior to college (or high school) made a direct connection
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between their (homo-) sexual behavior and their identity. As Tim's story conveyed.
he felt different from his high school and college peers “maybe because I lost my
virginity at a very early age." In Cliff's estimation, sex opened up ways of not only
understanding himself but also allowed him "to t>ecome a good [theater set]
designer." Another respondent agreed on the importance of sex upon his
understanding of his identity;
Yes! It was exploring and learning what sex was. It was a novelty.
It was exciting. My first top, bottom, three-way, hustler, etc. It was
all uncharted, new experiences. It was mostly fun, but a bit
superficial. Something was always lacking; I think it was the
romance.
For otfiers, like Dennis, romance was sometimes evident, even if an on-going
relationship was not desired. In any event, though, sex - the thought of, the search
for, the experience of, and the consequences afterwards - profoundly affected the
identities of the collegians in this study.
The Goals of Being “Nonnal.” Sex was not the only objective of non
heterosexual collegians; in their quests for understanding “who" they were - and to
whom they were similar - they also hoped to prove that they were like the majority of
their peers (be they straight, homosexual, gay or queer). Being "normal" was a goal
of many students who later identified as non-heterosexual. Even if they were
engaging In homo-sexual activity, the respondents perceived the identity formation
process in relation to the societal norms of the time. That the norms favored
heterosexuality and sanctioned against homosexuality was no surprise in the 1940s
and 1950s. One e-mail respondent commented:
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Homosexual did not equate normal - and I wanted more than
anything to be normal - one of the guys. Being gay or
homosexual back then was still filled with the negative stereotypes
of the limp-wristed, effeminate, lisping hairdresser. I wasn't that,
so I decided I couldn't be a homosexual or gay. There weren't any
images of regular homosexual men to refer back then. .. For a
long time — and certainly at that time — I considered the possibility
of being homosexual to be a terrible curse - something evil had
happened to me - and I was determined that it would go away if I
denied it long enough. I wanted to t)e regular and normal. At that
time, the idea that I could be gay and normal was an absurd
thought.
Perhaps these feelings were the basis of the entire process of identity
formation. As Mendelsohn (1999) pointed out.
The English noun identity comes, ultimately, from the Latin adverb
identidem, which means “repeatedly,” ... [and] is, in fact, nothing
more than a reduplication of the word idem, “the same”:
idem(et)idem. Same (and) same. The same, repeated. ..
It seems odd, at first glance, that a noun that we associate with
distinctiveness and individuality, with the irreducit>le uniqueness of
each person, should derive from one that denotes (and even
sounds like) nothing but mechanical repetition. But once you’ve
given it some thought, the etymology of identity makes a kind of
sense. At least one way of establishing what something is, after
all, is to see whether it always remains itself, and nothing else,
over and over again. This is
also the case, presumably, for people: you are, endlessly and
repeatedly, you, and not some other (Mendelsohn, 1999, 41).
This paradox is the essential point of non-heterosexual college identity. One
respondent viewed himself this way, as “Normal. All the kids in school were like me.
At the same time, the idea that I could be gay and normal was an at>surd thought.”
The comparative process of one's experiences to the (perceived) identities of
others was ongoing and extended to other non-heterosexuals as well as
heterosexuals. This comparison between self and others, however, did not always
bring about acceptance of one’s sense of self as different. In the 1970s, as Amie
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Kantrowitz (1977) helped to found the Gay Activists Alliance in New York, he finally
felt he found other non-heterosexuals around whom he could feel comfortable:
“Among them i could at last feel normal'" (Kantrowitz, 1977, 146). But simply being
around other non-heterosexuals did not provide this feeling of solace. As an
undergraduate at Vassar in the 1980s, Daniel Aibel's self-image contrasted the
conflict of non-heterosexual men caught between paradigms of heterosexual and
non-heterosexual.
While I thought I might be gay, I seemed to have nothing in
common with other gay people. I had no interest in being
shocking, weird, or even fashionable. I spent most of my time
alone; hoping, yet terrified, that someone would notice me
(MacKay, 1993, 119).
Emotional Attractions. For many respondents, such comparisons fostered
behavior and ideation - at least for a time - that mirrored the closet or parallel types.
“I was very uncomfortable with the idea and reality of being gay when I was in
college. It was a burden then — something to hide," is a telling comment from one
collegian. Also distinguishing is his perception of his sexuality in the absence of
sexual activity. While the physical act of sex with another man might be seen as a
clear sign of not being heterosexual, often emotional attractions to other men were
the first indications to non-heterosexual men of their difference. He hid his “idea and
reality” of being gay, and effected a facade of being “normal.”
This identification as "normal" highlights the dilemmas of using gay identity
development theories in the way educators use student development theory.
Should the student development practioner program activities and experiences for
the "normal" student, or those in the closet or in denial, that challenge their concepts
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301
of their own sexuality, in the hopes of progressing that understanding to more
closely align their sexual impulses or affections? On the other hand, should
practioners not address these issues through programming or advice, thereby
perpetuating the feelings that form the closet and facilitate denial?
The issues are made more murky when one considers that, as the narratives
corrotx)rate. identity is neither stable nor fixed. How students conceptualized
themselves (vis-a-vis their sexuality) - and how they allowed others to conceptualize
them - fluctuated during their collegiate years. The parallel types formulated two
almost disparate identities, based in relation to what was considered customary for
different contexts; some students self-identified as “gay” while exhibiting qualities,
behaviors and sensibilities that are classified by others as “queer;” the homosexual
students (like Duchess) made it clear that acting “too gay” was something they
avoided, even though, in private, they might want to behave in those fashions.
Such is the untenable position student programmers and advisors find when
confronted with counseling non-heterosexual male college students. Rather than
progress through orderly stages of development, non-heterosexual male identity
vacillates, adopting to suit the needs (and desires) of individuals to perform (or live)
in contrasting environments. The sense of “normal, just like all the other kids”
changes accordingly, as does the students’ individual impressions of what is
considered befitting the non-heterosexual identities.
Media influences. The sense of what “all the kids in school were like”
changed over the decades. The impact of media upon later respondents' self-
identity - and ability to self-identify - is a clear pattern in the lives of the respondents
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and of other non-heterosexuals (Gamson, 1995,1998). Moreover, this effect
appeared closely tied to queer theory, because the representations in the media
reflected changing social mores of acceptability as well as what was considered
(and/or presented) as normal.
Sam (a closeted type from Chapter Six) mentioned the few times in college
career In the 1950s that someone in history or literature suspected of being
homosexual was mentioned by fellows while studying, while Ralph bemoaned his
1940s peers "were never informed of the great homosexual figures of the past; that
could have meant so much to us." Ralph also regretted not having "the freedom and
the encouragement by some role models to put myself into a gay relationship"
during college. Indeed, for many of these men, their college years could be lonely;
many believed, as Walter did in the 1940s, there aren't many people like me." But
by the 1980s, Gene saw lesbian characters on a soap opera; although the
characters were going to commit suicide because of their sexual orientation and
despite his sister's declaration that homosexuality was "bad," Gene "automatically
thought. Oh, that’s me.”
Certainly the progression of identities in the typology display an increase in
role models and subjects of study on campus; if nothing else, there were other
students to whom to compare and to contrast one’s self—peer role models. But this
change also reflects a greater emphasis on representing and examining those
whose lives and identities were considered marginal.
Rick, another man closeted in college, relied upon movie imagery and
stereotypes to impart the public image of openly non-heterosexual men in the
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1950s: "The gay man of the time was a Clifton Webb-type — a fussy interior
decorator or hair dresser." James' contemporary perceptions of his non
heterosexual colleagues in the theater in the 1960s repeat this stereotype, the
"theater queen.” Around the same time, James remembers seeing the (in)famous
fourteen-page Ufe Magazine pictorial article (June 24, 1964) on homosexual
subcultures in San Francisco: "they talked about men in tight white pants and
cashmere sweaters. And I went. This is me, and I don't want to be that. ” Again,
the contradiction between the recognition of one's non-heterosexual identity idea (in
this case, as highlighted in media images and representations) did not match the
man's sense of self highlights Mendehlson's (1999) concepts of men and de in
operation.
Within twenty years, though, those images had been replaced (or, at least,
set beside) new portraits of non-heterosexual lives and lifestyles. Alec mentioned
the movie Cabaret as metaphor for his self-awareness of his sexual identity; the
movie, whose non-heterosexual characters were central to the plot, starred Liza
Minnelli, the daughter of a gay icon, who was herself trying to establish an identity
as “not Judy” while looking, sounding, and literally acting like her mother. It was to
her image that Alec was drawn, her song he performed in a moment where he finally
felt complete in his non-heterosexual identity.
The increased public representations of non-heterosexuals were not confined
to fiction, nor to films. By the 1980s, Juan witnessed "everyday individuals who
were teachers, lawyers, couples" on Oprah Winfrey's television talk show. And Tim
cited the influence of gender-bending artistic sexual outlaws David Bowie, Andy
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Warhol, and Lou Reed upon his thinking and self-conceptualization. The marginal
identities had become the vanguard of popular media in the United States, and, in
doing so, had become more mainstream than marginal. This process, while not
totally alleviating the stigma of non-heterosexuality, did ameliorate some of the
constrictions of the public concept of "normal" equating (only) to heterosexuality.
But despite the changes made in self-identity from the 1940s, even fifty years later
the potential for alienation from and subjugation to the norms of heterosexuality still
existed, even if not from the institutions of higher education.
On the (In)Finaiity of Conclusions
If the stories the men in this study tell of their college experiences emphasize
one quality, in my estimation, their concepts of identity - along with the interpersonal
behaviors and communications that deploy those concepts into practice - are far
less static than the existing identity development models (both collegiate and gay)
depict. While on the one hand most of the respondents depicted knowing,
confidently, that they were truly non-heterosexual, on the other hand they often had
difficulty conceiving how they could be non-heterosexual while being themselves.
For them, it was not a process particularly of "unbecoming” straight, or of "becoming”
gay or queer; rather, their paths to self-identity were (fairly) continuous negotiations
of self and other, of straight and non-straight, of activities of varying meanings and
meanings with varying activities.
During the years I was working on this project, a number of non
heterosexuals students (both current and former) told me they appreciated the
"extremists,” the extremely political and polemic queers; in the words of one.
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Compared to them, someone with my views is seen as a fairly
moderate liberal. Not so long ago, I would have been considered
extreme because of those same views. But as they keep
expanding the boundaries of what is considered out there and
edgy, my views tiecome seen by the general public as more
central.
This transition reflects changes in sensibilities of both the general (dominant,
heterosexual) society’s view of what is acceptable and "normal" and the
(subordinate, non-heterosexual) subculture s conviction of what was permissible and
customary. Non-heterosexual students found themselves a part of both worlds and
are compelled by the values of both; who and how they can be are delimited by
their dualistic position. A center cannot be central without margins; the margins
cannot be marginal without a locus.
I find Mendelsohn’s (1999) concept of the men and the de - the “on the one
hand this, while on the other hand that” aspect of understanding non-heterosexual
lives - important in understanding this construction and praxis of identity. Just as in
the Greek language, neither portion of a sentence (the men or the de) can make
sense without its pair, so too can these students’ identities only fc )e understood in
relation to the “other” halves: they “move between two places” (Mendelsohn, 1999,
205), t>etween the center and the margin, t)etween the normed and the queered. In
the context of collegiate non-heterosexual identities, on the one hand there is the
individual’s self concept, and on the other are the concepts of identity of (at all
times) heterosexual and/or (at some times, in some contexts) homosexual, gay,
queer, “normal,” closeted and parallel.
As individual students’ understandings of the position of their identities within
this schema evolved, so too did their perception of what value that position held to
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the center and the margins. Some students moved swiftly from one identity to
another and remained fairly secure in their comprehension of their place in campus
societies; they might engage in social and interpersonal communications and
activities that placed them in opposition to the norms of heterosexuality, or they
might remain publicly aligned with the center while trying to understand how they
could feel disconnected that center. Others played (or frayed) at the margins,
attempting to calibrate their sense of self with the views of others (both straight and
non-straight).
A proponent of stage-model theories could argue that different ideations
represented individual stages of progression through identity development; queer,
for instance, could be a phase of rebellion, an affectation of youth (or desired youth)
to attempt to create change while on a "quest" or "journey" towards a normative
concept of self-identity. A different form of disagreement might originate from an
individual who subscribes to the idea of fixed identities; he might assert that
whatever the reason for deviation of actions or motives, one is either homosexual or
heterosexual (or perhaps bisexual) and the language used to describe the
sensibilities and meanings individuals give to those actions and identities are
semantics. The data from this study belies such polemics.
The classifications in this typology are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive;
individuals might slide between classifications, based upon their own definitions of
their sexuality, the specific actions they undertake, and (in instances) the motives
behind both the definitions and the actions. As identity is neither fixed nor stable,
the types are not based solely upon the essentialistic concept of identity determined
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307
by sexual activity with male partners (respecting the experiences and sensibilities of
the "normals" and those, like Walter, Pozzo and Tim who identified as non-
heterosexual at least to themselves before engaging in activity), nor exclusive
because of the specific contemporaneous cultures of the individuals (a
constructionist view of identity), nor just because of the terminology used during their
college days to describe non-heterosexuality (a semantic perspective on identity
complexities). As Alec noted of the early 1970s, "I don't think... there was much
distinction" between the uses of the words gay and homosexual in normal parlance;
"the words were synonymous. "
I gave prominence, in assigning types to describe the college experiences of
these men, to the actions (and the motivations) related to sexual identity.
Consequently, some men were included with types whose labels might appear
anachronous. For example, homosexual as a type applied to Duchess, who
primarily used the term "gay” to talk about his sexuality in the 1980s. Queer
pertained to Jim, whose childhood and collegiate experiences in the 1970s he now
clearly views as "queer” (in the personal/political sense as well as the sexual sense).
It is even possible to see the certain acts by non-heterosexuals (such as the
womanless wedding at Baylor in the 1950s) as queer. The acts themselves were
queer, and while they were engaging in them, the students adopted (and/or
deployed) a queer identity; the image they understood to be project was queer,
even if their own personal self-definition might not be. Such a situation seems too
implausible if we ascribe the values of queer that we now use, but less so if we
utilize the concepts of queer theory to understand how an individual might publicly
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challenge the dominant social values and mores concerning sexuality. Just as
performing particular sexual acts did not define one's sexuality, neither did
committing queer acts make one queer. The Identities were more fluid, based upon
(on the one hand) the experience and (on the other) the meanings ascribed because
of and to the experience.
Social changes over time — including due to media coverage of "others,"
Increased research and study on non-heterosexual lives, and personal freedom to
enact a praxis of Identity apart from those considered "normal” - allow for new
understandings of past experiences and sensibilities. This study and the resulting
typology were not ahlstorical or revisionist efforts on my part; rather, I crafted the
types to challenge the dominant (and essentialistic) notions that one is either
heterosexual or homosexual, and that the experiences (no matter what the
"politically correct” term of the day) of each never change. These narratives simply
do not allow those arguments: identity - t>oth the process of discovery (or creation)
and the resulting "product” - Is far too messy. Like the concepts of queer and queer
theory, the term cannot contain the contents we wish to understand. The best I
could achieve In this study was to highlight how non-heterosexual male collegiate
identity fit into the vessels of classification, along with the seepage and the spills.
The changes In Identity (both those considered non-heterosexual and those
considered "normal”) over the past five decades are Important, for they allowed non
heterosexual Identifying men new ways to define themselves. Interact with others,
and effect social and personal change. College environments most certainly
Impacted both the process (ways and/or manners to self-ldentify) and the product
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(identity as label or term used for self-understanding and presentation to others) of
these men: postsecondary institutions created environments (both positive and
negative), provided structures for socialization and organization, gathered together
like-minded peers, and offered the idea(l) of not only the prerogative to determine
through college experiences whom one was but, also, in time, the right to do so
openly and publicly. This relationship has deepened within the last half-century, as
witnessed by the increasing number of respondents who found not only their time in
college easier in regards to their sexuality but also encouraging (in ways intentional
and not) of their examination of the possibilities o f-a n d opportunities for - not
being a heterosexual.
If history is about changes in people over time, one need look no further than
the differences in experience between the homosexuals and closeted students on
campus in the 1940s and 50s, and the gay and queer students of the 1980s and
90s. Analyzing those changes through the critical lens of queer theory, one can
understand how and why non-heterosexual identities transformed. As conceptions
of what was normal changed and society accepted divergent viewpoints and
experiences, non-heterosexual experiences were examined more often, not only in
relation to heterosexuality, and in light of the views of the examined (rather than only
those of the examining).
With the re-positioning of the viewpoint of study (and media and self
representation) shifted to examine what had been at the margins, the sense of
marginality and deviance of those not formerly in the middle changed. Identity
development theories, however, did not keep pace with these metamorphoses; the
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310
existing stage-development models are still based upon a singular outcome (either
for gay males or for college students). Any deviation from that theoretical norm is,
indeed, a deviation.
The value of those existing theories is not nullified by this, however, just
limited. If student identity development theories reflect the progressive process of
self-understanding, that too is evident in the stories of the men in this study,
particularly those who lead parallel lives and those who, at the time, thought of
themselves as “just like everybody else.” Finally, if the types represented in this
theory of identity formation are accurate, then the understandings of higher
education administrators, researchers, practioners and programmers who attempt to
work with and/or understand “gay” students as a monolithic group must change to
reflect the diversity of non-heterosexual lives and experiences; if they do not, their
(well-intentioned) efforts will be as flawed as their concept of this student population.
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311
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329
Appendix A:
Protocol Questionnaire
Where did you attend college?
What year did you enroll?
What year did you graduate?
What was your major?
Where did you hang out on campus? Off-campus?
When you went to college, how did you define yourself (or your sexual orientation)?
When was the first time you used that term to describe yourself?
Were you out in your classes? Some, but not others? Why/why not?
Did being gay impact, or influence, your course work, grades, course selection?
Tell me a bit about your hometown; was it large, or small? Were you out to anyone
there?
What was gay life like on campus? In the city/town of your school?
Did you live in campus housing?
Did you have roommates? Did you live with a significant other, lover or boyfriend?
Were you involved in campus or local politics?
Were you a part of a campus gay group? If so, what was your involvement?
What was your first trip home after leaving college like? Did you feel different
because of your sexual orientation?
What did you do after college?
How did you meet other gay people?
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330
How could you tell if someone were gay or not? (Or could you?)
Please describe a typical week night, say, a Tuesday night of your sophomore year.
Please describe a typical weekend night.
In college, what did being gay mean to you? What does it mean to you now?
Did your family know about your sexual orientation during your college years?
If you had to prioritize your identity, during college, which might come first; gay or
student? Something else?
What was the worst moment of your college life?
What was the best?
Do you have a time that you consider the moment you came out?
Were you romantically involved in college?
Did you consider it a serious involvement?
Looking back now, do you consider it a serious involvement?
What term(s) did you use when talking about someone you might be dating or going
out with?
Was sex important in those relationships? How/why/why not?
Did sexually transmitted diseases impact your college experience?
(If applicable:) Did AIDS impact your college experience?
What would you relive, or do again? What would you change? Why?
Which was more important? Classes or being with your friends/ Did that change
when circumstances changed?
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331
Did you ever feel discriminated against in college because of your sexual
orientation? Or empowered? Or privileged?
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332
Appendix B:
E-Mail Questionnaire
Question Set One
Where did you attend college?
What year did you enroll?
What year did you graduate?
What was your major?
Where did you hang out on campus? Off-campus?
When you went to college, how did you define yourself (or your sexual orientation)?
When was the first time you used that term to describe yourself?
Were you out in your classes? Some, but not others? Why/why not?
Did being gay Impact, or influence, your course work, grades, course selection?
Did your family know about your sexual orientation during your college years?
Question Set Two
Tell me a bit about your hometown; was it large, or small? Were you out to anyone?
What was gay life like on campus? In the city/town of your school?
Did you live in campus housing?
Did you have roommates? Did you live with a significant other, lover or boyfriend?
Were you involved in campus or local politics?
Were you a part of a campus gay group? If so, what was your involvement?
How did you meet other gay people?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
333
How could you tell if someone were gay or not? (Or could you?)
Please descrit)e a typical week night, say, a Tuesday night of your sophomore year.
Please describe a typical weekend night.
In college, what did tieing gay mean to you? What does it mean to you now?
What was the worst moment of your college life?
What was the best?
Were you romantically involved in college?
Did you consider it a serious involvement?
Looking back now, do you consider it a serious involvement?
What term(s) did you use when talking about someone you might t> e dating or going
out with?
Was sex important in those relationships? How/why/why not?
Did sexually transmitted diseases impact your college experience?
(If applicable:) Did AIDS impact your college experience?
What would you relive, or do again? What would you change? Why?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Dilley, Patrick (author)

Core Title A typological history of non-heterosexual male college students in the United States, 1945 to the present

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Education

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag education, higher,education, history of,education, sociology of,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychology, developmental

Language English

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Advisor Tierney, William G. (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Hagedorn, Linda Serra (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-75522

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